[ { "id": 204393, "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-1962", "page_number": 25, "title": "RAS-1962", "content_text": "16\n\nF. S. DRAKE\n\nIn A.D. 489 the Theological School at Edessa was closed by the Roman Emperor Zeno. In A.D. 496 the Nestorian Catholicos (or Archbishop) of Nisibis was made Patriarch of the East with his seat at Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of Persia on the Tigris, and the Persian Churches with their own Patriarch were henceforth independent of the Patriarch of Antioch.\n\n4\n\nIt is doubtful how far the split was due to theological differences, and how far to patriotic motives. Although the name 'Nestorian' is commonly applied by others to this ancient independent Syro-Persian Church, it is not the name by which they describe themselves. And in fact they were probably little conscious of the theological differences indicated by the name. They were conscious rather of being a Church outside the bounds of the Roman Empire; their Patriarch was the Patriarch of the Christians of the East, and they called themselves the Church of the Chaldees. Some still call them the Chaldaean Church. But this name has now become attached to a section of them that has become incorporated in the Church of Rome. Some call them the Assyrian Church, and this perhaps is the name least liable to cause confusion. Their centre was in fact, and is, the mountainous country of Kurdistan, east of Mosul (the ancient Nineveh) and of Arbela, where Alexander defeated Darius and commenced the conquest of Persia (331 B.C.). The sturdy peasants, who under the Persian Empire after an initial acceptance, endured a period of bitter persecution, and who maintained their primitive faith and life derived from the early days, are in all probability the descendants of the ancient Assyrians.\n\nAfter the conquest of Persia by the Moslem Arabs, the seat of the Patriarch was moved in A.D. 762 to Bagdad, the new capital, at that time a centre of learning and science, where at first they lived on good terms with the Mussulman despot. During the next five hundred years the Nestorian Church was allowed to go on its own way, sometimes with kindly recognition from liberal caliphs, sometimes harassed by harsh tyrants, but still all the time a recognized institution within the territory of Islam.\n\nWith the Mongol invasion Hulugu, grandson of Genghis, took Bagdad in A.D. 1258 and put an end to the Eastern Caliphate.\n\n7 Adeney, op. cit., p. 494.", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1962.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/9s166f47f", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 210436, "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-1985", "page_number": 43, "title": "RAS-1985", "content_text": "24\n\nCARL T. SMITH\n\nprofessing the Christian religion could be buried and that such sections be consecrated. An area in an isolated part of the cemetery would be designated for the burial of non-Christians. The Ordinance set apart certain Crown Land to be used as a burial ground for persons professing the Christian religion and had its first reading in Legislative Council in November 1909.\n\nThere was some ambiguity between the title and the memorandum which accompanied the proposed bill. One spoke of the Colonial Cemetery, the other of the Protestant Cemetery. The original draft of the bill also excluded the burial of Roman Catholics. The Attorney General explained that they had been excluded because \"The Church of Rome had been in possession for years of a portion of the English Cemetery.\" A separate piece of ground under the administration of the Catholic Church was immediately to the north of the Colonial Cemetery.\n\nAs an explanation for the introduction of the Bill, the Governor told the Council, “I think everybody is aware of the fact that there has been a good deal of discussion at the Sanitary Board and elsewhere on the subject of Chinese interment in the Colonial Cemetery. The Colonial Cemetery, so far as I can ascertain from a study of the archives, has always been open to any person irrespective of race or creed. It has now been desired that there should be a certain portion set aside for Christian interment. The Bishop presented to me a joint request from the representatives of the Church of England and various denominations of the Colony that a portion of the Colonial Cemetery should be dedicated for Christian burial”. A member of the Council asked if Christians other than Protestants would be excluded, such as Nestorian and Armenian Christians. The Governor replied that this was an ecclesiastical problem which should be left to the ecclesiastical authorities. At a subsequent meeting of the Legislative Council the Governor stated that he had been approached privately regarding the situation of Roman Catholic who were Freemasons and who were not allowed to be buried in the Roman Catholic Cemetery. He consulted the Anglican Bishop who assured him there would be no difficulties regarding their burial in the proposed consecrated section of the cemetery. A question was asked if in the separation of sections", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1985.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/gt54s866x", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212126, "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": 68, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "45\n\ngroup, headed by the Nestorian patriarch. Although they were not permitted to convert Moslems, Nestorian missionaries were otherwise given a free hand, and by the end of the twelfth century Nestorian churches could be found in Egypt and Cilicia, in Persia and Mesopotamia, in India, Ceylon and Socotra, and in much of Turkestan. All these churches, organised into at least twenty, and possibly as many as thirty, metropolitan provinces, recognised the authority of the Nestorian patriarch or catholicus, who ruled from Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate.\n\nThe Nestorian church enjoyed a final period of expansion under the Mongols. For a while, during campaigns against Moslem enemies, the Mongols saw that Christian support could be valuable to them, and the Nestorians were able to take advantage of the Mongol unification of Asia from the Euphrates to the Sea of Japan to establish themselves in strength in China in the second half of the thirteenth century. The Nestorian church now reached its greatest geographical extent. But appearances were deceptive. As Mongol power waned throughout Asia the vacuum was filled not by Christianity, but by Islam. The Nestorian church in China did not survive the Mongol Yüan dynasty, and in central Asia most Nestorian Christians apostasised in the face of Moslem persecution in the middle years of the fourteenth century. Any surviving communities of Christians were almost certainly either wiped out or converted to Islam during the terrible campaigns of Timur Leng towards the end of the fourteenth century.\n\nApart from a tiny offshoot in India, the church which dominated Asia in the middle ages survives today only in Kurdistan, uneasily placed astride the borders of the modern states of Syria, Turkey, Iraq and Iran. Emigration from Kurdistan during the last two centuries has also created a Nestorian diaspora in the United States, Europe, and Australia. The total membership of the Nestorian church was reckoned in 1989 at about 1,770,000.\n\nThe Nestorians in China\n\nFor more than two hundred years during the T'ang dynasty (618-906), and for a further sixty or seventy years during the Mongol Yüan dynasty (1260-1368), Nestorian Christians could be found in significant numbers in China. The dates are not entirely certain. As far as the T'ang period is concerned, the first officially-recognised Nestorian", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212127, "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": 69, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "46\n\nmonastery in China was founded in 638, in the capital Ch’ang-an (modern Sian), though some Nestorian missionaries may have reached China earlier. In 845, a major attack on the Buddhist church in China was launched by the emperor Wu-tsung, and in an imperial decree of that year providing for the dissolution of the Buddhist monasteries and the return of the Buddhist clergy to lay life, there is a minor clause ordering the expulsion from China of over 3,000 foreign monks, some of whom were probably — though the text of the decree is ambiguous — Nestorian Christians. This decree was rescinded soon afterwards, and may not have been enforced in the more remote cities of China. Certainly, although we hear no more of Nestorians in Ch'ang-an, an Arab writer refers to Christians among the foreigners slaughtered in Canton in 877 by Huang Ch'ao's rebels, and Nestorian Christianity may have persisted in parts of China for some time after Wu-tsung's decree of 845. But it is clear that Christianity had for all intents and purposes died out in China by the end of the tenth century. The Arabian author Abu'l Faraj mentions meeting a Nestorian monk in Baghdad in 987 who had just come back from China:\n\n\"In the year of the Hegira 377, in the Christian quarter behind the church, I met a monk from Najran who seven years before had been sent by the catholicus to China with five other clergy to set in order the affairs of the Christian church. I saw a man still young and of a pleasant appearance, but he spoke little and did not open his mouth except to answer the questions which were put to him. I asked him for some information about his journey, and he told me that Christianity was just extinct in China; the native Christians had perished in one way or another; the church which they had used had been destroyed; and there was only one Christian left in the land. The monk, having found no one remaining to whom his ministry could be of any use, returned more quickly than he went.\"\n\nThe dates for Nestorian Christians in China during the Yüan period are equally vague. Although individual Nestorians are found in various parts of China from about 1200 onwards, including some siege engineers in the Mongol armies, they appear only to have come in force after the final defeat of the Sung regime in southern China by the Mongols in 1279. Most references to Christians in Yüan China are found later than 1280 and earlier than 1340. A special government department,", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "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": 212135, "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": 77, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "54\n\nOther Official Identities\n\nWhile technical Chinese terms, derived from a transliteration of the proper name Nestorius, exist to distinguish the Nestorian church and the Nestorian theology from other types of Christianity, ching-chiao ('brilliant teaching') has become the normal term used by Chinese writers for Nestorian Christianity in China, just as t'ien-chu chiao and chi-tu chiao, also terms invented by Christian missionaries for use in China, have become the standard terms for Catholic and Protestant Christianity respectively. Indeed, at one point in the seventeenth century, Chinese Catholics considered abandoning the term t'ien-chu chiao and calling their religion ching-chiao hou-hsueh, the 'revised brilliant teaching'. It was, of course, the discovery of the Sian tablet in 1625 which gave a new lease of life to the term, and its revival is a curious irony of history. In fact, far from being the usual term used by the Nestorians for Christianity, ching-chiao, 'brilliant teaching', had fallen out of use by Yuan times, and was only used for a short period by the Nestorians in Tang China. It seems to have been invented by Archbishop Adam shortly before the erection of the tablet in 781, and was probably only consistently used during his lifetime.\n\nThe term fa-ch'in ching-chiao was never used by Nestorian Christians in Yüan China to characterise their religion. They almost certainly did not know that Nestorians had come to China in T'ang times, even though references to the earlier mission probably survived in the church's archives in Baghdad. In official correspondence, Nestorian Christians in the Yüan period are referred to as Yeh-li-k'o-wen. The term has never been satisfactorily explained, and the suggested derivations from either the Greek archon (ruler), Syriac arkdiqun (archdeacon), or Turkish arkhun (fair-complexioned), all pose problems of one kind or another, though the third suggestion is certainly the most plausible. 'Christianity' was merely the teachings of the 'Yeh-li-k'o-wen', an expression found in several official contexts. This colourless expression supplies additional evidence for the indifference of the Nestorian Christians of the Yuan period towards missionary activity among the Chinese population.\n\nIn the T'ang period, moreover, Christianity seems to have been known by an almost equally colourless name, ching-chiao, the 'teaching of the scriptures', until shortly before 781, and to have been", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 }, { "id": 212290, "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": 232, "title": "RAS-1990", "content_text": "209\n\n7\n\nThe texts translated by Legge were given the special subtitle, The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Confucianism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879-1891). They included six volumes (numbers 3, 16, 27-28, 39-40) in The Sacred Books Of The East Series under the general editing of F. Max Müller: Part I. The Shu King (the Book of Documents), The Religious Portion of the Shih King (The Book of Odes), and the Hsiao King (the Classic of Filial Piety) (XW) (1879); Part II. The Yi King (the Book of Changes) (58) (1882); Part III. The Li Ki (the Book of Rites), (禮記) I-X (1885); Part IV. The Li Ki, XI-XLVI (1885); Part V. The Tao Teh King (道德經) and the Writings of Kwang-Tze (莊子) (the Taoist Classics by Laozi and Zhuangzi), I-XVII (1891); Part VI. The Writings of Kwang-Tze, XVIII-XXXII, and the Thai-Shang Tractate of Actions and Their Retributions, (太上感應篇) with Appendices, I-VIII (1891). One of Legge's more important addresses in this field was to the Oriental Congress which met in Lyons and Florence during September, 1878. It was entitled, \"On the Present State of Chinese Studies and What is Wanted to Complete the Analysis of the Chinese Written Characters\" (September 16, 1878). Legge was Chairman of the Congress.\n\nAfter his Inaugural Address at Oxford, Legge quickly sought to attract students and any interested public by presenting very practical discussions of Chinese language. On November 7, 1876, he presented \"The Nature and History of the Chinese Written Character\". In 1878 another public lecture dealt with \"Principles of Composition in Chinese, or Grammar without Inflections\". By January, 1877, he was able to attract enough students to begin a course entitled \"Elements of Chinese and the Confucian Analects\". By the school year of 1881-1882, Legge was presenting classes on The Four Books, Laozi's (Zhuangzi) Daode Jing (道德經), and Chinese Poetry. See Oxford University Gazette, 1876-1877, pp. 64, 191; 1878-1879, p. 93; 1881-1883, pp. 200-201. The text he used for the grammar course in his early years at Oxford was Stanislas Julien's Syntaxe Nouvelle de la Langue Chinoise (ibid, 1877-1878, p. 193).\n\n* Besides the major Taoist volumes in The Sacred Books of the East, Legge also presented independent public addresses on Laozi and Zhuangzi (莊子) at Oxford's Taylorian Institute. The high regard Legge had for Zhuangzi can be seen in the typescript of the address, still available in the Bodleian. See Oxford University Gazette, 1889-1890, p. 92.\n\nLegge's response to Buddhism was very much influenced by the polemical attitudes of the Tang dynasty scholar, Han Yu, and other criticisms of Buddhism he read in Chinese tractates written by notable missionary scholars. He employed Han Yu's memorial against Buddhism as part of class readings beginning in 1883, added other texts to this in the late eighties and early nineties, and spoke publicly on \"The Purgatories of Buddhism and Taoism!\" in 1893. See Oxford University Gazette, 1882-1883, p. 558; 1884-1885, p. 339; 1892-1893, pp. 226, 491. His most important text and article relating to Buddhism are A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms, Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hien of His Travels in India and Ceylon (AD 389-414) In Search of the Buddhist Books of Discipline (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), and “A Fair and Dispassionate Discussion of the Three Doctrines Accepted in China', by Liu Mi, A Buddhist Scholar”, (London; n.d., presented to the Orientalist Congress 188?, pp. 563-580). The original source of publication for the article is not clear.\n\n† Besides the Buddhist texts mentioned above in §9, Legge also published Christianity In China: Nestorianism, Roman Catholicism, Protestantism. On the flyleaf is the following title: Christianity in China; A Rendering of the Nestorian Tablet at Si-an-fu to Commemorate Christianity. London: Trübner & Co, 1888.\n\nCf Lindsay Ride's \"Biographical Note\", in The Chinese Classics with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes (Taipei: Southern Materials Center, Inc, 1985), p. 22. At the age of 26 he had been awarded a Doctorate of Divinity by New York University (1842).", "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1990.txt", "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/d79206299", "rank": 0 } ]