HISTORY OF ASIA GENERAL SURVEY 91 



Nestorians arrived in China in the seventh century, as the celebrated 

 inscription of 781 discovered in 1625 at Si-ngan-fu, capital of the 

 Shen-si Province, testifies. Under the Mongol Dynasty of Chinguiz 

 Khan, in the course of the thirteenth century, Nestorians through 

 Tangut and Central Asia, from Khanbaliq (Pe-king) to Bagdad, held 

 an unbroken line of archbishops and bishops; the innumerable 

 stones which cover their graves, especially in the province of Samirie- 

 thie, bear witness to the number and importance of these Nestorians. 



From the time of St. Louis and the meeting of a Council at Lyons, 

 we trace the great progress of the Missions of the Roman Church. 

 The Catholic world of Central and Western Europe was full of zeal 

 for the propagation of the Gospel in Asia, where the somewhat 

 mythical Christian prince known under the name of Prester John 

 lived, and cherished also the hope to oppose invading Islam with a 

 barrier of Mongol tribes. Hence the missions of the Franciscan 

 brother John of Piano Carpini, sent in 1245 by Pope Innocent 

 IV to the camps of Batu and of Cuyuk Khan, and of the Dominican 

 monk William of Rubruk, dispatched by the King of France, St. 

 Louis, in 1253, to the court of the Great Khan Mangu at Karakorum, 

 whose journeys have been edited with so much skill and care for the 

 Hakluyt Society by our President, the Hon. William W. Rockhill. 

 Missionaries were dispatched to Khanbaliq (Pe-king), to the Fu-Kien 

 province, to Central Asia, and bishoprics were created at Khanbaliq, 

 at Zaitun, and at Ili-baliq. All these missions disappeared in the 

 course of the fourteenth century, either destroyed in Central Asia 

 by the influx of Mohammedanism or on account of the accession of 

 the Ming Dynasty to the throne of China in 1368. 



Missionaries returned to China only in 1579, but the evangeliza- 

 tion in this country was in truth the work of the Jesuit Fathers 

 and especially of the celebrated Matteo Ricci, who died at Pe-king 

 in 1610. Christianity, which was very flourishing in the seventeenth 

 century, soon declined, owing to the petty quarrels between religious 

 orders, and the bull of Benedict XIV, Ex quo singulari, dealt to the 

 missions a death-blow in 1742, as it proscribed the liberal doctrines 

 advocated by the Jesuits in the worship paid by the natives to Con- 

 fucius and to their ancestors. 



Protestant missions in China are of a far more recent origin; they 

 do not go back further than the beginning of the nineteenth century, 

 when the famous Dr. Robert Morrison, author of a great Chinese 

 Dictionary, sent by the London Missionary Society, arrived at 

 Canton in 1807. The number of missionaries is now very great, 

 and many of them are American. I may recall among them the 

 names of two distinguished sinologues: Elijah Coleman Bridgman, 

 of Connecticut, and Samuel Wells Williams, of New York, who was 

 several times charge d'affaires of the United States at Pe-king. 



