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The Church of the East and the First Catholic Missions (635–1840)

This chapter opens with a broad survey of Christianity’s initial appearance in West Asia and the several papal-sponsored sending missions of a handful of friars that followed. It then moves to a more extended treatment of the first organized and subsidized effort by the Church to penetrate China with the gospel—the first Jesuit mission of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Particular attention is given to the conversionary efforts of Matteo Ricci, the conversion of Xu Guangqi, and European missionary attempts to convert rural people and villagers. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion of the homegrown variety of Christianity that survived during the period when Christianity was officially outlawed in China as a heterodox and “perverse sect.”