I showed the photos to the priest, to Father Chen, who had moderately proficient English. My Mandarin was pretty basic and I knew no Mongolian at all. Father Chen looked at the photo of Great Uncle Martinus and he looked at me, at the photo again, with a near sighted scrutiny and at me again, with a look of profound consternation. Everyone who had seen the photo, especially the Chinese, said that I looked so much like him. Europeans tend to look alike to the Chinese anyway but the family resemblance made us virtually identical.
“No, not me, Father Chen”, I said. “Shūshu. Uncle.” I didn’t know how to say great uncle so I said, “Grandfather’s Brother.”
“Come look here,” said Father Chen and I followed him down a corridor into a room with many photos on the walls and he pointed to a photo of a youngish, bearded priest and said, “Same same.”
Indeed, it was undoubtedly the same. It was Great Uncle Martinus, in a long white cassock, standing outside the church, there among the patriarchs and martyrs of the church.
“His Chinese name was Mei Anyuan,” said Father Chen.
“What about this?” I said, and showed him the other photo again, Uncle Martinus’ headstone. No one in the family had seen Martinus since he left the Netherlands and went to China as a Catholic missionary. I was living in China and it was a sort of pilgrimage for me to see where Martinus had lived and died. I knew he had died in 1929. The date was on the headstone and I knew he had died of typhus, as had so many in China at that time.
Father Chen took off his glasses and peered into the photo to read the inscription on the headstone. He held the photo so close to his face it was almost touching his nose. There was an inscription in Latin and the place name in Chinese script at the bottom.
“This is old Chinese,” he said. “How can you read this? How did you find this place? How did you find Ershisiqingdi?”
“It was difficult to find,” I said, “and it’s a long story. I contacted the missionary society in Belgium to find out where they sent Martinus.”
And indeed it was a long story and too complicated to convey unabridged across the language barrier. Like Father Chen, none of my Chinese friends could read the old script. But there was an approximation of the place name in Romanji, Chinese rendered into English script as Erhshihszekingti. Google had never heard of it but I searched Chinese Google maps for a place name that resembled the old Chinese script. To get a clue for the location I contacted the CICM, Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Mission Society of Scheut in Belgium and from there I contacted the CICM archivist, Werner Laplante, in Rome. He had files on Martinus’ movements in China, beginning in November, 1924, with his arrival in Tianjin. He was an assistant priest for a time in Hejiao, Inner Mongolia, and then went to Ershisiqingdexiang (another variant of the place name) in 1928, where he died of typhoid fever on 6 March, 1929. M. Laplante said he could not give an exact location for Ershisiqingdexiang but it was in Inner Mongolia, south of the Great Wall and somewhere near the Yellow River. And he added that because so many young confreres had died of typhoid, CICM sent a Polish doctor to China to find a cure for the typus plague, which he succeeded in doing in 1935.
I searched Inner Mongolia in the vicinity of the Yellow River on Chinese Google maps painstakingly for a great many hours. I was looking for a small village in a vast area. Eventually I found Ershisiqingdi at the apex of an inverted triangle between Hohhot and Baotou, north-west of the Yellow River, and realised that this strangely exotic sounding name translated quite prosaically as District Twenty-four.
I followed Father Chen again, out of the church, out through the wrought iron gates. My driver was there leaning against his car, talking on his cell phone. He looked up and waved a greeting with his free hand and continued his phone conversation. I was going to introduce him but it could wait. I had no driver’s licence and Ershisiqingdi was so remote that there was no public transport so I had hired a driver in Baotou who knew the area.
We walked past a copse of willow trees and through a field of corn to the cemetery. A fresh breeze stirred the weeping willows and sent a shiver through the stalks of corn. Father Chen stopped and pointed ahead. “There,” he said.
Where? There was no sign of a cemetery, just a barren field of weeds, with an eroded clay brick wall and scattered rubble.
Father Chen walked to one of a row of low, cleared mounds and said, “Here.”
I looked around and at the mound. “What? This? Is this a grave? Where is the headstone?” I said, holding up the photo.
“The Red Guards came here in 1968”, said the old priest gravely.” They broke everything, all the headstones and everything in the church. And they broke the priest.”
Nineteen sixty-eight. The Cultural Revolution. History suddenly, horribly, personally real. The cemetery desecrated, headstones kicked over and smashed. Why did they call it the Cultural Revolution? Red Guards rampaging, destroying icons of culture, whether Chinese or foreign, destroying tradition, art, beauty, spirituality. This plot of ground left uncultivated was a memorial to the Cultural Revolution, a barren wasteland with the bones of the dead beneath.
We stood in silence, Father Chen allowing me to pay my respects to my ancestor. At least he knew where Uncle Martinus was buried. He’d gone straight to the spot without hesitation. Typhoid was an unpleasant death but at least Martinus was spared the terror of the persecution. I’d heard how Chinese Christians and any foreign missionaries who had not fled were arrested, humiliated, tortured and slaughtered during the Cultural Revolution. Christians were persecuted even out in this remote area. And yet the church survived, still survives. A thousand parishioners from surrounding villages attended Mass every Sunday at the Ershisiqingdi Catholic Parish Church, a statistic that didn’t seem to fit with the landscape, but the countryside in China is not so sparsely populated as in most other parts of the world. Nor did the church building seem to fit the landscape. It was, in fact, a cathedral, a grand, grey brick mother church that rose imposingly above the low, concrete and wooden buildings of the village. And rising from its pitched roof was a steeple with a bell tower and a massive cross.
*
I had inherited my great uncle’s clerical legacy, or at least carried on the family tradition of Christian ministry, not as a Catholic priest like Uncle Martinus but I was the pastor of an international evangelical fellowship in Zhengzhou. Not that I could do much evangelising, as in converting Chinese people to Christianity. I would have liked to be more involved in missions work, spreading the Gospel to unreached Chinese, but strict government controls on religion meant that only foreigners could attend our church – expats only. The police came occasionally to our services and called out any Chinese in the congregation. They took my friend, Hao Wei out one Sunday but he was allowed to stay because he had a Canadian passport. Some Chinese nationals who could not produce a foreign passport were arrested and I never saw them again.
We shared the church building with a government registered Chinese church in one of the older precincts of the city, though we held our services at different times, of course. We also had our own annex of a Bible bookshop. Chinese nationals were allowed to attend registered churches, the so called Three Self Patriotic Churches: self-governance, self-support, self-propagation. No foreign interference, in other words. However, many Chinese nationals attended unregistered, underground churches. I attended one of these house churches myself for a time with some Chinese friends but I stopped going for fear of leading the authorities to them. Underground Christians attending unregistered churches in Henan province had been arrested and the church buildings bulldozed. Three Self churches were tolerated but strictly controlled. Religion censors deleted whole books of the Bible, prophetic books like Revelation and Daniel. There was no teaching of ‘the Gospel’, no messianic teaching about Jesus and no eschatology. And the first of the Ten Commandments had been deleted, the one where God says “You shall have no other gods before me.” The proscription had been taken further in Henan, where the Ten Commandments had been taken down, by decree, in every state registered church and replaced with quotes by Xi Jinping, and where pictures of Jesus had adorned the walls, there were now only photos of Xi or Mao.
*
As Father Chen and I walked back to the church I noticed the car was gone. I looked around but there was no sign of car or driver. I immediately regretted not getting my driver’s cell phone number and not getting my bag with my phone and Bible out of the car. He might return; if not, Father Chen could call someone else for me.
“Not to worry,” said Father Chen. “Let’s go have lunch.”
In the white tiled, concrete kitchen/dining room, an elderly diminutive woman with a round, burnished ochre face and rosy cheeks was busily preparing food. Father Chen introduced her as Miss Cai, his housekeeper of many years. Miss Cai was cooking in a vat set in the concrete counter with a fire underneath like the laundry coppers in the wash houses I’d seen in older houses back home in New Zealand. Father Chen and I sat at a round, wood grain Formica table and Miss Cai served up wild rice, bitter greens and donkey dumplings.
“This is exactly the sort of meal Father Martinus would have eaten here,” said Father Chen.
“The dumplings are very tasty,” I said. “Donkey meat is quite similar to beef.”
Father Chen was curious to know more about Father Martinus, more than just the brief mention in the annals of the church missionaries.
“Well, I had never actually met him, of course,” I said. “He died before I was born. But I know the family are very proud of him, of his missionary work in China. And I know Martinus loved China. My grandparents have many photos of him in China. I remember seeing a photo of him wearing a Mongolian sheepskin coat and hat by the Great Wall.”
“How did he learn the language?” Father Chen asked.
“When he arrived in Tianjin in 1924, he spent his first year there studying Chinese.”
While we were eating and chatting, a car drove up along the gravel drive to the church. My driver returning, I thought. But no, it was a police car, followed by an old army truck with a crane.
“The police!” Father Chen exclaimed. “You must hide. Go with Miss Cai. Take your bowl and cup.”
“But why?”
“Foreign pastors can be arrested here. People are paid to inform the police. I don’t think your driver will return.”
“But I don’t want to put you in danger,” I protested.
“Not to worry,” said Father Chen. “Go quickly. I will tell them you went in another car.”
Miss Cai led me down a narrow corridor and down some worn steps, all of the same grey bricks, to a heavy wooden door and gestured for me to go on. More steps led into an underground cellar with a low vaulted ceiling of brick arches. It was very like the food storage cellars of older Dutch houses, built before the advent of refrigeration. The cellar was dank and bare but for a stack of empty sacks in one corner and a mound of ash on the floor. Miss Cai shut the door and left. The cellar went dark but it was, thankfully, not a complete blackout. There was a small vent at the top of one wall that admitted a little light. I set my bowl and cup on the floor and arranged the old sacks into a sort of nest. I could cover myself with the sacks if I had to hide in my cell. Sackcloth and ashes. I began to wonder if I had been brought here to repent of my sins. I had to confess I had a few. Things I should have done and things I shouldn’t have done came readily to mind in solitude.
I sat and waited. So there was a bounty now on foreign pastors. What was the worst that could happen? I would be sent home. The consequences could be worse for Father Chen. I should have just gone with the police. But there I was sitting in the dark, waiting, listening. I knew what the crane was for. The police had already removed the cross from our church in Zhengzhou. They were tearing down the crosses from every church in the country.
Maybe the police wouldn’t arrest me and deport me. Maybe they had just come for the cross. But why did my driver flee? Anyway, I was just a visitor here. I had not committed any crime. I had a proper visa and I was working legally as the pastor of an international church. It would be better to front up out in the open than to be found hiding if they decided to search. That would be very incriminating. I could still go out, but Father Chen had probably told the police by now that I had left.
So I sat and waited in my sack nest of musty, slow time. Actually, on reflection I had broken Chinese laws. I had been a guest preacher at an underground church and I had gone to Tibet with one of their pastors, Wangpo. I went to Tibet on a tourist visa but it was a missions trip, meeting with Christians in underground churches. They were all underground in Tibet. Not churches in the Western sense but fellowships of believers meeting in private homes, like the first century churches. We were on a church planting mission and Beijing definitely frowned on such evangelical activities. Maybe the police had found out about what I was up to in Tibet. I fretted about the loss of my phone. My driver would be rewarded for handing it in and I feared the authorities would trace some of my contacts.
The Chinese government was becoming more repressive on religion again in its territories. Wangpo was very wary of the Chinese authorities but he didn’t seem to bear them any malice. And it was not just a matter of Christian forbearance. “The Chinese were brutal in taking over Tibet,” he said, “but at least now most Tibetans are better off, materially. They now have good roads and railway from China and good food, even in winter. Tibet now has communism. Before they had theocracy and feudalism. The Buddhist monks were well off. The vast majority of the people were very poor and life was harsh. Now the monks have lost their power and status.”
I asked Wangpo about his family and he said. “My father was a peasant. My grandfather was a peasant. I’m a university professor. That would not have been possible without a Chinese education. And now my son is in the final year of his Engineering degree.”
I went back to my unfinished lunch and while I was eating this time I heard footsteps, echoing in the passage, approaching. I stopped eating and started grabbing sacks to cover myself. The door creaked open and Miss Cai came down the steps and set a bucket on the floor.
“Are the police still there?” I asked her.
She made no reply and left. Well, she had no English. Of course the police were still there or she wouldn’t be leaving me in the cellar. In the bucket was a blanket, a flashlight, a bottle of water and a Bible. I was obviously expected to stay for a while yet and I could pass the time reading the Bible. It was a bilingual Bible: one page English, one page Chinese – modern, simplified Mandarin script. So, I could also work on improving my Chinese. I was glad of the bucket as I was dying to relieve myself and had been thinking of sneaking out of the cellar to find a toilet. I appreciated the blanket too, as it was getting late in the day and getting quite cold. Surely the police were not staying the night in the church. I was beginning to feel like a prisoner. I studied the Bible for some time and fell asleep. I was reading the book of Philippians and consoled myself that at least I wasn’t beaten and in chains, as Paul had been. And yet Paul rejoiced in the Lord. Now there was a challenge: rejoice in all circumstances. I could at least take Paul’s advice and pray. I slept fitfully and Miss Cai came in the morning with breakfast: congee and tea. I said “Zăoshang hăo” and she said “Good morning.” She was Mongolian and her repertoire of English and Mandarin was limited to simple greetings.
I had lunch again in my cell and later in the day Father Chen came and said the police had gone. He apologised for inconveniencing me and explained the situation. There were two police officers. One had driven back to Baotou and the other stayed with the truck driver but the truck had broken down and was getting fixed in the village. The driver stayed overnight in the village but the police officer was well known in the village and was not welcome there because of some past incident. So Father Chen obliged him with a bed for the night. It was the charitable thing to do and might otherwise have aroused suspicion.
Father Chen also said not to worry about travel and returning to Zhengzhou. “I have to go to Hohhot in a couple of days,” he said. “I will take you to the airport. It will be safer than going back to Baotou. You can relax and enjoy your time here.”
And so he resumed his kind hospitality, beginning with a tour of the church. The interior was illuminated by coloured lancet windows. In the nave and the aisles were the usual Catholic icons of the Madonna and Christ child, the Crucifixion, the Stations of the Cross, and one I had not seen before: a tapestry of a lamb with blood gushing from a wound in its side into a chalice. The same image was depicted in the plasterwork on the exterior of the church. There were a few people sitting in the pews and more kneeling in prayer, even though no Mass was being conducted at the time. “There is always someone in the church”, said Father Chen.
In the rectory he took me again to the photo gallery. “This is the founder of the church,” he said, pointing to a faded sepia photo of a European priest. “The first CICM missionary who came here from Belgium. He was killed in the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. Most of the Europeans fled but he stayed.”
Then pointing to a photo of a Chinese priest, he said, “This is Father Zhang. He was here when the Red Guards came. The European missionaries fled when the Cultural Revolution started but Father Zhang stayed. He hid in the cellar but the Red Guards found him. They tortured him for days until he lost his mind.”
“I guess I got off lightly,” I said.
Father Chen showed me more of the icons of the history of the church. “And this,” he said, “this was Father Martinus’ bed.” It was a large wooden couch, ornately carved, with tattered woven rattan upstands on three sides. “The police officer slept here last night. You can sleep here tonight.”
And there I slept on a thin mattress. I had got used to Chinese beds, which were quite hard compared to Western beds, and I slept soundly, though with disturbing dreams. My day was leisurely and peaceful but my night was fraught with dreams of violence and hiding underground from Red Guards, transforming into red demons.
Much of the next day I spent in the company of Father Chen but I was free to wander the grounds or sit in the church with the parishioners who came and went. I regarded it as a spiritual retreat, a time of Bible study, meditation and prayer. Outside the church I overheard Father Chen in conversation with some local people. I couldn’t understand much of what was said but the tone became decidedly heated and adversarial. I wondered if there was a dispute concerning my presence, but Father Chen assured me it had nothing to do with me. “It was just some disagreement about doctrine and teaching,” he said.
The cathedral was not the only church in the district, I discovered. There was an unregistered, underground church. Doctrinal disputes even here. I should not have been surprised. It was the history of the Church from the beginning. It was the nature of man to be divisive. I would have liked to have spent some time with these underground Christians, but there was the problem of the language barrier and anyway my time there was coming to an end.
Father Chen dropped me off at the Hohhot airport and I caught a flight to Zhengzhou. I was relieved to arrive home safely but dismayed to find our Bible bookshop and my office had been ransacked. All the Bibles and Christian literature had been removed. Fortunately, Father Chen had gifted me the bilingual Bible. It was a great consolation for me.
*
The police had also raided Wangpo’s church and arrested another pastor there on a charge of ‘incitement to subvert state power’, and Wangpo was a fugitive on the run. He’d be easy to spot out in public, as he stood head and shoulders above most Chinese. I had only ever seen Wangpo with a calm demeanour but when he came to see me at home he was furtive and obviously deeply troubled, not so much for himself, but for the pastor arrested and the rest of their fellowship. Also for his son, James. James’ professor had confiscated his cell phone and found messages on it that confirmed his suspicion that he was a Christian. Now the university demanded that James recant his Christian faith or he would not be allowed to graduate. James said he would not deny Christ and so he would not receive his degree. I told Wangpo, ruefully, about how I had lost my phone.
“Xi Jinping is cracking down on religion,” said Wangpo, “searching out underground churches and arresting Christians. Not just Christians”, he added. “Buddhists in Tibet. Moslems in Xinjiang. There’s mass detentions of Uighurs in ‘re-education camps’ in Xinjiang. Xi is trying to eliminate religion from China, just like Mao tried to do. But they can never do it. No matter how much persecution, the spirit of man seeks the spirit of God.” Wangpo sighed, “I am living like Daniel in Babylon.”
I knew immediately what he meant: the exiled prophet Daniel, who refused to bow down and worship an emperor in place of God and was cast into the lions’ den. Wangpo and his son went back to Tibet and I doubt if I’ll ever see them again. He was right, of course. Xi Jinping was conducting a purge on religion, pursuing the Communist vision of a China with no religion. Xi was going after Christians in Henan, starting with the underground churches and Protestant churches, which were ‘a threat to national security’.
*
I wonder how much longer I can remain in China. Xi Jinping won’t be going away anytime soon. He’s done what dictators do: he’s changed the constitution to give himself a lifetime job as the President of the People’s Republic of China. In the meantime, I’ll continue preaching the Gospel for as long as I can. I’m studying my precious bilingual Bible and my Chinese is getting better every day. And right now I’m reflecting on my time in Ershisiqingdi as an underground Christian.