800, refers to "Metropolitans of China, India, and Persia, of the Merozites of Siam, of the Raziches, of the Harinos, of Samarcand, which are distant and which by reason of the infested mountains and turbulent sea are prevented from attending the four yearly convocations with the catholicos, and who therefore are to send their reports every six years."
In the year 845 the Emperor Wu Tsung condemned 4,600 Buddhist monasteries to be destroyed, and at the same time ordered three hundred foreign priests "to return to the secular life, that the customs of the empire might he uniform."[1]
Further, two Arab travellers of the same century have left accounts of their discoveries of Christianity in China. One of them, Ebn Wahab, describes his conversation with the emperor about the contents of the Old and New Testament. Another indication of ancient Syrian Christianity in China is to be seen in the discovery in the year 1725 of a Syrian manuscript containing large portions of the Old Testament and a collection of hymns which was in the possession of a Chinaman.[2]
In the tenth century—so dark in Western Europe—the Nestorians introduced Christianity into Tartary proper. Three centuries later (a.d. 1274), Marco Polo says that he has seen two churches in the city of Cingianfu built by Nestorians. He states that "the Great Khan sent a baron of his whose name was Mar Sarghis [? Sergius], a Nestorian Christian, to be governor of this city for three years. The two churches were built during that time."[3] A little further on Marco Polo tells us of some people called Alans who were Christians, but who lost a city they had captured by their drunkenness.[4]
The legend of Prester John, so widespread and so long enduring in the East, wild and fantastic as it has become, is based on the idea of the conversion of a Mongol
