The Nestorian Stele and China’s Christian Past – DISCOVERIES FROM THE BOOKGIFT PART III

When Protestant and Catholic missionaries returned to China during the 19th century, they did not arrive in a spiritual vacuum. For many of them, one discovery was very important. The Nestorian Stele in Xi’an was a nearly three-meter-high stone monument erected in 781 during the Tang dynasty. Today the stele is displayed at the Beilin Museum in Xi’an, but for generations of missionaries it was something far greater than an archaeological object. It was proof that Christianity had once taken root in China centuries before the arrival of Europeans. And it was something they could go and visit on the site where it was once erected.

The stele tells the story of an Assyrian Christian mission that reached the Tang court in the 600s. Its inscriptions describe churches and monasteries across the empire and tell about how early Christians translated their faith into concepts familiar to Chinese readers, borrowing language from Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. For missionaries in the 1800s and early 1900s, this was encouraging. The stone linked their own work to an ancient Christian history already present in Chinese civilization. Perhaps that is why Dagny and Robert kept a photograph of the Nestorian Stele in their family photo album.

From the 16th century onward, Catholic missionaries translated parts of the Bible into Chinese. During the 19th century, Protestant missionaries completed full Chinese translations of the Bible and spread them through schools, printing presses, and medical missions. One milestone was the publication of Robert Morrison’s Chinese New Testament in 1813, followed by complete Chinese Bibles that became widely used throughout the Qing dynasty.

Translation was very important to the missionaries and their work. The Bible had to be expressed in language and concepts Chinese readers could understand. In this sense, the Nestorian Stele served almost as an inspiration and precedent. The missionaries could see that Christians in Tang China had engaged with the same questions over a thousand years earlier. How should God be described in Chinese? Which words could convey the essence of God? How could Christianity be understood without appearing so foreign?

This also shaped how many Chinese encountered Christianity. The faith was often introduced not only by missionaries but through Chinese helpers, teachers, and especially “Bible women” (read a bit about a Bible woman here) — local Christian women who travelled, taught, read scripture aloud, and explained biblical stories to other women. Through them, Christianity became more rooted in everyday Chinese life.

I think the Nestorian Stele was important to my great-grandparents as it linked their beliefs to a part of the history of China that they were there to revive.

But it was not only the Chinese who learned from the missionaries. In order to understand their audience, the missionaries also needed to understand where the Chinese came from. And that was Confucianism. I found a Chinese-English book in Karin Stålhammar’s collection that exemplifies this. It was the “Four books Chinese classics in English.

Searching on the internet I found out that this was a traditional Confucian curriculum. For almost a millennium, the Four Books were the foundation of a classical education in East Asia, teaching everything from thorough reading, to ethics, reasoning and human relations. It was also an introduction to Confucian thought. The four books were “Great learning”, “The discourses”, “The book of Mengzi” and “The doctrine of the mean”. Mina Stålhammar’s book also has “The Confucian Analects” in addition to the other books. The way it is layed out in the book, I will probably not read all of it, but it is interesting to think about how the missionaries took in this information and what it meant for them and their mission to convert the Chinese to Christian faith.

Passage from the “Confucian Analects” in the Four Books:

“Chapter V: Tsze-hea said, “He who from day to day recognizes what he has not yet, and from month to month does not forget what he has attained to, may be said indeed to love to learn.”

I think that passage fits well as the missionaries indeed loved to learn – they had to in order to persevere in their new environment and become accepted as part of the Chinese society.

The Four Books Chinese Classics in English owned by Mina Stålhammar, grandmother of Karin Stålhammar. According to Mina Stålhammar’s inscription, she obtained it in Shanghai in 1904. (assuming I’ve deciphered the inscription correctly).