Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/428

416 416 CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA, ETC. laged and burnt it. The other Christians, as they did not take flight, were thrown into prison, loaded with chains, and cruelly treated, and the persecution did not cease till the tyrant was put to death by a Tartar chief; when the storm abated, and the few Christian believers who were left were suffered to remain unmolested. The time was approaching, however, when Chris- tianity in High Asia, after having shone, more or less brightly, in the seventh, twelfth, and thirteenth cen- turies, was about to become entirely extinct. The vast countries overrun by the Tartars, were resounding with the tumult of war, and involved in a frightful confusion, in which the voices of those who preached the good tidings could no longer be heard. Catholicism, which had in some measure entered China with the Mongols, and made so much progress there in the reign of Kublai Khan and his successors, was about to disappear with the Mongol dynasty of Yuen, The son of a common labourer, who had become a Bonze in the Buddhist convent of Sou-Tcheou, had thrown away his monkish robe, and, assuming the uniform of a soldier, put himself at the head of the Chinese insurgents, who had revolted against the Tartar government, and after gaining nu- merous victories over them, drove the foreigners from the empire, founded (in 1369) the dynasty of Ming, and gave to the year of his reign the name of Houng* Wou, that is to say, "Fortunate War," — or, more lite- rally, " Immense Fortune produced by War." The Christians shared in this revolution the fate of their protectors. As the new Chinese dynasty was endeavouring to put a stop to all communication with foreign countries, new missionaries could no longer get to Pekin, and the mission consequently began to Ian-