A European community in Yangzhou during the Pax Mongolica (original) (raw)
Related papers
Yangzhou, 1342: Caterina Vilioni's Passport to the Afterlife
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 2024
The tombstone of an Italian woman, Caterina Vilioni, in Yangzhou (1342) is a rare and important testimony to Christianity in Yuan China. By exploring the visual language and the multicultural geopolitical context of Caterina's funerary monument, this article sheds light on the dynamic processes behind how cultural and religious barriers were negotiated in the premodern Eurasian world. Despite the increasing scholarly interest in the European import of Asian luxury merchandise along the Silk Roads, movement of objects, persons, and ideas the other way around from Europe to Asia is much less explored. Moreover, the expansion of European networks towards the east was written from the perspective of men: friars, diplomats and merchants. Yet, the Yangzhou tombstone directs attention to the overlooked presence of non-elite Christian women in the cosmopolitan port cities of southeast China well before the era of modern global maritime exchange. While previous scholars traced the tombstone to Buddhist and Christian art, I argue that the visual language intentionally projected cultural ambiguity. By comparing it to the Mongol paiza (safe conduct pass), this article proposes that Caterina's burial marker functioned as an 'otherworldly passport', which invoked spiritual protection and facilitated the passage between two realms.
2022 Sebillaud et al. Catholic-Confucian Mortuary Practices in a Rural Manchurian Cemetery
Historical Archaeology, 2022
Catholic missionaries were active among rural populations in Manchuria, in northeast China, around the turn of the 20th century. Their presence influenced everything from the role of women in religious and family life, to the adoption of new material culture, to local burial customs. This investigation of the Pianliancheng cemetery in Jilin Province, in use from the 1890s to the 1930s, reveals the material and embodied traces of this history. Archaeological, bioarchaeological, and historical evidence for cultural hybridization and transnational connections are presented. Specific findings include the history of individual Catholic priests in the mission, the hybridization of Catholic and Confucian burial practices by the Chinese converts, material connections to Chinese immigrant communities abroad, the labor burden and nutritional status of various members of the community, the continuation of foot binding in rural Manchuria, and the influence of conversion on gender roles and family life.
2020
The historiographical record of the Liao dynasty (907-1125) is limited due to the contingencies of manuscript survival, and so excavated epitaphs have come to be a vital primary source for study of Liao history. This thesis analyses the epitaphs of the Liao as a whole and considers the contingent social factors behind their production. This is done over four thematic chapters that roughly map onto four periods in the Liao where the themes are most apparent: geography, culture and the tenth century; territorial reforms, the expansion of the imperial examinations and the early-to-mid eleventh century; genealogy, the Kitan aristocracy and the mid-to-late eleventh century; and court politics, historiography and the late Liao (1085-1125). Taken together these themes explain the increased production of epitaphs over the course of the dynasty and in different regions of the empire. I argue that epitaphs were not a cultural signifier of ethnic categories but a medium through which people not only commemorated the dead, but also signalled their status to others. It is this function of epitaphs as texts that could influence others perceptions that explains the growing demand for them against the backdrop of the changing social structures.
Entangled Religions
This paper discusses the complexity of the religious traditions in Quanzhou (Fujian, China), the largest international trade port under Mongol rule. The contribution of presumed Persian Muslim Pu Shougeng 蒲壽庚to the reconstruction of a Taoist-Buddhist shrine was taken as the case study. The external conditions surrounding his composite religious act (beyond private beliefs) were also observed in terms of individual goals, backgrounds, and social networks. For this purpose, the author presents the Chinese stone inscription from Quanzhou (in Fujian, China) titled “Zhong jian Qingyuan Chunyang dong ji 重建清源純陽洞記 (Record of Reconstruction of the Chunyang Cave in Qingyuan Mountain),” dated to the fourth year of Hou-Zhiyuan 後至元 (1338) during the Yuan period.
Christian Funerals and Graves in Southern Fujian
2012
Proceedings associated with the death of Chinese Christians are ripe for analyzing the dividing lines between the faith of these converts and the prevailing practices of the local culture. Funerals, impregnated with religious symbolism and local folk beliefs and practice, were potentially contentious affairs in which decisions about honoring the dead and their living relatives were quite consequential. This paper analyzes how Christians in Southern Fujian performed rituals associated with death and funerals. Such funerals were not planned or performed in a vacuum and such events were clearly a production of the Chinese culture of Southern Fujian. Thus, largely relying on mission reports and personal stories of Chinese Christian funerals, we will look at both the "Christian" and "Chinese" characteristics of Christian funerary rites, including funeral sounds (songs and wails), clothing, and processions. This paper argues that through the rituals associated with funerals, the Christian communities in Minnan were forming and projecting a distinct Christian identity. Funerals were a chance for public demonstrations of the faith of the deceased or their families and afforded opportunity to gather and celebrate in a public fashion while simultaneously promoting their faith. In addition, the end of this paper looks at the graves of Chinese Christians, specifically those found in the "Christian" graveyards on the island of Gulangyu. The preservation of these cemeteries provides valuable historical sources as well as a window into the present commemoration of a Christian heritage in Southern Fujian.