Martyrs of China

The Martyrs of China are the Orthodox believers killed in Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion in the summer of 1900. The Orthodox Church honours them as new martyrs, 222 identified people, and remembers them on 11 June.

The Russian Orthodox mission reached Beijing as early as the time of Peter the Great and cared for a small Orthodox community, mostly Chinese, in close relation with the Russian Church. At the start of the twentieth century there were several hundred believers. In the summer of 1900 the insurgents of the Boxer movement, who fought against foreign influence in the country, made war on the Church and on Chinese Christians one of their slogans. On the evening of 11 June leaflets were posted in the streets calling for the massacre of the Christians and threatening with death anyone who sheltered them.

Many Christians gathered, to escape danger, in the house of the priest Mitrophan Chi Sung, head of the Beijing mission. He drove no one away, not even those who had been his enemies before, but strengthened the faint-⁠hearted, saying that the time of trials had come. It is told that he went several times a day to look at the burned church. On the evening of 10 June soldiers and Boxers surrounded his dwelling. About seventy Christians were there; the strongest fled, while Mitrophan and many others, mostly women and children, stayed and were tortured. Mitrophan, sitting in the yard, was pierced in the chest by the Boxers and fell under a date tree. He was the first of the martyrs, killed together with his family. In the whole uprising some 30,000 Christians of various confessions are reckoned to have died; of the Orthodox, 222 people were identified and their relics gathered. Despite the torments, they did not renounce the faith. Among them were not only Russians but mostly Chinese.

On 11 October 1901 Archimandrite Innocent (Figurovsky), head of the eighteenth Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, presented the Holy Synod with the list by name of the 222 Chinese Orthodox and asked that a church be built, in place of the destroyed mission church, in honour of all the holy martyrs. By decree no. 2874 of 22 April 1902 the building at Beijing of a church “in honour of all the Holy Martyrs of the Orthodox Church” was permitted, with a crypt for the bones of those killed and an annual feast on 10 and 11 June, with a procession to the places where the Christians were killed. After it was built, the remains of the martyrs were laid in its crypt. Before 1917 a service and an icon were composed for them. During the Cultural Revolution the church was destroyed and the crypt flooded.

In 1997 the Russian Church Outside Russia spread their veneration throughout the Church, and by decision of the Council of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church of 3 February 2016 the church-⁠wide veneration of “the Hieromartyr Mitrophan the priest and the many martyrs who suffered with him, who received the crowns of martyrdom in 1900 in Beijing” was established. The Catholic Church honours separately one hundred and twenty martyrs of China, canonized in the year 2000.