[ { "id": 205105, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1966", "page_number": 61, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "56\n\nHERBERT FRANKE\n\nThese Northern European traders, then, were the first Europeans that ever came to China, or so it seems. They left very little, if any, impression on the Chinese. Not even the annalistic chapters of the Yüan-shih recorded their arrival, and but for the court diary kept by a Chinese official in Kublai's residence we would never have known about them at all. The same is true for the Polos, who are, as indicated above, not recorded in any Chinese source. But this applies not only to the Venetian travellers. The many missionaries, mostly Franciscan friars, who came to China have left no traces in Chinese records and we would not know about their visit if Western sources had not preserved their accounts.\n\nGiovanni da Montecorvino, who was dispatched to the Great Khan in 1289 by Pope Nicholas IV, went to Peking (Khanbaliq) and we have in a medieval chronicle his letters dated from Khanbaliq 1305 and 1306 respectively. There he reports on the progress of his evangelistic work, on baptisms, and he asks to have sent to him an antiphonarium, a collection of legends, a psalter and a graduale. He pretends to have learned the Tatar language; that is, either Mongolian or Turkish. Otherwise nothing in his letters indicates things Chinese. They could have been written anywhere where the \"Tartar\" language was spoken and that was almost everywhere between the Black Sea and the Yellow Sea. He did not notice that the majority of the Peking inhabitants did not speak Tatar but Chinese.\n\nA similar impression is given by most of the other letters written by Franciscan friars residing in China all of which points to a singular lack of contact between China and representatives of Occidental civilization. There are, on the other hand, a few remains of an archaeological nature proving that Latin Christianity reached China after all. The most famous relic is the \"Latin Tombstone\" in Yang-chou, which has been called, not inappropriately, by the author of a study of the monument, “a landmark of Medieval Christianity in China.\" This stone was discovered in 1951 and has a Latin inscription saying that \"In the Name of the Lord Amen here lies Catherine, Daughter of the Late Sir Dominic de Viglione, who died in the Year of the Lord One Thousand Three Hundred Forty-Two in the Month of June.\"\n\nAbove the inscription there are several finely chiseled drawings of Mary with the Child and scenes of the martyrdom of St. Catherine, the patron-saint of the girl. These representations of Christian art show an impressive combination of Western motifs", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 205106, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1966", "page_number": 62, "title": "RAS-1966", "content_text": "SINO-WESTERN CONTACTS\n\n57\n\nwith Chinese technique and art forms. This stone is so far the \"sole material monument\" of the Franciscan mission in medieval China. It has been suggested that there might exist another one. Christian tombstones from Ch'üan-chou were published some years ago, and it has been thought that the language on one of them is Latin. It must be Christian because the inscription begins with the sign of the Cross, but the attempt to read it as Latin and to regard it as the tomb inscription for Andrew of Perugia, the third suffragan bishop of Zayton — modern Ch'üan-chou — does not seem convincing. The only thing that can be said with certainty is that the inscription is not in Syriac script.5\n\nThere is, however, another mission from the West that reached China and where even the dynastic history of the Yuan has recorded their arrival. It is that of the papal envoy Giovanni da Marignolli, Bishop of Bisignano. A medieval manuscript in Prague has recorded the Western part of the story. This embassy, if we may call it that, was occasioned by a letter from some Alan Christians in China dated 11th July 1336. Some of the senders can be identified with persons mentioned in Chinese sources of the period. The Pope, Benedict XII, answered with a letter dated 13th June 1338, and Giovanni da Marignolli left Avignon — the papal see in those years — in December 1338. He travelled first to Constantinople and proceeded from there to the Crimea and the court of Uzbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde. Another station was Almaliq in Central Asia. Finally the papal envoy reached Khanbaliq (Peking) and was presented to the Emperor, Shun-ti. Giovanni presented the emperor with gifts, among them a Western horse. After a few years in China the envoy went back to Europe via India and reached Avignon in 1353. The Chinese annals have recorded the exact date of the audience when Giovanni met Shun-ti, or, to call him by his Mongol name, Togon Temur; it was August 19, 1342. The Chinese dynastic history calls the country Fu-lang, another way of transcribing the name of the Franks, that is, the Europeans. However, Giovanni's name and that of the Pope, are not mentioned by the Yuan-shih. In any case, this embassy seemed so important to the compilers of the dynastic history that they recorded it, and this means something because the basic documents for Togon Temur's reign were already lost at the time of the compilation of the Yuan-shih so that the annals for his reign are notoriously incomplete. But even so it does not seem", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212128, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 70, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "47\n\nthe Ch'ung-fu-ssu or Office for Christian Clergy, was set up in 1289 to supervise their activities, and this body is last heard of in 1351. The Ming revolution against the Mongols in the 1360s, which swept through China from south to north, was strongly nationalistic in character, and references to foreigners in Chinese cities cease after these cities passed under Ming control. The Mongol capital Khanbalik (modern Peking) fell in 1368, and China thereafter retreated into a long period of isolation from the outside world. Nestorian Christianity was now spent, and the next wave of Christians to arrive in China, nearly two hundred years later, were Roman Catholics from Europe. They came by sea, as it was now no longer possible to travel overland through Central Asia, and they found that the work of evangelism had to begin all over again, as scarcely the faintest memory of Christianity had survived in China.\n\nThe number of Nestorian priests in China was never large. In the T'ang period they probably numbered a few thousand at most. As we have seen, Wu-tsung's decree of 845 gives a figure of about 3,000 foreign monks, and a slightly earlier Buddhist work asserts that the grand total of Manichean, Nestorian, and Zoroastrian monasteries in China was smaller than the number of Buddhist monasteries in a single small city. In the Yüan period, according to a census taken in the 1290s, Mongols and other foreigners in China accounted for as many as one person in thirty-five of a total population of seventy-two million. Even so, the number of Nestorian Christians in China was estimated by John of Cora in 1330 to be no higher than 30,000. This estimate may be slightly low, but it is clear that it is on the right lines.\n\nThe Nestorian missions to China have generated an extensive and often romantic literature, and much, probably too much, has been claimed for the effectiveness of their missionary activity. In T'ang China the Nestorians had the Christian missionary field to themselves; in Yüan China they were joined by missionaries of the European Latin church. On both occasions the influence of Nestorian Christianity on China appears to have been insignificant. The major, if impermanent, missionary achievement of the Nestorian church beyond its heartland in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys and the hills of Kurdistan, was not in China, but in Arabia, India, and Turkestan. The mission to Turkestan was particularly important: the ethnic character of the Nestorian church, at first predominantly Syrian and Persian, was substantially modified between the ninth and fourteenth centuries.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212129, "series_id": 26, "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine", "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊", "series_use_hku_proxy": false, "document_key": "RAS-1990", "page_number": 71, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "48\n\nby the conversion to Christianity of a number of important Turkish steppe tribes, including the Kerait, the Naiman, and the Ongut. These successes were achieved despite competition from Buddhist, Moslem, and Manichean missionaries. But although the Nestorian church made considerable headway among the tribes whose territory lay between Persian Khurasan and the northern borders of China, little evidence has yet been produced to suggest that many converts were made within China itself.\n\nThere is abundant evidence for Christians in China during the Yüan period. It is quite clear that, while many churches and monasteries were built in China, there were few Chinese Christians. Nestorian and Latin priests competed for the allegiance of the Ongut' tribe, Turkish Christians who lived within the Great Bend of the Yellow River, and John of Montecorvino, the Franciscan archbishop of Khanbalik from 1308 to 1328, struggled to keep Alan Christian mercenaries in the Mongol imperial guard firm in the orthodox faith and safe from the errors of Nestorius: but we do not hear of either church preaching the Gospel to the Chinese. John of Montecorvino had the Bible translated into Latin, Turkish, and Persian, the languages of Khanbalik's foreign residents, but not into Chinese. Christian priests in Yüan China probably guessed that the Chinese would be unreceptive to a foreign religion associated with the unpopular rule of the Mongols, but their own behaviour was not always a good advertisement for their religion. We know of a Nestorian Christian administrator, Mar Sargis, who abused his position as governor (darugha) of Chinkiang to build Christian monasteries on land which he had confiscated from a Buddhist temple. Christians were resented, and it is therefore scarcely surprising that in 1368 both Latin and Nestorian Christians were driven from China along with their Mongol protectors.\n\nAlthough the earlier wave of Nestorians was not disadvantaged by such an association with a foreign occupying power, the few Nestorian churches known to have existed in T'ang China also seem to have been mainly there to serve the religious needs of foreigners resident in China. Syrian and Persian traders could be found in both capitals, Ch'ang-an and Lo-yang, and the number of Nestorians in China was probably at its largest during the reign of Kao-tsung (649-683), when this merchant community was augmented by an influx of refugees from Sassanian Persia. The Sassanian empire was overthrown by the invading armies of Islam at the battles of Qadisiya in 636 and", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 } ]