The Lotus & The Cross
Early Christian Remains from China and India

This exhibition presents photographs of early Christian remains from Kerala in South India and Quanzhou in Fujian in South China. The tombstones from Quanzhou belong to Christians of the Church of the East who settled in South China during the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1260-1368), while the crosses from Kerala belong to various Syrian Christian communities, the earliest dated to the eighth century.

Syriac was the earliest Christian language used in Asia and it was Syriac-rite Christians who first settled in China and India. There are written records and inscriptions showing that between the fourth and seventh centuries Christians from the Middle East undertook trade and missionary work using the overland Silk Road to China and the maritime Spice Route to India. The photographs show some of the surviving archaeological evidence for this early Syrian Christian presence in South India and South China. A common iconographic motif to be seen on the remains from both continents is the mounting of the cross on the lotus flower.

The tombstones from South China and the crosses from South India show considerable artistic adaptation and acculturation. The lotus flower motif—with a long history in the Indian iconographic tradition—probably reached China along the Silk Road with the introduction of Buddhism in the early centuries of the Common Era. The earliest depiction of the cross on the lotus in China is on the so-called “Nestorian” tablet of 781 housed in the Forest of Steles Museum in Xi’an, a complete rubbing of which can be seen in the Del Santo Reading Room at the University of San Francisco. The so-called “Persian crosses” of South India with inscriptions in Middle Persian have been dated to the eighth or ninth centuries. These crosses show a variation on the leafed-cross design known from Christian art in Byzantium and the Middle East. The tall free-standing crosses of Kerala appear to date from a later period, but they clearly exhibit lotus petal designs on their pedestals. The combination of the cross and the lotus in China and India symbolizes the meeting between East and West like no other image has done.

The exhibition is part of an Australian Research Council-funded project based in the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University, Sydney, which is researching the epigraphy and iconography of these artifacts.

Photographer and Curator
Dr. Ken Parry
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia