Church of the East in China

[1] Two possibly Church of the East monks were preaching Christianity in India in the 6th century before they smuggled silkworm eggs from China to the Eastern Roman Empire.

Taizong extended official tolerance to the mission and invited the Christians to translate their sacred works for the imperial library.

[5] Church of the East worshippers in the time of Xuanzong accepted the Confucian religious beliefs of the emperor, and likely other traditional Chinese religions.

The stele contains a long inscription in Chinese with Syriac glosses, composed by the cleric Adam, probably the metropolitan of Beth Sinaye.

These references confirm that the Church of the East in China had a well-developed hierarchy at the end of the 8th century, with bishops in both northern capitals, and there were probably other dioceses besides Chang'an and Lo-yang.

[15] Another epitaph in Luoyang of a Nestorian Christian Sogdian woman also surnamed An was discovered and she was put in her tomb by her military officer son on 22 January, 815.

This Sogdian woman's husband was surnamed He (和) and he was a Han Chinese man and the family was indicated to be multiethnic on the epitaph pillar.

[3] The eventual extinction of Christianity has been attributed to factors such as that the religion had a minority status and was of foreign character along with dependence on imperial support.

Among these books are some translations of the Scriptures, including the Pentateuch (牟世法王經) - Genesis is known as 渾元經, Psalms (多惠聖王經), the Gospels (阿思瞿利容經), Acts of the Apostles (傳化經) and a collection of the Pauline epistles (寳路法王經).

The province evidently had several dioceses, even though they cannot now be localised, as the metropolitan Shemʿon Bar Qaligh of Tangut was arrested by the patriarch Denha I shortly before his death in 1281 'together with a number of his bishops'.

[38] During the first half of the 14th century there were Church of the East Christian communities in many cities in China, and the province of Katai and Ong probably had several suffragan dioceses.

[41] The last tombstones in two East Syriac cemeteries discovered in modern-day Mongolia around the end of the 19th century date from 1342, and several commemorate deaths during a plague in 1338.

[43] Reasons often cited for the rapid decline and disappearance of Church of the East after the fall of the Yuan dynasty include the foreign character of the religion and its adherents, comprising mainly a Central Asian and Turkic-speaking immigrant community.

[44] In consequence of these factors, once the Yuan dynasty fell, the Church of the East in China quickly became marginalized and soon vanished, leaving little trace of its existence.

[45] A later visit to Hong Kong led the Assyrian Church to state that: "after 600 years, the Eucharistic Liturgy, according to the anaphora of Mar Addai & Mari was celebrated at the Lutheran Theological Seminary chapel on Wednesday evening, October 6, 2010.

"[1] This visit was followed up two years later at the invitation of the Jǐngjiào Fellowship with Mar Awa Royel accompanied by Reverend and Deacon, arriving in Xi'an, China in October 2012.