bodyType

customContents

entityId

entityUuid

articlePageQuery

filter

article

articleBaseAdvertisingInfoArticle

articleListArticle

articleSeoArticle

hooksArticleAcknowledgementGateOverlayArticle

hooksTrackPageViewArticle

hooksContentInterestArticle

articleLinkingDataContent

hooksAmpRedirectArticle

articleSchemaContent

liveArticle

advertZone

sentiment

contentLock

topics

types

sections

paywallTypes

createdDate

publishedDate

urlAlias

moreOnThisArticles

sponsorType

commentCount

authorLocations

authors

corrections

displaySlideShow

multimediaEmbed

printHeadline

seriesContainer

articleSpeeches

socialHeadline

headline

images

flag

firstTopic

glossary

flattenTypeIds

image

relatedLinks

relatedNewsletters

__typename

sponsor

pdfFiles

seriesReverseOrder

series

disableOffPlatformContent

published

updatedDate

summary

subHeadline

body

keywords

readingTime

customTimezone

liveContents

THE RUSSIAN Orthodox Church last Sunday conducted Christmas Mass in China for the first time in more than 50 years.

Before midnight, some 50 worshippers filed into the remnants of the Orthodox cathedral in the grounds of the Russian Embassy for a Mass conducted by Father Dionysis, a priest sent by the church elders of Smolensk and Kaliningrad.

'It was very, very joyful,' said Du Zhonglian, one of the congregation that includes descendants of Cossacks brought to Beijing by the Qing Emperor Kangxi in 1653.

Among those attending was 80-year-old Father Alexander Du, the oldest surviving member of one of Beijing's oddest communities, the Albazinians.

Du Zhonglian, who also calls himself Viktor Dubinin after his ancestor, a Ukrainian Cossack, said Russian Orthodox believers were struggling because it was not recognised as a separate religion by the Chinese Government. 'We need our own church and we should build it here,' said Mr Du, whose father and grandfather were Russian Orthodox priests.

Beijing once had a number of Orthodox churches, the largest being the Church of All Holy Orthodox Martyrs under whose crypt were buried some of the 224 believers massacred by the Boxers in the 1900 rebellion.

It was partly torn down in Soviet times and the remaining shell used as a garage. It is being used for church services again, but remains too small to hold the whole community, several hundred, at once.

The parish dates to 1685, when the first Russian church in China was built to serve the Albazinians. They trace their origins to Cossacks sent by the tsar to the Amur River, where they built a fortress from which they gained their name. The expanding Russian and Chinese empires had competed to stake claims on territory in Siberia until they signed the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1690.

The Manchus besieged the Cossacks with 15,000 troops, but despite the Cossacks' eventual defeat, Kangxi was impressed by their bravery and brought them to Beijing to join his bodyguard. According to legend he brought dozens back and had them married off to the widows of executed prisoners because no one else would marry the foreigners. The Albazinians hotly dispute this version.

'We had a high status and became bannermen, Manchu aristocrats, members of the Embroidered Yellow Banner,' Mr Du said.

Moreover, all Albazinians trace their ancestry back to five Cossacks - Romanov, Khabarov, Kristov, Jakovlev and Dubinin - who were emissaries taken hostage and brought to Beijing early on in the conflict. 'Kangxi admired them because they were big and strong,' Mr Du said. 'So he saved them.'

Mr Du and his fellow Albazinians look Chinese but if one looks closely , there are traces of his ancestor's Western features, such as a heavier than normal growth of facial hair. He thinks the community numbers about 300, although some say there are several thousand in Beijing. 'Most of us are actually descended from Dubinin and are called Du,' he said. His friend, Zhao Hongyou, nods in agreement. His grandmother was named Du, too.

They are identified on ID cards as Mongols or Manchus. As bannermen, the Cossacks and their descendants married respectable Mongol and Manchu women from the same banner, one of eight banners that formed the imperial bodyguard.

Each group lived in a different part of the imperial city, and members of the Embroidered Yellow Banner lived in the same area as do the descendants of the Cossacks.

Kangxi gave them the Guangdi Miao, the Temple of the War God, to live in, situated in the northeast corner of the imperial city. In the next few weeks, the area outside the embassy will be razed to make way for office blocks.

'Now we are fighting to stay in our homes,' said Mr Du with some bitterness. 'This land belongs to us but the authorities say we have no legal documents to prove it. But where can we get them?'

As their courtyard houses are turned to rubble, the Du family and others are being dispersed to distant suburbs. For more than 250 years, the headquarters of the Russian Orthodox mission to China was based in this same corner, and part of the original temple still exists. 'About 1,000 of us all lived there in a self-sufficient community until 1955,' Mr Du said and described the apiary, orchards, a mill and dairy farm that existed in his childhood.

'We had black and Swiss cows and it was the biggest in Beijing,' he said.

It had all been rebuilt after 1900, when the Boxers laid it to waste and murdered 300 believers, many of whom were afterwards declared martyrs for refusing to reject their faith. The mission was then given extra land as compensation by the state.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, the mission had to become financially self-supporting but its importance increased as more and more Russians found refuge in China.

In 1920, the retreating White Armies took the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II's relatives, including Grand-Duchess Elizabeth, who had been thrown down a mine shaft in 1918, and brought them to Beijing, where they were buried in the Russian cemetery. The Russian embassy was in the Legation Quarter, but in 1956 the Soviet embassy took over the territory. On the orders of then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, the church and other buildings were torn down and half the land was given back to China.

The compound, home to thousands, still occupied more ground than any other embassy in the world. The cemetery was moved to outside Anding Gate and later become part of Communist Youth League Park. It was then submerged under a lake.

In 1957, the Russian Orthodox Church in China was declared autonomous and then lapsed into obscurity.

At first the Albazinians were allowed to build a new church, but it was taken away in 1966 and turned into a plastics factory that has since been demolished. During the Cultural Revolution, the embassy was emptied and defended by a handful of troops and six diplomats, who moved from one abandoned flat to another.

The street outside was named Anti-Revisionist Street and in 1969 thousands of Red Guards laid siege to the embassy. The embassy staff, fearing for their lives, armed themselves with machine-guns. The Red Guards were narrowly held back but vandalised the entrance as they left.

The Albazinians suffered, too, as their loyalty came under suspicion. Their homes were ransacked by Red Guards and a number were sent to labour camps. The Orthodox congregations are unable to train or ordain new priests to hold services or perform other rites, making the Albazinian congregation a sort of underground church. Although in Harbin and elsewhere, Orthodox churches were restored, they were not handed back and continue to be used as restaurants or warehouses.

In the 1990s, the newly independent Moscow Patriarch, Alexy II,  began making contact again with the Albazinians. In November, officials of the parish of Smolensk and Kaliningrad and a senior aide to the Moscow Patriarch visited Beijing to lobby for the restoration of formal ties. The Russian church faces many of the same problems as the Roman church.

Beijing is unlikely to acknowledge the authority of the Moscow Patriarch and the two remain at odds over the interpretation of historical events such as the Boxer rebellion. Further, the Orthodox church also wants Beijing to find the remains of the last Tsar's relatives, which are now regarded as holy relics. Moscow cannot send ordained priests and services can only be held inside the Russian Embassy. Moves are now afoot to build a church inside the embassy grounds and a number of Albazinians have gone to Russia, America and Australia to study with the help of Orthodox congregations.

Mr Du fears this is not enough. He wants authorities to reactivate the autonomy of the Orthodox church and support it in its property claims. 'Look at my son,' Mr Du said, nodding to his quiet 27-year-old. 'He cannot understand the Slavonic church services because he cannot understand Russian - after 300 years of history what will be left of us?' Once they are scattered around Beijing, he said younger members would forget their heritage and the ties that bound them would dissolve.

Jasper Becker (jasper@a-1.net.cn) is the Post's Beijing bureau chief



Christmas worth half-century wait