Christianity and Islam

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

The two foreign religions that have a place in Chinese history is Islam and Christianity. Islam traveled to China in 652 A.D., soon after its foundation in the Middle East. Christianity did not arrive in China until the 17th century when Jesuit Catholic missionaries from Europe came to convert the Chinese. Protestant missionaries also came to China in the 19th century. These Western missionaries found it very difficult to convert the Chinese to Christianity since the religion was associated with Western imperialism that had brought war and defeat to the Chinese. Probably the most famous missionary to come to China was Sun Yat-sen, the founding father of Taiwan, in the beginning of the 20th century.
There is a Great Mosque, or Qing Zhen Si, located in Xian, China[Edit by="sshorter on Jan 12, 2:51:12 AM"][/Edit]

[Anonymous]

I visited the Great Mosque in Xian when I was in China in 1987. At the time Xian had only recently been opened to foreign visitors, primarily becuase of the taracata (sp?) warriors. The Great Mosque is located at what is supposed to have been the official end of the Silk Road, or so that's what they hold us. At the mosque they had large stone tablets with quotations from the Quaran. On the side facing Mecca the quotation was in Arabic and on the other side in Chinese. I'm not sure how the mosque survived the Cultural Revolution but its a good thing it did.

[Anonymous]

Oh, and by the way, don't forget that Budism is also a foreign religion imported from India. It can be hard to remember since Budism has not survived very well in India as it has in China and the rest of East Asia. And we might also think of Marxism as a more recent "religion" imported to China from the West.

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