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Gravestone of Anthony Vilionis, who died in Yangzhou in 1344. He was the brother of
Katerina Vilionis, and his stone shows scenes from the life of St. Anthony.
Medieval Latin Christians in China
Many of the Mongol rulers of the Yuan Dynasty had Christian wives or family members, which helped open China once again to Eastern and Latin Christians coming into China during the Pax Mongolica (roughly 1250 to 1350). The Franciscans were invited into China by Khubilai Khan and the first Latin Bishop of Beijing, Fra Giovanni da Montecorvino, had built his first cathedral in Beijing by 1306. For the next fifty years, Latin Christians from the West were found within the imperial circle of the Yuan dynasty. The tombstone of the Franciscan bishop of Quanzhou, Fra
Andreas da Perugia and the famous Yangzhou tombstone of Katerina Vilionis—both with Latin inscriptions—date to this early period before 1350.
After the Ming dynasty closed the borders to the outer world, Franciscan influence in China withered away but did not altogether die out by the time that Portuguese Dominican and Jesuit missionaries arrived on the shores of southern China in the late 16th century. The newly arrived priests, unaware of the earlier Franciscan and Nestorian presence, were surprised to find vestiges of Christian imagery in statues and gravestones. Because they had lost all notion of the Latin Christian presence two centuries before, the Jesuits theorized that perhaps St. Thomas had indeed made it all the way to China and these were vestiges of his apostolic teachings.
Only in the 17th century, with the discovery of the Xi’an stele with its undeniable Eastern Christian content, did the Jesuits and most of the western Christian world become aware of the vast and early presence of the Church of the East in China.
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