“There’s no Church, but we did find the first man over there!”

As we nauseously crawled up the hills wrapping around Fangshan, a rural district south west of Beijing city proper, our driver gesticulated proudly at the improbably large museum being erected by the roadside. The site of one of modern anthropology’s more controversial findings, the homo erectus ‘Peking Man’, whose bones were lost in the brutal period of Japanese occupation, Fangshan’s attempts to redefine itself as a tourist beacon were still undermined by the lacklustre infrastructure and half-hearted attempts by municipal government. Further up the hills, the overgrown and abandoned tomb complex of Imperial China’s Jurchen Jin dynasty was marked only by a cracked carpark and the skeleton of a neglected visitors centre, a few locals collecting butterflies on the 12th century terraces and processional way.

The voyage had been prompted by a grainy black and white photo and caption in Beijing’s Capital Museum – the Fangshan District ‘Temple of the Cross’, a bona fide remnant of Nestorian Christianity’s presence in 1st millennium China. Nestorian Christianity, also known as the ‘Church of the East’ (or in Mandarin: 景教 Jingjiao ‘The Luminous Religion’), originally a Sassanian Persian offshoot of the Syriac Church, entered China early in the 7th century. Its most famous attestation is arguably the 8th century 大秦 ‘Daqin’ (an early Chinese term for Rome) stele in Xi’an (the Tang Capital), a record of the 150 years since Nestorian Christianity was established in Tang China. Driven underground or even into extinction by persecution, the religion had a resurgence in the Yuan Dynasty, with Marco Polo commenting on Christians in Southern Fujian province and with records showing a number of bishops and dioceses shadowing the new Mongol administration based in Khanbaliq (Beijing).

So, while Christianity in China is more normally associated with the Matteo Ricci and the missionaries of the Qing, a Tang Church deep in northern China is perhaps more remarkable than inexplicable. And indeed, after switching to foot for a light climb for the last few miles, we came across a cleared terrace in one of Fangshan’s valley with the footprint of a modest building and stelae attesting to this remarkable site – Beijing’s earliest Church 十字寺: Shizisi, ‘Temple of the Cross’.

The two stelae and other remnants uncovered by Republican archaeologists in the 1930s allow us to piece together the history of a site which tells a story of the vicissitudes of unstable North China, historically an area on the fringes of Han Chinese control and often lapsing into ‘barbarian’ orbits. Founded as a Buddhist precinct by the (Han) Eastern Jin Dynasty in 317 CE, Chongsheng Temple 崇圣院 was converted to a Nestorian Church under the new Tang Emperor Taizong as early as 638 CE – merely 3 years after Christianity officially entered China, and at the start of the feted Tang Golden Age. The first stele records how the Liao Dynasty, the Khitan Empire which emerged out of Manchuria to wrest control from the Tang, converted Chongsheng back to Buddhism in the 10th century. The second (below) records how in the 1350s the crumbling Yuan Dynasty – who had swept into Northern China a century previously, wiping out the ‘barbarian’ Jurchen Jin on their way to smash the forces of the Song – reestablished the Nestorian Church, giving in the moniker ‘Temple of the Cross’. This was the title it bore until the Ming, who had at long last reinstated Han rule over the Beijing area, rededicated the complex to Buddhism in the 16th century before it faded from history and disappeared into ruin.

The Temple of the Cross isn’t a sight of great ruins or mystery like the Daqin Pagoda, an alleged Nestorian monastery outside Xi’an, nor does it embody the pivotal significance of old Silk Road centres in Xinjiang or Shaanxi. But there is a satisfying story told in this secluded corner of Greater Beijing, a story which perhaps tells much more about the complexities of ‘China’ as it interacted with the world outside its borders over the ages.

After much chiding from friends new and old, and after increasingly abusing the medium of Twitter for pseudo photo-essays, this luddite is trying the blogging world to share some of the fruits of the exploring I am lucky enough to be setting about in China and South East Asia.

A mostly amateur Greco-Roman Classicist by background, with interests coalescing around linguistics and the Hellenistic worlds of the Near (and sometimes Less Near) East, I come to this new Sinological world as a novice and 外行. I hope that, at the least, this will provide a platform to share some of the more recherché and esoteric places and people I find, and that in a humble way my thoughts and observations provide a different perspective from the normal tourist commentary (in English) or schematised and uncritical tone in most publicly available (Chinese) sources.

Most importantly, I hope that it inspires some people to ask the questions that I haven’t, point out what I have missed, and join me in understanding the nuggets and jewels of provincial China.