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Stones indicate earlier Christian link?
By Wang Shanshan (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-12-22 06:34 Nestorians were believed to be the first Western expatriates in China,
according to Wang Meixiu, professor at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.
But the Nestorians had little time to convert the Han. Emperor Wu Zong
abolished Buddhism and other religions except Taoism in AD 845.
Christianity flourished to different extents three other times before the
20th century: during the Yuan (1271-1368), late Ming (1368-1644) and early Qing
(1644-1911) dynasties, and after the First Opium War (1840-42).
Both Nestorians and the Catholics arrived in the second wave in the 13th
century, and Christianity flourished again mainly among the ruling Mongols and
the ethnic minority groups.
But its influence vanished soon after the Mongols retreated to the northern
grassland when the Yuan Dynasty fell.
Catholic missionaries who arrived from the 16th to the 18th centuries
converted a number of Han including a Chinese prime minister named Xu Guangqi
(1562-1633), but their achievements failed to continue in the early 19th century
for complicated reasons, Wang Meixiu said.
In the late 19th century, Christianity flourished for its fourth time in
China with the arrival of Western colonialists.
St Thomas in Asia
But as it often happens, legends that do not go exactly in line with the
official history have been handed down for millennia.
One of them concerns the arrival of Christianity in China in the 1st century,
said Gu Weimin, historian and professor at Shanghai University, in his book
"Christianity and Modern Chinese Society," published by Shanghai People's
Publishing House in 1996.
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