Iconostasis of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Dormition of Most Holy Theotokos, Russian Embassy, Beijing, China
Sunday
morning in China’s capital city is not unlike most other days: Beijing’s more
than 20 million inhabitants bustle through congested sidewalks, cars compete
almost hopelessly for space on crowded roads, and hazy grey skies loom heavily
over the city landscape, punctuated by soaring cranes marking new
constructions.
Beijing
is not exactly a city of church bells and rising spires, but nestled quietly
among the trees within the protective walls of the Russian Embassy lies the
Russian Orthodox Church of the Dormition of Most Holy Theotokos. Its humble but
majestic onion dome and Greek cross rise above the embassy walls, a sight few
could have imagined only 50 years ago, when the Orthodox church was converted
by the Soviet authorities into a garage. Three years ago the “garage” was
restored into what it was originally made for, a temple of God where the Divine
Liturgy is offered in all the rich beauty of the Russian Orthodox tradition.
The restored onion dome and Greek cross above the Russian Orthodox Church of the Dormition of Most Holy Theotokos
About
a month ago I contacted the priest rector of the church, Father Sergiy Voronin,
and the first words of his response were, “Christ is in our midst.” The
presence of Christ becomes obvious as one enters the beautiful Church of the
Dormition, with its remarkable iconostasis; 30 minutes before Liturgy the icons
are already illuminated as the faithful light candles and offer them
prayerfully while intoning the name of Holy Trinity.
Why
was I, a Roman Catholic, visiting this Orthodox church located in the Russian
embassy?
Other
than our shared brotherhood as Christians in the Apostolic Church, I came as a
pilgrim to visit the site where 222 Orthodox Christians were massacred by
Boxers in 1900, just as Catholic priests and faithful were being killed in
other parts of the city. During the Divine Liturgy, my wife and I stood near
the icon dedicated to the Orthodox martyr saints of China, and I could not help
but contemplate Tertullian’s declaration, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed
of the Church.”
Catholics
and Orthodox remain divided—God grant the grace to heal this division—but we
remain in a very real way part of the same Body of Christ. I came to the Church
of the Dormition as a pilgrim to visit the place where members of the same Body
I am part of died as witnesses to the Church of Christ founded on the Apostles.
I have visited other locations where Chinese Christians were massacred during
the Boxer Uprising, and like those places, I could see how their blood planted
seeds—though the seeds of Orthodoxy in Beijing have only recently begun to grow
again into a more visible community. The problem today is that China does not
recognize Orthodoxy as an official religion, and so only foreign-passport holders
are granted access to Orthodox Liturgy. Chinese Orthodox Christians today can
only walk by what were once grand Orthodox churches, such as those in Harbin,
Shanghai, and Wuhan, and see structures that are now either boarded up or
converted into artists’ studios, dance clubs, or exhibition halls.
After
celebration of the Divine Liturgy, accompanied by harmonious voices of the
church cantors, I shared tea with Father Sergiy and discussed the history of
the Russian mission in China. The church also maintains a rich collection of
old photos, documents, historical objects, and a library, in a small museum
upstairs. There I was able to piece together more of the lush historical
tapestry of the Russian Orthodox presence in China.
Catholic
missionaries entered China en masse in the wake of the Reformation, and the
most famous Catholic to live in Beijing was the intellectual luminary Father
Matteo Ricci, SJ. But by the late 17th century, Russian Cossacks who had been
defeated by the Qing armies under the commanding Kangxi Emperor were captured
and brought to Beijing as evidence of the Chinese victory. Among these
prisoners of war was the priest, Father Maxim, who had with him the required
vessels for the Divine Liturgy and an icon of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker,
after whom the first Orthodox chapel was named in China’s capital. Kangxi
granted a plot of land near Beijing’s East Gate (Dongzhimen) to these Russian
Cossacks and allowed them to openly practice their Orthodox faith; this is
where the Russian diplomatic and spiritual mission in China has remained until
today.
Few
today realize that the Roman Catholic Jesuits were not the only Christian
missionaries who exchanged scientific knowledge of astronomy, medicine,
mathematics, and geography with China; the Russian mission also had such interactions
with Chinese men of learning in Beijing. As more Chinese converted to
Orthodoxy, there was a need to translate Church Slavonic into Chinese, a
process which began after 1830.
In
1900, as anti-Christianity and anti-foreignism swept through northern China,
Boxers attacked the Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing, called Beiguan, or
“North Church,” and massacred 222 Chinese. In June 1900, the Boxers besieged
the Orthodox mission and, after looting the church, burned it to the ground.
The native Chinese Christians hid themselves at the home of Father Mitrophan
Ji, a Chinese priest, but soon after his home was surrounded by a crowd of
Boxers. The Christians were massacred; Father Mitrophan was stabbed to death
under a date tree near his home. Not only did Boxers destroy the church, but
every tree and bush was also burned along with the buildings.
Other
Orthodox Christians suffered martyrdom during the Boxer violence. One of the
martyrs was a seven-year-old boy whose Christian name was John. On the evening
that Father Mitrophan was killed—June 10, 1900—young John was seized by Boxers,
and because he was identified as a Christian, his back was slashed and his toes
were cut off. While his captors derided him for being a “second-hand hairy” (ermaozi)—foreigners were called “hairies” (maozi)—John insisted that he simply
believed in God. Refusing to denounce his Christian faith, John was beheaded.
In remembrance of these holy witnesses to Christ, the Orthodox Christians in
China intone, “Give rest, O Lord, to the souls of your servants—Priest
Mitrophan and those with him—and make their memory eternal. Amen.”
Many
of the relics of these martyrs were saved, and by 1917 the Orthodox mission in
Beijing had been rebuilt to include two churches, a tall steeple, and two
monasteries. One of the mission churches was built on ground where many of the
martyrs were slain, and was called Church of All the Holy Martyrs of Beijing.
After the Bolshevik Revolution the Russian Orthodox mission in China confronted
a new threat; was it the property of the Church, or could its status as
Russia’s diplomatic mission in China be used as an excuse for the Soviets to
claim the property? Deliberations and debates regarding who could claim
ownership of the Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing continued long after the
establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and the last two Orthodox
Russians—Archbishop Victor and the monk Seraphim—were finally evicted from China
in May of 1956. Shortly afterward, what remained of the Russian Orthodox
religious buildings was either destroyed or reallocated for other uses. The
dome and steeple of the Church of the Dormition were toppled from the roof, the
icons and altar were pitched, and the space in which the Holy Sacrifice was
previously offered became a garage for embassy cars. One might say that in 2009
a new page was turned for Russian Orthodoxy in China; it was then that Father
Sergiy traveled to Beijing, becoming the first Orthodox priest to return to
Beiguan since 1956.
(Above) The Russian Orthodox Church of the Dormition of Most Holy Theotokos as it appeared in 2009 while being used as a garage for the Russian Embassy. (Below) The restored church as it appears today.
Father
Sergiy, from a remote part of Siberia, is accustomed to being in a country with
so few practicing Orthodox Christians. His native Russia, which was almost
entirely Russian Orthodox before the Bolshevik Revolution, today sees only 3
percent of its population attend Liturgy on a given Sunday. The anti-religious
legacies of Lenin and Stalin have unfortunately left a more enduring mark on
Russia than the early Party leaders of China. The church in the Russian embassy
was handsomely restored and consecrated on October 13, 2009, and since then
Father Sergiy has regularly celebrated the Divine Liturgy each Sunday at 9:30 am. Since Orthodoxy remains an
unofficial religion in China, the Orthodox Liturgy may be attended only within
the embassy church, and one must be placed on an authorized list and present a
non-Chinese passport to enter the embassy compound. To appreciate just how the blood
of the martyrs has begun again to take root in China, one
must see a photograph of what the church looked like as a garage, and compare it
to the church today; the transformation is astonishing.
I
have said much here about the Russian Orthodox missionaries in China because they
spilled their blood in martyrdom in 1900, along with their Roman Catholic
brothers and sisters in China. Few Catholics are aware, however, that Eastern
Catholics, too, have lived and worshipped in China. As Father Sergiy informed a
Greek Orthodox visitor who was sharing tea with us, the only discernable
difference between Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox is that Catholics
pray for the Pope during the Divine Liturgy (Eastern Catholics, of course, are
in full communion with the Holy Father and Rome, unlike Eastern Orthodox). In
the 1937 Jesuit-published A Guide to Catholic
Shanghai, the Russian Catholic Chapel with a photograph of its spectacular
iconostasis is featured on page 20. Eastern Catholic priests celebrated the
Byzantine Liturgy in Old Slavonic there, with a burgeoning parish of some 260
Russians. Sadly, tensions between the Catholic Byzantine and Orthodox faithful
exacerbated relations between the two communities in Shanghai, though today it
is even more regrettable that neither the Eastern Catholic nor Orthodox
churches are in use at all; I have walked by the old Russian church many times
in Shanghai, and have each time lamented its current state of decay from long
neglect.
Dr. Anthony Clark & Father Sergiy Veronin in the Russian Orthodox church.
As
difficult as it is to see once-thriving churches sit vacant, with high onion
domes stripped of their crosses, one cannot help but celebrate the restored and
growing church community at the Russian Embassy of China in Beijing. After a
long visit to the church museum, I returned to the dining room, where Father
Sergiy affectionately blessed the faithful as they departed. I thanked him for
allowing us to attend Liturgy and visit his museum and
library. And bowing down I too received his blessing, after which he said,
“You’re on the list, so remember you’re always welcome here.” I remembered his
note to me—“Christ is in our midst!”—and I silently thanked the holy martyrs of
1900 for their witness and continued prayers. Truly it is upon their blood that
the Russian church is again able to worship the God of the ages, and raise the
Cross of Christ in a city growing more fevered in its march toward materialism.
In
the Troparion sung in honor of the Russian Orthodox martyrs of China, the choir
of the Russian Orthodox Church of the Dormition of Most Holy Theotokos sings:
Thy 222 martyrs who shone forth in the empire of China held the
Christian faith as a shield and did not bow down to idols. They accepted
torture and death from their irrational countrymen and the lips of the
passion-bearing youth cried: we consider suffering for Christ as nothing. We
desire to obtain eternal life for this transitory life. Amen.