Reflections | What happened to China’s early Christians and why did the Nestorian doctrine die out?
The religion arrived during the Tang dynasty via Middle Eastern missionaries, but its fate was forever in the fickle hands of ancient China’s emperors
In Greater China, Good Friday and Easter, which fall on March 30 and April 1 respectively, are public holidays only in Hong Kong and Macau. In fact, the two special administrative regions are the only places in China where government shuts down and most residents get a day off on Christian feast days. (In Macau, All Souls’ Day and the Feast of the Immaculate Conception are also holidays.)
This has less to do with the number of Christians in the two places – they form only small minorities – than with the fact that Hong Kong and Macau were colonies of European countries. Still, non-Christians in both places do not complain. Why look a gift horse in the mouth?
Christianity in China began, however, not in two European outposts on the south coast but on the edge of the northern Loess Plateau in Changan (present-day Xian). The earliest definite record of Christians in China was inscribed in both Chinese characters and the Syriac alphabet on a stele unearthed in the early 17th century.
The inscription on the stele, erected in the year 781, gave a precis of Christian teachings and mentioned Alopen Abraham, a missionary of Nestorian Christianity, a branch of Christianity based in the Middle East that fell out with the church in Rome over points of doctrine.