Christians and Manichaeans on the Silk Road

Abstract

This study chronicles the major discovery of textual evidence about the eastward diffusion of two major world religions, Christianity and Manichaeism, along the Silk Road, and their eventual arrival in Tang China. It begins with the well-known discovery of the Xi’an Monument (once called the Nestorian Monument) in the seventeenth century and the controversy it stirred up in European scholarship because it was a relic of the (Christian) Church of the East. The study then focuses on discoveries of both Christian and Manichaean material made at the eastern end of the Silk Road, especially at Kaochang (medieval Qočo) and Dunhuang, which authenticated the Monument and inaugurated the study of the history of these two religions in pre-Modern China. The final part of the study chronicles the survival of these two Near-Eastern religions in China and asks whether our knowledge of Christianity in China under the Mongols contributes to the ongoing debate on the historicity of Marco Polo’s visit to China proper.

The Xi’an Monument

In 1623, Chinese workmen accidentally discovered in or near the village of Zhouzhi, an inscribed stele 279 cm high with texts in both Chinese (ca. 1800 characters) and Syriac (ca. 250 words) and weighing over five tons. ‘The Stele on the diffusion of the Luminous Religion of Da Qin (lit. ‘Greater China’ = Rome) in the Middle Kingdom (Daqin Jingjiao liuxing Zhongguo bei)’, as the monument entitles itself, is now housed in the Forest of Stelae Museum of Xi’an (Xi’an beilin bowuguan), part of the Shanxi (or Shaanxi) Provincial Museum (Shanxisheng bowuguan), and is probably the most gazed upon monument in the ancient Chinese city of Xi’an besides the Terracotta Army.

The stele is inscribed in two languages, Chinese and a language in a script then unknown to Chinese Confucian scholars. The latter, however, had little difficulty in reading and understanding the Chinese part of the inscribed texts. According to this, the monument was erected in the second year of Jianzhong era of the Great Tang (Dynasty) (i.e., 781 ce) by a group of foreign priests or monks. It narrates the history of the diffusion of a religion from a mythical land in the West, called Da Qin (Rome), into China proper during the early decades of the Tang Dynasty. The divine head of this foreign religion was a triune deity, and one of them had the name of Míshīhē, and who descended to earth in a spectacular manner:

Thus, one of the three, the radiant Míshīhē (i.e. the Messiah), concealing his true majesty, appeared as a man. Heaven rejoiced, and a virgin gave birth to a sage in Da Qin (i.e., the Roman Empire). In Bosi (i.e., Persia) they saw the brilliant light and brought offering, thus fulfilling the old law as told by the twenty-four sages. He regulated family and nation through his great plan; he established the new doctrine of the wordless [inspiration of the] pure (i.e., divine) spirit, one of the three. He formed good practice through correct belief; he created the principle of the eight frontiers (?); he refined the unworthy into the true. He opened the door of the three constants; he introduced life and eliminated death; he raised a bright sun to dispel the darkness. (Eccles and Lieu 2023)

Less than two decades had passed since the first major European Christian missionary, the Jesuit scholar Matteo Ricci, was granted permission by the then reigning emperor of China to build the first Catholic Church in Beijing (1601 ce). However, it did not take long for Chinese scholars who had examined the newly discovered stele from Xi’an to realize that the religion described in the Chinese part of the stele carried a message similar to the one being propagated by the newly arrived missionaries. Word soon got around in China of this remarkable discovery, and it was not long before Jesuit missionaries were able to examine the stele and confirm its Christian origin and that the foreign script used in the inscription was Syriac – a language widely used by Christian communities in the Near East.

At the time of its discovery, Europe was on the verge of entering the Age of Enlightenment. However, as the first European scholars who reported on its existence and published the bilingual Chinese and Syriac texts inscribed on what came to be known as the Monumentum Sinicum were tasked with the conversion of China, they put out the news that the monument was erected by a papal mission and that the chief priest had a title which appears to read ‘Pope’ (papas) of China – now sadly proved to be a misreading for the title ‘reverend’ or ‘monseigneur’ (fapshi, the Tang pronunciation of fashi 法師 ‘teacher of the law’ (= Daoist priest) in Modern Chinese) (Lieu 2020). Nowadays, few scholars would realize, without a great deal of prompting, that this was in fact the first major inscribed text in Chinese to be seriously studied by European scholars, since Sinology, along with Egyptology, was then in its infancy. Not surprisingly, Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), the most scholarly of the early champions of its authenticity, was both a Jesuit and a pioneering scholar of the Coptic language. Although Kircher did not know Chinese and had plenty of fanciful ideas about this hieroglyphic language just as he had about ancient Egyptian, he was a proven scholar of Greek, Latin, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew and, of course, Syriac. A modern study of this polymath is aptly subtitled ‘The last man who knew everything’ (Findlen 2004). In fact, Kircher was not far wrong in insisting that the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics lay in Coptic. The coincidence of the find of the Xi’an Monument and the granting of imperial patronage to the Jesuits in China was too good to be true, and philosophes such as Voltaire immediately dismissed the Xi’an Stele as a Jesuit forgery. It was not until Protestant scholars, who had their own anti-Catholic agenda, began to study the Monument more objectively from the turn of the nineteenth century onwards that the authenticity of the texts on the stele became more assured.

The early part of the twentieth century witnessed the discovery from the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas in Dunhuang of nine Chinese Christian texts from the Tang period (see below). This set a new agenda for scholarship as these texts use the same Chinese Christian terminology as the Chinese text on the Xi’an Stele. Moreover, in 2006, a second Christian monument, also from the Tang period, a Buddhist-style sūtra-stele, was found in Luoyang, and contained part of a Chinese Christian text already known to us from the texts discovered in Dunhuang (Tang Li 2009). Sadly, the new stele or pillar was cut from its base by treasure hunters using a chainsaw and the bottom part, containing almost a third of the inscribed texts, has not yet been found. It also exhibits a distinctive Cross-over-Lotus design typical of the Church of the East as well as Buddhicized angels or apsaras. This means that scholars who still wish to label the Xi’an Monument a pia fraus will have an impossible mountain to climb.

Turfan

Between 1902 and 1914, German archaeologists conducted a series of excavations at oasis sites in East Turkestan, especially in and around the important medieval city of Qočo (Chin. Gāochāng) or Kara-Khoja or Turfan, then called Idiqut-Schahri. Albert Grünwedel (1856–1935), one of the leaders of the first expedition (1902–1903), remarked on finds of large quantities of manuscript fragments in the eastern area of Ruin K:

Prints and manuscripts in Sanskrit were brought to us from these ruins; later, I initiated a search (for their find sport) and finally entire dungeons full of decayed manuscripts were found in the rooms located to the east. Books had been stored there, but water from the ariqs (irrigation channels) had leaked into the room, and after drying up, worms did the rest. (Grünwedel 1906, tr. Dreyer, 2016)

However, despite this unpromising start, the first expedition brought back to Germany vast numbers of texts and text fragments (some containing very fine miniatures) in scripts and languages then new to Western scholars. Fortunately, in Berlin they had the perfect scholar to decipher them. Dr F.W.K. Müller (1863–1930) was a Sinologist who was also well-qualified in Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Syriac. Müller took a particular interest in texts written in a variant form of the Estrangela Syriac script (with some resemblance to cursive Palmyrene Aramaic) which he was able to decipher because of his excellent training in Semitic Studies. He began his attempt at decipherment in March 1903 with a well-preserved text with excellent calligraphy, but because it was written in a little-known language (Sogdian), he was unable to translate it. Fortunately, he had better luck with other texts in the same script and, less than a year later, in March 1904, he was able to present to the Prussian Academy a full table of transcriptions, specimen texts and even sample translations. He also made what seemed then an extraordinary claim that the primary language behind the texts written in this special Semitic script was an early medieval form of Iranian and that the texts contained scriptures and hymns belonging to the Manichaean sect (Müller 1904a). Because systematic persecution by Christians and Muslims had left us few original Manichaean texts, the discovery made by Müller was a sensation. It was not long before Müller was able to place before the same academy a substantial selection of genuine Manichaean texts with interlinear translations in German (Müller 1904b) – a work which helped to inaugurate a new era of research on Manichaeism based on original and genuine Manichaean texts.

The Second Prussian Expedition (1904–1905) to Chinese Turkestan was led by Albert von Le Coq (1860–1930), a former merchant but who was also well-qualified as a Turcologist. From Ruin K, which he identified as a Manichaean temple and/or monastery, he discovered an exquisitely executed wall painting of Manichaean priests in three rows behind an outsized figure, clearly that of a religious leader (Von Le Coq 1909). The painting was carefully removed from the wall and taken to Berlin and exhibited at the Museum für Indische Kunst where it was destroyed in an air raid during the Second World War. Von Le Coq had surmised that Ruin K had once contained a Manichaean library as the excavators found manuscript fragments that had been reduced to loess by irrigation water lying deep on the floor:

Thus, I had the grief of discovering in the Manichaean shrine K a library which was utterly destroyed by water. When I had unearthed the door from the heaped-up loess dust and sand we found on the threshold the dried-up corpse of a murdered Buddhist monk, his ritual robe all stained with blood. The whole room, into which this door led, was covered to a depth of about two feet with a mass of what, on closer inspection, proved to be remains of Manichaean manuscripts. The loess water had penetrated the papers, stuck everything together, and in the terrible heat of the usual summer there all these valuable books had turned into loess. I took specimens of them and dried them carefully in the hope of saving some of these manuscripts; but the separate pages crumbled off and dropped into small fragments, on which the remains of beautifully written lines, intermingled with traces of miniatures executed in gold, blue, red, green, and yellow, were still to be seen. An enormous treasure has been lost here. On the walls we found exceedingly well-executed frescoes, but they, too, were much damaged. In a narrow passage near this library a tremendous quantity of textile materials, some Persian and some Chinese in character, was discovered, amongst other things Manichaean hanging pictures on cloth, depicting a man or a woman in the full canonicals of the Manichaean priesthood. (Von Le Coq 1928)

The library was apparently undamaged until the beginning of the twentieth century when the irrigation channels were dug, causing a rise in the water table and thereby the books to rot. Many of the recovered fragments were lavishly illustrated, a sign that their original codices were produced by well-trained scribes working for rich patrons (Gulácsi 2001). Members of Von Le Coq’s team also discovered the remains of a Christian monastery at Bulayïq (Shuïping) about 10 km north of Qočo, which yielded a number of manuscripts in Syriac script. As mentioned earlier, Müller had begun his attempt at deciphering the new texts with an exceptionally well-executed parchment bi-folio in the Manichaean Estrangela script, but the language of the text eluded him. This was until he began to study texts brought back from Bulayïq in the more conventional Syriac script and in the same language as that on the parchment he could not decipher. He quickly realized that some of these texts written in the Syriac script, but not in the Syriac language, might even have been translations into an East Iranian language of the Syriac New Testament, the Peshitta. Now, Müller had the Rosetta Stone he needed and he was able to identify fragments from the New Testament by using personal and geographical names, and before long he was able to decipher this hitherto unknown language, which he correctly named Sogdian, the lingua franca or more precisely the lingua iranica of the Silk Road (Müller 1907). The successful decipherment of these text fragments showed beyond doubt that both Manichaeism and Christianity were active on the Silk Road and had well-established bases on the western frontier of China proper.

Mani and Manichaeism

Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, was not a Persian magus as we are led to believe by Christian heresiologists. He was born c. 216 ce, and his parents had emigrated from the city of Hamadan in Western Iran to Ctesiphon, south of Baghdad in modern Iraq, later to become the winter capital of the ruling Sasanian dynasty. According to a semi-autobiography in Greek found in a miniaturized codex from Roman Egypt, Mani was brought up in a Jewish–Christian ‘Baptist’ sect in Southern Mesopotamia during the last years of Parthian rule. He rebelled against his superiors in his 24th year (i.e., 23 years old) over ritual washing as a form of religious purification. He believed he was the recipient of a special revelation from his Divine Twin and styled himself ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’ (Gardner 2020; Lieu 1992).

The young Mani became an itinerant preacher and healer. He based his new doctrine on an amalgam of Syriac Christianity, Second Temple Judaism and Zoroastrianism. At the heart of Mani’s teaching was a primordial struggle between the Realm of Light presided over by the Father of Greatness and the Realm of Darkness tyrannically ruled by the Prince of Darkness. A result of this conflict was the creation of the human being, which is of sinful nature in his bodily form, but his soul, which remains divine, could be redeemed by special knowledge represented by a special Manichaean divinity known as the Light-Mind. The sect was consequently divided into two classes of believers. The Elects, who were the redeemed ones, were priests who studied and copied scriptures and led an ascetic life. Their daily, especially alimentary, needs were attended to by Hearers who were lay brothers and sisters who could marry and lead a normal life (Lieu 1992; Hutter 2023).

The young Mani travelled widely in Iraq, Iran and parts of India before being granted an audience with the Shahanshah (King of Kings) Shapur I (r. 240–270 ce) of the new Sasanid Dynasty. With imperial support and zealous disciples, his teaching enjoyed great missionary success in Iraq and Iran, as well as the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, especially Egypt. However, one of Shapur’s successors, Bahram II (r. 274–293 ce) accused him of being a negative social influence as well as an ineffective physician. He was imprisoned and died, possibly of torture, between 274 and 276 ce and some sources say that his corpse was flayed and his head placed on a stake at the city gate of Beth Lapaṭ (ruins near modern Sahabad, Iran). Also known as Gondeshapur or Vēh Antiōk Šāpūr (‘Shapur’s Antioch is better’), the city of Beth Lapaṭ was ironically built by Shapur I originally to house Roman captives from his many victorious campaigns. Although Mani was not actually crucified, his followers commemorated his death in the annual feast of the Bēma, which they regarded as a form of crucifixion. At the feast, an image of Mani, or a living member of the Elect, was placed on a platform (bēma) of five steps and special hymns were sung and food consumed. Mani’s followers were severely persecuted by both Sasanian Persian and Roman and Byzantine rulers as well as by the Abbasid Caliphate. Fortunately, Manichaeism became a Silk Road religion par excellence and found many followers among Sogdian merchants who translated the scriptures from Mani’s original East Aramaic into their own language and later into Chinese and Turkish (Uygur). As the Tang government of China was open to foreign cultures via trade and foreign migration, the entry of Manichaeism into China proper was achieved by the end of the seventh century ce, as witnessed to by Manichaean symbols in wall paintings found in cave temples in the Turfan region of the Xinjiang province of China (Chao Huanshan 1993–1994).

Dunhuang

Dunhuang, arguably the most famous of the Silk Road cities, came into prominence as a source of Manichaean texts as a result of the historic ‘inspection’ of the large cache of texts in the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas in May 1907 by Marc Aurel Stein (1862–1926), then Principal of the Oriental College, Lahore. The cache had come to light several years earlier when a Daoist priest had by chance discovered a sealed entrance while cleaning up a cave temple, now known to scholars as Cave 17. Stein’s description of the cave is as follows:

The entrance to the cave-temple had been formerly blocked by fallen rock débris and drift-sand, as was still partially the case at several of the caves situated at the foot of the cliff further south. While restorations were slowly being carried on in the temple cellar and the place now occupied by its antechapel, the labourers engaged had noticed a crack in the frescoed wall of the passage connecting the two. An opening was thus discovered that led to a recess or small chamber excavated from the rock behind the stuccoed north wall of the passage.

Manuscript rolls, written in Chinese characters but in a non-Chinese language, were said to have filled the recess completely. Their total quantity was supposed to be so great as to make up several cartloads. News of the discovery having reached distant Lan-chou, specimens of the manuscripts were asked for from provincial headquarters. Ultimately orders were supposed to have come from the Viceroy of Kan-su to restore the whole of the find to its original place of deposit. So now this strange hoard of un-deciphered manuscripts was declared to be kept by the Tao-shih behind the carefully locked door with which the hidden recess had been provided since its first discovery. (Stein 1921)

The documents had been deposited before 1035 when the cave was sealed. This man-made time capsule would turn into one of the most significant documentary finds in the last century. A skilled negotiator, Stein managed to persuade the Daoist priest who made the discovery to permit him to take to India a large quantity of texts for further study. Among the Stein texts now in the British Library is a beautifully executed long scroll in the Manichaean script containing the text of a long confessional (Von Le Coq 1911) and a codex – an omen book – copied in the then obsolete or obsolescent (Turkic) Runic Script (Tekin 1993).

The news of the find soon attracted other scholarly visitors to Dunhuang, and one of them was the distinguished French Central Asian scholar, Paul Pelliot (1878–1945). Among the manuscripts he was able to acquire for the Bibliothèque Nationale was a fragment in Chinese of some 30 lines, which Pelliot was able to identify as the concluding section of a summary of Manichaean doctrine. This text has come to be known as the ‘Fragment Pelliot’ (P3884) after its discoverer. By then, news of the discovery had belatedly reached Chinese scholars in Beijing, and what remained of the cache was brought back to the capital. It was not long before the Chinese scholars noticed that what had appeared to be an untitled Buddhist text in Chinese in fact belonged to an Iranian religion, as it contained a number of loan-words which were not transliterations of Sanskrit or of Pali, as commonly found in Chinese Buddhist texts. Since Chinese scholars then were not sufficiently trained in the subject of Iranian religions, Paul Pelliot together with eminent French Sinologist Eduard Chavannes (1865–1918), were invited jointly to edit the newly discovered text. This led to their epoch-making study ‘Un traité manichéen retrouvé en Chine’, published in three parts of the Journal Asiatique (Chavannes and Pelliot 1911, 1913a, 1913b). It gives a fully annotated translation of the newly discovered text, together with a translation of the ‘Fragment Pelliot’ and a collection of testimonies on the diffusion of Manichaeism in China.

The long Manichaean treatise in Chinese published in 1911 by Chavannes and Pelliot appears to have been a Chinese adaptation of a work in Middle Iranian, and this was proved beyond doubt by Professor Werner Sundermann FBA, MAE, who, in 1992, published a large collection of fragments in Parthian and Sogdian of a work known as the Sermon of the Light-Mind. An international team under the direction of the present author and Dr Gunner Mikkelsen assembled all known fragments of this text in Central Asian languages, which involved close collaborations with two Members of Academia Europaea, Professor Nicholas Sims-Williams FBA, MAE and Dr Enrico Morano MAE. Their work was made much easier by other international projects that had digitized the relevant fragments, making them available for consultation anywhere in the world. Their joint effort has now been published with the Chinese version of the treatise with all the Parthian, Sogdian and Uygur parallels on facing pages, together with an English translation, in the UNESCO-sponsored series Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum (Lieu and Mikkelsen 2017).

Among the Chinese texts Pelliot did manage to bring back to Paris is a text of undoubted Christian provenance. Collection Pelliot 3847, as the text is known by its accession number and housed in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, contains two texts. The first is the Chinese version of the Gloria in Excelsis Deo under the Chinese title Daqin Jingjiao sanwei mengdu zan, ‘Hymn in praise of the salvation achieved through the Three Majesties of the Luminous Teaching’, and the second is a text with the simple Chinese title of Zunjing, which can be translated as ‘Book (or Scripture) of the Honoured’ or ‘The Venerated Scripture.’ As the character zun is found in other Chinese Christian texts in association with divine names such as tianzun, ‘Venerable (one) in Heaven’ (i.e., God the Father) or Shizun, ‘Venerable (one) of the universe or on earth’ (i.e., Jesus), Zunjing may simply mean ‘Divine (i.e., Christian) Scriptures’. The two texts share so much Christian terminology with the main Chinese text on the Xi’an inscription that there is no question of the latter’s authenticity. Between the two World Wars, Japanese collectors acquired a number of Chinese Christian texts, some hard to date, which are now kept in a centre for Buddhist studies in Osaka. These are of great interest to scholars because they contain a significant number of New Testament passages, especially the Sermon on the Mount, dressed in a Chinese guise (Nicolini-Zani 2022; Kim and Lieu 2021).

Diffusion and Survival

From the historical sources published by Chavannes and Pelliot, we learn that the religion reached China in the early eighth century but was only allowed by imperial edict of 732 ce to be propagated among members of the foreign communities. The status of the religion changed completely when the Khaghan of the Uygur Turks (who were the main mercenaries serving a defeatist Tang government) was converted to the religion in 762. The capital of the so-called First Uygur Empire was then at Karabalghasun on the Orkhon, south of Lake Baikal, and the conversion was celebrated in the famous fragmentary trilingual inscription (Turkish, Sogdian and Chinese) found at the ruins of the capital. In 840, the Uygurs were victims in a fratricidal war against the Kirghiz and were resettled by the Tang Government in the region around Qočo. There, Manichaeism continued to enjoy the status of the religion of the royal court well into the middle of the tenth century. The majority of the Manichaean texts recovered by the Prussian Expeditions were thus produced in the first century of the Second Uygur Empire, when the religion still enjoyed the patronage of the court and of the nobility (Lieu 1992).

The Christians of the Church of the East were not so fortunate in their search for political, especially imperial, patronage in the Mid-Tang period. Nevertheless, the Xi’an Monument listed a number of Emperors who showed favour to the sect:

When Emperor Taizong’s reign (627–649 ce) began, he was wise in his relations with the people. In Da Qin there was a man of great virtue (bishop), known as Āloúběn, who detected the intent of heaven and conveyed the true scripture here. He observed the way the winds blew in order to travel through difficulties and perils, and in the ninth year of the Zhenguang reign (635 ce) he reached Chang’an. The emperor dispatched an official, Duke Fang Xuanling, as an envoy to the western outskirts to welcome the visitor, who translated the scriptures in the imperial library. (The emperor) examined the doctrines in his apartments and reached a profound understanding of their truth. He specially ordered that they be promulgated. ‘In Autumn, in the seventh month of the twelfth year of the Zhenguang reign (638 ce), the emperor proclaimed: The way does not have a constant name, and the holy does not have a constant form. Teachings are established according to the locality, and their mysteries aid mankind. Āloúběn, the virtuous man of Da Qin, has brought scriptures and images from afar and presented them at the capital. He has explained the doctrines, so that there is nothing left obscure. We have observed its basic teachings. They set forth the most important things for living, their words are not complicated, and their principles, once learnt, can easily be retained. Everything in them benefits mankind. It is appropriate that it should spread throughout the empire.’ As a result, a Da Qin (i.e. Roman) temple (or monastery) was constructed in the capital, in the district of Yining. This monastery had twenty-one monks. The virtue of the house of Zhou had come to an end, and the black chariot has ascended into the western heaven. The way of the great Tang dynasty shone forth, and the Luminous teachings spread into the East. It was decreed that the Emperor’s portrait should be copied onto the temple wall. His celestial image radiated colourful lights, giving a heroic aspect to the luminous portal. His sacred countenance brought blessings upon it and cast glory upon the learned company. … The Emperor Gaozong (r. 649–83 ce) duly succeeded his ancestor with deep piety and he was even more beneficent toward the institution of truth. He also commanded Luminous (Jingjiao, i.e. Christian) monasteries to be built in all the prefectures. Furthermore he honoured Alouben (<Syr. Rabban ‘teacher’?) by making him the great master of doctrine for the preservation of the State. While this doctrine was established in the Ten Provinces, the state became rich and tranquility abounded. Because every city was full of monasteries, the (ordinary?) families enjoyed ‘luminous’ (or illustrious) (jing) fortune. (Eccles and Lieu 2023)

The Church of the East suffered persecution by Buddhist monks during the reign of Empress Wu (660–705 ce) and later by Daoist priests, but the sect survived both disasters and recovered thanks largely to the patronage of the influential general Yi Si who held a number of important positions (Thompson 2024).

Survival

The mid-ninth century witnessed violent reactions by the Tang Government towards foreign peoples and religions in China. The Manichaeans had earlier obtained permission to establish monasteries in a number of key cities before the most serious of the xenophobic outbursts in 845. We are told by a local source that a Manichaean priest managed to escape to the southern coastal province of Fujian and attracted a number of followers there. A Manichaean temple in what is now Ningbo survived into the twelfth century ce under Daoist guise, but one of its later abbots expressed regret that he was unable to maintain the rigorous ascetic rules of Mani, the founder of the sect to which the temple was originally dedicated (Lieu 1998). That same temple might have been responsible for producing Buddhist-style Manichaean paintings that were sold to visiting Buddhist monks from Japan and taken back to the land of the Rising Sun. Since 2008, a series of paintings of undoubted Manichaean provenance but once considered Buddhist has been identified and these have greatly added to our knowledge of not just Manichaean artistic motifs but the contents of their teaching (Yoshida 2015). From the tenth to the thirteenth century, Manichaeism and Christianity survived in South China as secret religions and may have interacted with each other, as shown in representations of Mani with features of Jesus or vice versa. In October 2008 came the news that Manichaean texts in Chinese had been found in Shangwan village of Baiyang district of Xiapu county in the Fujian province. Investigation has shown that this was the site of a Manichaean temple, but what is surprising is that the texts were copied as late as the last imperial dynasty of China (1644–1911) and yet they reflect the earliest stage of Manichaeism in China. They contain a different translation of the hymn scroll from Dunhuang and also Parthian hymns in phonetic transcription. Amazingly, one of the texts gives a brief summary of Mani’s life, hinting at his problems as a young man with the Mesopotamian Baptists over the issue of ablution as a form of spiritual purification – a detail known to us only from the Greek Cologne Mani Codex. Needless to say, there is a great deal of ongoing research in China in particular on this new material (Kósa 2022).

The Christian Church of the East was not so fortunate. The persecutions of the mid-ninth century led to the closure of their monasteries in the capital cities of Chang’an and Loyang and the followers who did not flee to the frontier regions had to go into hiding. A Christian monk from Najran in Southern Arabia who returned from a visit to China in 987 ce told his Muslim friends in Baghdad that the Christians in China had perished and completely disappeared (Nicolini-Zani and Skudlarek 2022). However, as we shall see, there is evidence of the sect’s survival in the post-Tang era in South China, especially in and around the cosmopolitan port-city of Zayton (Quanzhou).

Christians and Manichaeans in South China

The regional source which mentions the escape of the Manichaean priest, c. 845, from the capital cities to Fujian also mentions a Manichaean shrine on Huabiao Hill, now in Jinjiang district. This was located by Chinese scholars after the Second World War and a preliminary report with black and white photographs of the site was published in the 1950s, but there were rumours that it was destroyed by rampaging Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. The present author breathed a sigh of relief when a colour photograph of the site was published in 1980 and assuaged all fears (Lieu 2012). The shrine was originally a Daoist temple but was taken over by Manichaeans when China came under the rule of Mongols who were more tolerant of foreign religions than the previous Song Dynasty. The shrine contains the sole surviving statue of Mani as the Buddha of Light that was carved into the hillside, which means it could not easily be removed as the shrine changed use. The Manichaeans, locally known as the Light Sect (mingjiao), had a considerable following in the surrounding villages until the eighteenth century, and in the early twentieth century a new Buddhist sect was founded by two monks who believed that the statue of Mani, in Chinese Moni, was a special avatar of Muni (i.e., Buddha Sakyamuni) the Buddha of Light, and this new sect, which has some vestiges of Manichaean terminology in their liturgy, has continued to this day. That Manichaeism and Christianity might have coexisted in a friendly manner as secret societies in South China is demonstrated by the fact that one of the newly discovered paintings shows either a Jesus figure with Manichaean features or a Mani figure with Christian features. Moreover, one of the new Manichaean texts from Xiapu contains a hymn to the martyr Saint George who had never been a Manichaean saint (Kim and Lieu 2021).

The Mongol conquest of South China was not completed until c. 1277 and this was achieved with the help of allied tribes such as Uygurs and Keraits. Many members of these tribes had been converts to Christianity in their native towns and villages along the Silk Road and their religious allegiance is attested to by a number of tombstones found in the port city of Zayton (Quanzhou). These tombstones contain unique examples of Christian art that show a heavy influence of Buddhism, as shown by similar artistic representations in the famous Buddhist Twin Pagodas of Zayton (Quanzhou). Nevertheless, some of the features of the Christian angels/Buddhist apsaras show features that remind us of similar figures found in Konya in Turkey from the same period (Lieu 2012).

A number of the inscribed tombstones, now exhibited in the Quanzhou Museum of Maritime History, are of great interest to historians. One of the Christian tombstones has an epitaph in Latin, a dedication to Andrew of Perugia who came to China as part of a Franciscan mission led by John of Montecorvino that landed in Zayton (Chin. 泉州 Quanzhou) in South China in the summer of 1293 (Lieu 2012). Another is dedicated to a Mar Antonis (i.e., Antony) who is the abbot of a monastery belonging to the Church of the East (Lieu 2012). A third is the most intriguing. It is bilingual in Chinese and in Syro-Turkic:

Chinese version: To the Administrator of the Christians [也里可溫 yelikewen] and Manichaeans [明教秦教 mingjiao qinjiao] etc. in the combined Circuits of Jiangnan 江南, the Most Reverend [mali haxiya] Bishop [阿必思古八 abisiguba] Mar Solomon [馬里失里門 mali shilimen], Timothy Sauma [Tiemida Saoma 帖迷荅掃馬] and others have mournfully and respectfully dedicated [this tombstone] in the second year of Huangqing 皇慶, guichou 癸丑, on the fifteenth day of the eighth month [5 September 1313]. (Lieu 2012)

Syro-Turkic version: This is the tomb of the Most Reverend Bishop Mar Shlimen (i.e. Solomon) of the Circuits [lit. realms] of Minzi [i.e., Manzi = South China]. Zauma [= Syr. Sauma], the administrator leading [the mourners?] wrote this on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the Ox year. (Lieu 2012: 206-09)

The unique role of Mar Solomon as bishop of both Manichaeans and Christians in Manzi may be explained by an incident in the travels of Marco Polo that has been preserved in a unique Latin version of the text of the Milione. Marco Polo passed through several key cities in Manzi on his way back to Europe via the port city of Zayton (Quanzhou) on the Fujian coast. Before reaching the city by land, Marco Polo and his uncle Maffeo stopped briefly at the city of Fuzhou, which was also an important port. There, an Arab introduced them to a secretive sect whose religion nobody seemed to be able to identify. The followers of this sect neither worshipped fire nor Christ nor Buddha nor Mohammed. Eager to impress upon the members of this sect Kubilai Khan’s known toleration in matters of religion, the Polos paid them a special visit and were allowed to inspect their wall decorations and holy books. With the help of a translator, the visitors were able to identify a Psalter among the books. From this, the Venetian visitors concluded that the members of the unknown sect were Christians and that they should send a delegation to the Khan to procure for themselves the privileges that were granted to the Christians. Two members of this so-called Christian group were duly dispatched to the court of the Khan and were introduced to the head of the Church of the East. The latter took their case to the Khan and requested that these people should be granted the privileges due to the Christians. However, the head of the Buddhists argued that the followers of this sect should not be placed under the rule of the Christians as they were ‘idolaters’ (i.e. Buddhists) and had always been known as such. Kubilai Khan summoned the delegation to his presence and personally asked them whether they would like to live under the law of the Christians or the law of the Buddhists. They replied that if it should please the Khan and was not contrary to his majesty, they wished to be classed as Christians as their ancestors had been. Their wish was duly granted and Kubilai Khan ordered that they should be addressed as Christians and be allowed to keep the law of the Christians (Barbieri 2008).

Several modern scholars have surmised that the Polos had stumbled across a secretive group of Manichaeans. In the course of their journey to China, the Polos had had plenty of opportunity to encounter followers of the Church of the East but not necessarily Manichaeans, who were by then a persecuted minority in Central Asia and thrived mainly as a popular religion in China-proper under the guise of Daoism or popular Buddhism. Marco Polo gave the number of members of this religious group in Manzi as 700,000 – a figure which fits well with the size of the following of Mani in South China. His desire to identify the Manichaeans with followers of the Church of the East was obvious since Jesus was important to both religions, and Mani the founder of Manichaeism had claimed to be the ‘Apostle of Jesus Christ’. The Manichaeans in Fuzhou were probably pleased to accept such unexpected political protection and, since they were mostly Chinese speakers by this late stage of their history in China, they were unlikely to be excessively interfered with in the day-to-day conduct of their religions by a Turkic-speaking Christian bishop (Lieu 2023).

Who says Marco Polo did not visit China?