Tea at Trianon: Christianity in Ninth Century China

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, March 3, 2008

Christianity in Ninth Century China

Some interesting new research. (Via NOR) To quote:

A latest research on a tombstone dating back to ninth century has shed light on the probability of Christianity having been popular among the Chinese during the Tang Dynasty.

The incomplete damaged eight-surface tombstone with scriptures of the Jingjiao or Nestorian Church and pictures of crosses were unearthed in Luoyang City in central Henan province in 2006, Luo Zhao, a religious teacher from Chinese Academy of Social Sciences said.

"To be exact, the Christian text was a China-proper ontological thesis about the Christian theology written by a prelate who had been long living in China in the late eighth century," said Luo.

Tombstones with Buddhist texts were common in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) but it was for the first time that tombstones with Jingjiao scriptures were discovered, he said. Chinese archaeologists had unearthed the Jingjiao stone tablet in 1623 in the Tang capital Xian, which threw light for the first time on the spreading of the religion in half a century after it entered China.