Heaven in Conflict

Franciscans and the Boxer Uprising in Shanxi

Anthony E. Clark

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780295805405
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Chine

One of the most violent episodes of China's Boxer Uprising was the Taiyuan Massacre of 1900, in which rebels killed foreign missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians. This first sustained scholarly account of the uprising to focus on Shanxi Province illuminates the religious and cultural beliefs on both sides of the conflict and shows how they came to clash. Although Franciscans were the first Catholics to settle in China, their stories have rarely been explored in accounts of Chinese Christianity. Anthony Clark remedies that exclusion and highlights the roles of Franciscan nuns and their counterparts among the Boxers—the Red Lantern girls—to argue that women's involvement was integral on both sides of the conflict. Drawing on rich archival records and intertwining religious history with political, cultural, and environmental factors, Clark provides a fresh perspective on a pivotal encounter between China and the West.

PART 1

The Drought and the Heavenly Battle

CHAPTER 1

Taiyuan, from Mission to Diocese

The fact I am gray is due more to work and troubles than to old age.

—JOHN OF MONTECORVINO, OFM, ON HIS LIFE IN CHINA

ON 10 October 1927, the Italian friar Father Antonio Santarelli, OFM, inscribed his signature on a list of questions related to the tragic events of the Boxer incidents in Shanxi. In article 8 he asked whether the anti-Catholic persecutions of 1900 were due to the rash of calumnies against Chinese Christians and the Franciscans, such as rumors that Chinese Catholics “follow a new and pernicious doctrine, assist the European political leaders, condemn ancestral veneration, produce discord among the people, and poison water.” Was it also true, he asked, that popular rumors accused the Franciscan missionaries of “carving out the hearts and eyes of Chinese children”?¹ In his opening remarks in this document for the Vatican’s Sacred Congregation for Rites (now the Congregation for the Cause of Saints), he noted that some 2,417 Catholics had been killed in Shanxi during the summer of 1900. It is possible that he had known several of the Franciscans who had left for China and died there during the conflicts of the late nineteenth century, and in his list of thirty-seven matters “to be investigated” (ut probant), he asks some probing questions, all revolving around one central issue: Was this conflict one of politics or religion? As far as we know, Father Santarelli had never been to China, but his order, the Order of Friars Minor, had made Shanxi one of its principal mission stations, and to this day it is often discussed and written about in Franciscan communities.

JESUIT FOOTPRINTS

The first Catholic to leave missionary footprints on Shanxi’s fertile loess soil was a Flemish Jesuit, Nicolas Trigault, SJ (1577–1628), who established a chapel in Jiangzhou in 1624. Nicolas’s nephew, Michel Trigault, SJ (1602–1667), was later the first to arrive at Taiyuan.² Most of China’s Christians at that time had been “missionized” by the Society of Jesus, and by the time Jesuits settled in Shanxi, the number of priests in China was far too few to adequately attend to the pastoral requirements of the country’s growing number of converts. By 1665 fewer than two dozen priests were in China to serve the spiritual needs of several thousand Christians.³ Michel Trigault entered Taiyuan in 1633 and managed the budding mission there until 1665, quite alone and overworked.⁴ The Church of the East, from Persia (the so-called Nestorians), had taught its version of Christianity in Shanxi as early as the eighth century, but record of the “Luminous Religion,” as it was called in China, had faded from historical memory. When Michel Trigault entered Shanxi, his Christian religion was unknown to the deeply conservative denizens of Taiyuan, and following Matteo Ricci’s example he adapted his teachings to those of Confucius and ingratiated himself with the local literati. He baptized two hundred new faithful soon after establishing a modest Roman Catholic chapel in Taiyuan.

The difference, or perhaps the conflict, between Western and Chinese gods was quick to emerge in Shanxi, and Trigault was an eager participant in the contest for souls. Three years before moving to Taiyuan, Trigault and his Jesuit confrere, Albert d’Orville (1621–1662), lived in the Shanxi town of Jiangzhou, where the Catholic God was rumored to be more austere than the comparatively congenial gods of China. As the Lantern Festival approached, celebrated on the fifteenth day of the first lunar month, the two priests heard of local gossip that Catholics enjoy “no such feasts or revelries” as do the Chinese on such holidays.⁵ In response, Trigault and d’Orville orchestrated a special celebration of their own on the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, which corresponded with the festivities of the Lantern Festival. They installed a special platform inside the Jiangzhou church and lavishly adorned the chapel interior with paper lanterns, flowers, silk streamers, and censers that poured out clouds of fragrant incense.⁶ The Catholic God would not be outdone by pagan revelries—the church doors were ordered to remain open so that passersby could observe how extravagant Christian merrymaking could be. Inquisitive Chinese were invited to enter and see the lanterns, which were “dedicated to the Lord of Heaven and his Holy Mother.”⁷ China’s traditional Lantern Festival was transformed into an opportunity for conversion.

After 1665, Shanxi’s mission evaporated because of imperial Chinese court politics and the shortage of clergy, but when Rome divided China into two archdioceses in 1696—one see in Nanjing and the other in Beijing—new Catholic orders were dispatched to supplement the Jesuit mission. Shanxi was at first assigned to the Jesuits, and Shaanxi was given to the Franciscans, though Shanxi’s capital city, Taiyuan, remained a missionary backwoods.⁸ The Jesuits had earlier prepared Shanxi’s Catholics to sustain their religious fervor through membership in confraternities such as the Association of the Holy Mother (Shengmuhui); women catechists, vowed to perpetual virginity, taught other women the rudiments of Christianity, and men promoted pious practices such as intoning litanies and performing severe penances, including self-flagellation in organized assemblies. The Jesuit Alphonse Vagnone (1568–1640) had created a number of such pious associations in Shanxi by the 1630s; and in an Annual Letter he submitted in 1630, Vagnone reported that Shanxi’s Christians gathered in private homes, many with richly adorned oratory chapels, “to practice devotions, read holy books, and encourage each other to observe the Commandments.” Since Shanxi’s Catholics saw a priest for an average of only a few days each year, Jesuits commonly assigned a local church elder (huizhang) to “rouse their fellow Christians to practice acts of piety and devotion.”⁹

Yongzheng (1678–1735), successor to the emperor Kangxi (1654–1722), was far less impressed by Jesuit learning and artistic training than his father and accepted a memorial (i.e., a formal report or communication) from an official in Fujian who recommended the wholesale proscription of Christianity in China and the expulsion of all foreign missionaries. In an imperial edict issued in January 1724, Catholicism (Tianzhujiao) was expressly listed among “perverse sects” and “sinister doctrines.”¹⁰ After Yongzheng ascended the throne, the persecuted Catholic Church went underground, while others apostatized as European missionaries were driven out.¹¹ Christianity in Shanxi after Yongzheng saw the development of Taiyuan Catholicism reach a low point; after Yongzheng’s edict the activities of Taiyuan’s Catholics essentially vanished.¹² Not only did Shanxi suffer from Yongzheng’s anti-Christian edict, but in addition, more than a third of China’s Catholics stopped attending religious meetings or simply reverted to popular Chinese folk beliefs.

Despite the capricious state of the mission in Shanxi during the early Qing, the Society of Jesus laid an enduring foundation there, and when the Franciscan friars began to replace them, they did so on trails already blazed by distinguished Jesuits. Nicolas Trigault, for example, had produced one of the first systems of Romanization while working in Shaanxi and Shanxi in his Aid to the Eyes and Ears of Western Literati (Xiru ermu zi); Giulio Aleni, SJ (1582–1649), taught Christianity in Shanxi before relocating to his more famous mission at Fujian; and Shanxi was the first mission post of the renowned Jesuit court astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest, SJ (1623–1688). The Franciscan mission in northern China did not begin in earnest until the eighteenth century, when Rome was still considering how to divide its attentions, and its boundaries, in China.

FRANCISCAN FOOTPRINTS

The first Franciscan to build a church in China predated the first Jesuit missionaries by three centuries. Giovanni da Montecorvino, OFM (1247–1328), established his mission cathedral in the shadow of Kublai Khan’s (1215–1294) imposing palace in Beijing, then called Khanbalik.¹³ Friar Giovanni’s legacy figures so heavily in Shanxi Catholic identity today that the present diocesan seminary, near the center of Taiyuan city, is named after him (Giovanni Montecorvino Seminary, Menggaoweinuo Zongxiuyuan), and Montecorvino’s biography is outlined in a chapter dedicated to him in the Taiyuan Diocese’s centenary commemorative book, published in 2006.¹⁴ Shanxi’s Catholics presently envision Shanxi as a Franciscan rather than a Jesuit province, and churches there most typically bear the names of Franciscan saints, such as Saint Anthony and Saint Francis.

It is perhaps Friar Giovanni’s missionary success that has historically appealed most to the Franciscans who later settled in Shanxi, and friars in China are quick to point out that Montecorvino holds the distinction of being China’s first Catholic bishop. In a letter entrusted to a papal legate on 8 January 1305, Bishop Giovanni succinctly recounted his triumphs, and his challenges, in converting the residents of Beijing: “I have built a church in the city of Khanbalik [Beijing], where the chief residence of the king is, and I finished it six years ago; where also I made a bell-tower and put three bells there. I have also baptized there, as I reckon, up to today about six thousand persons. And if there had not been the above-named slanders I should have baptized more than thirty thousand; and I am often engaged in baptizing.”¹⁵ The “slanders” he mentions came from Eastern Christian, or Nestorian, detractors, competitors with the early Catholic mission.¹⁶ The Nestorian clergy in China were displeased that Roman Catholics had quite unexpectedly occupied the mission ground, which previously had been occupied only by they themselves.¹⁷ But who could have blamed them for their bitterness? Had not the Catholic Church condemned Nestorius (ca. 386–ca. 451), the archbishop of Constantinople, as a heretic and ejected him from his see? According to Friar Giovanni the Nestorians were anathema, and according to China’s Nestorian community the Franciscan bishop was an interloper. Interdenominational politics aside, neither the Catholics nor the Nestorians did much to ingratiate themselves to the native Chinese, and once their Mongolian sponsors retreated in 1368, their churches and monasteries slowly faded from China’s vast landscape. It was nearly four centuries before the Friars Minor, more simply known as the Franciscans, sent new missionaries to China in large numbers, and it was not until 1890 that Rome officially recognized Taiyuan as its own apostolic vicariate under Franciscan care.¹⁸

Before Shanxi was a Franciscan mission it was administered by the Italian Jesuit Antonio Posateri, SJ (1640–1705), who served as the apostolic vicar of Shanxi from 1702 until his death at Taiyuan in 1705.¹⁹ By the time of Posateri’s death, Shanxi boasted a Catholic population of around three thousand, clustered mostly around the urban centers of Jiangzhou and Taiyuan.²⁰ Posateri’s position remained vacant for eleven years after his passing. When Rome combined Shaanxi and Shanxi into a single vicariate in 1716, it assigned the Order of Friars Minor to manage mission affairs there. The sons of Saint Francis, affectionately known among the friars as “il Poverello” (the poor man), had at last staked their enduring claim to Shanxi’s abundant plains, and there could not have been a more striking distinction between the styles of these two orders. Jesuits had decided upon a cautious and measured process of introducing the culturally startling aspects of Christian doctrine to Chinese society; the Franciscans were less calculated in their approach. A 1639 letter by the friar Antonio de Santa Maria Caballero, OFM (1602–1669), noted that Catholic literati “were so hindered by their Confucian rites and those to ancestral tablets that they persisted in their beliefs for more that five centuries . . . and encouraged considerable opposition to our Dominican and Franciscan Friars.”²¹ In addition to denigrating Confucian rites, the friars also aggressively preached in public areas wearing “their habits of blue and white sack” and “brandished their crosses while preaching.”²²

The two provinces of Shaanxi and Shanxi remained bundled together into a single apostolic vicariate from 1716 till 1844, and its first vicar, Bishop Antonio Laghi, OFM (1668–1727), lived in Xi’an, Shaanxi.²³ The post-Jesuit Catholic mission in Shanxi can be divided into seven principal periods: (1) the era after Yongzheng’s edict, from 1724 to 1860, during which Catholic activities were forced mostly underground; (2) the three decades from 1860 to 1890, following the Sino-French Convention, which reopened the empire to missionary efforts, and during which the Franciscan friars labored to strengthen and protect the mission’s legal status; (3) the period from 1890, after which Taiyuan was established as an independent apostolic vicariate, until 1896, when the Franciscan mission focused its attention on training and stationing more native clergy; (4) the period of the Great North China Famine, in 1896–1897 (distinguished from the Great Famine of 1877), through which the Shanxi friars were occupied with relief efforts for those afflicted by the severe drought; (5) the survival of the mission during the violence of the Boxer Uprising, 1898 to 1900; (6) the post-Boxer era of Catholic restoration in Shanxi, from 1901 to the 1940s, which centered on remembrance, reconstruction, and vigorous proselytization; and (7) the period of resistance and survival while Taiyuan was elevated to an archdiocese (1946) and as the province entered the post-1949 communist era. The events from the Great Famine of 1877 until the post-Boxer reconstruction era are at the center of this work.²⁴

After a series of unequal treaties in China, such as the Sino-British Treaty of Nanjing of 1842, the Sino-American Treaty of Wangxia of 1844, the Sino-American and Sino-French Treaties of Tianjin in 1858, and the Sino-French Convention in Beijing of 1860, Western Catholic missions were accorded unprecedented access to China’s inland areas. Catholic orders such as the Franciscans, Vincentians, and Dominicans were then allowed to lease or purchase land to construct ecclesial buildings—churches, orphanages, schools, and hospitals—and local officials were obliged to treat sympathetically the foreign missionaries who entered their jurisdiction. During this time, leading up to the official founding of the Taiyuan Diocese in 1890, the Franciscan mission in Shanxi sought to salvage what Catholic presence remained after Yongzheng’s proscription; and after they had returned to Shanxi in 1860, the friars ambitiously sought to better secure the legal footing of the Catholic presence in the province. They therefore directed their attention toward the Zongli Yamen, the Qing (1644–1911) bureau in charge of foreign affairs in the capital, Beijing, and began to aggressively lobby for concessions favorable to Catholic religious practice and expansion. What Shanxi’s Catholics complained about most during their time “underground,” from 1724 to 1860, was their legal obligation to pay taxes to local temples devoted to other deities. That was the first and most hotly debated issue the Shanxi friars confronted after settling in the province.

It was in the context of recovering the Shanxi Catholic community that the friars of Fengtai county, who lived...