In December, he went, together with Lu Tingmei, to Yaoshan village, Xilin County of Guangxi, where he met the local Catholic community of around 300 people.

Condemned to cage torture (zhanlong), he was first beaten one hundred times on the cheek by a leather thong, which caused his teeth to fly out, his face mutilated, and his jaw lacerated.

The planks he stood on were gradually removed, placing a strain in the muscles of the neck, and leading to a slow and painful death from suffocation.

The viceroy responded to de Courcy by pointing out that Chapdelaine had already violated Chinese law by preaching Christianity in the interior (the 1844 treaty signed with France only permitted for the propagation of Christianity in the five treaty ports opened to the French), he also claimed that the priest was in a rebel territory and that many of his converts had already been arrested for acts of treason, and the viceroy further claimed that Chapdelaine's mission had nothing in common with the propagation of religion.

[8] In 1857, de Bourboulon, the French plenipotentiary, arrived in Hong Kong and attempted to negotiate reparations for the execution of Chapdelaine and to revise the treaty.

The political situation wherein Britain's victory was seen as inevitable and the French desire to make its own imperial gains in China, alongside the fact that the French did not have a policy elsewhere of punitive military expeditions to avenge the death of missionaries, has led many historians to conclude that the death of Chapdelaine was merely an excuse used in order to declare war so that France could build its empire.

[8]The Chinese version of Article Six in the Sino-French Peking Convention, signed at the end of the war, gave Christians the right to spread their faith in China and to French missionaries to hold property.

[3] He was canonized on 1 October 2000, by Pope John Paul II, together with 120 Christian martyrs who had died in China between the 17th and 20th centuries.