Chinese Catholic altar boys prepare before a procession near Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province. A new website launched last week provides a historical account of Christianity in China. (Photo by Kevin Frayer /AFP)
The Online Chinese Christianity Collection has been launched by The Kingdom Business College based in Beijing, China and Globethics.net in Geneva, Switzerland.
This collection has more than 34,500 carefully selected full text documents on Chinese Christianity and culture and a detailed classification tree, Independent Catholic News reported.It is the fruit of the cooperation of many leading institutions on Chinese Christianity. Two thirds of the documents are in Chinese, the others in English, German, French and others.
Contributors include: China National Knowledge Infrastructure, Beijing; Institute of Sino-Christian Studies, Hong Kong; Chung Chi College at Chinese University of Hong Kong; Fujian Theological Seminary, Fuzhou; Hong Kong Baptist University; Nanjing Union Theological Seminary; Yale Divinity School at Yale University; China Information Desk, Hamburg, Germany; China-Zentrum St. Augustin, Germany; Sino-Western Studies, Finland; Foundation of Theological Education in South-East Asia and Open Access Repositories.The Nestorian sect, based in Persia, in the 7th century, first brought Christianity to China. They sent missionaries to Central Asia where the community thrived for several hundred years until it was virtually wiped out.
Roman Catholicism first came to China in 1294 with Franciscan missionaries led by St. John of Montecorvino. The first Protestant missionaries arrived in 1807.