Join us as we explore the evidence for Christianity in China from 86 AD to the Mongol invasions, the heroic narratives of 16th to 20th-century missionary endeavors, the marvelous life of Wu Li, an early Chinese Christian painter, calligrapher, poet and priest, and the moving accounts of the martyred confessors of the Boxer Rebellion.
Orthodox Christianity arrived almost unnoticed in the 1700s, when captured Russian soldiers were invited to settle in China by the Kangxi Emperor Xuanye. Marrying Chinese women, their descendants remain today a small but officially recognized Chinese Orthodox minority. In the late 19th- and early 20th-century, Chinese translations of Orthodox services and literature began to appear, and after the Russian Revolution, hundreds of thousands of Russian Orthodox clergy and laity emigrated to China where they remained until the Cultural Revolution.
Meet a Chinese Orthodox subdeacon ordained before the Cultural Revolution, a native Chinese priest who emigrated to San Francisco with St. John Maximovitch, a modern Orthodox convert, theologian, and translator from Shanghai, and the reflections of a former American Protestant missionary to China on culture and tradition.
Finally, investigate the current state of Orthodoxy in China through insightful interviews with Archpriest Dionisy Pozdnyaev of Hong Kong, whose Brotherhood of Sts. Peter and Paul prepares translations of Orthodox liturgical, pastoral, and hagiographical texts for Chinese speakers throughout the world.
This twenty-year span of articles and interviews from Road to Emmaus Journal delves into China’s surprising Christian past and the hopes and challenges for the future of Orthodoxy in China and the diaspora.
