Metrophanes Chang and the Chinese Martyrs
The Holy Hieromartyr Metrophanes Chang, first priest of the Chinese, and the Two Hundred and Twenty-two Holy Martyrs of the Peking Mission
New Martyr · Hieromartyr · Priest · Martyr · d. June 1900, at Peking (church date 06-11)
Commemorated 11 June — The martyrdom of the Peking Mission in the Boxer Rising
In June 1900, during the Boxer Rising, the Orthodox community of Peking — a small Chinese church two centuries old, descended from the Russian mission established in the city in 1685 — was destroyed. Two hundred and twenty-two of its members, led by their priest Father Metrophanes Chang (Chang Tzi-tzung), the first Chinese Orthodox priest, were offered the choice of renouncing Christ or being tortured and killed, and chose the second. Among the named are the priest's wife Tatiana and his sons John and Isaiah, Isaiah's betrothed Maria, and the church schoolteachers Paul Wang and Ia Wen. The mission compound was burned and its people killed in and about it. They are commemorated on June 11, and they are the protomartyrs of Orthodoxy in China.
The Orthodox mission in Peking
The Orthodox presence in Peking was not a nineteenth-century foreign enterprise but the by-product of a seventeenth-century frontier war. In 1685 a company of Russian Cossacks taken at the fortress of Albazin on the Amur was resettled in Peking with their priest, and the Chinese authorities gave them a temple site in the north-east of the city; from that settlement — the Albazinians — grew the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission, formally constituted in the following decades, which for two centuries served both as a church and as Russia's diplomatic and scholarly presence in China. Its members intermarried with Chinese families, and over the generations the community became Chinese: by the end of the nineteenth century the mission's flock was a Chinese Orthodox congregation with its own schools, its own catechists, and — from the 1880s — its own priest.
Father Metrophanes Chang
Metrophanes Chang Tzi-tzung was the first Chinese to be ordained to the Orthodox priesthood. He served the Peking mission, taught in its school, and was the pastor of the community that died with him. The accounts of the martyrdom report that he had been ordained in the 1880s and that he received the priesthood at the hands of the great missionary bishop Nicholas (Kasatkin) of Japan, who ordained several of the first native clergy of the East; those particulars rest on the mission's own later narratives and are recorded here as such (see Sources). What is not in doubt, and is what the calendars keep, is that a Chinese priest stood at the head of a Chinese congregation and did not leave it.
His household is named with him in the commemoration: his wife Tatiana; his sons John and Isaiah; and Maria, betrothed to Isaiah, who by the accounts defended the mission against those who came for it. With them are named Paul Wang and Ia Wen, teachers of the church school.
The Boxer Rising and the martyrdom
The Yihetuan movement — the "Boxers" — rose in northern China in 1899 and 1900 against the foreign powers, against the foreign missions, and above all against Chinese Christians, who were held to have betrayed their own. In the summer of 1900 the rising reached Peking. The Christians of the city, Orthodox and others alike, were hunted through the streets and in their homes, and were offered a simple choice: to renounce Christianity, or to be tortured and killed. The Orthodox mission compound in the north-east of the city was attacked and burned.
The Orthodox record numbers 222 members of the Peking Mission, "led by their priest, Father Metrophanes Chang," who refused to deny Christ and were killed. The commemoration is fixed on June 11 — that is, in the Russian reckoning, the Julian June 11, the civil June 24 — the date on which the destruction of the mission fell.
The particulars of individual deaths are transmitted in the mission's own accounts, gathered soon afterwards from survivors; they are graphic, and they are also the least well-attested part of the record, so this entry names the martyrs the calendar names and does not reconstruct their sufferings one by one. The character of the persecution is not in question: it was a demand for apostasy, made to a whole congregation, and refused.
Veneration
The commemoration was established in the Russian Church within a very few years of the events, at the petition of the mission itself, and a church in honour of the Holy Martyrs was built on the mission ground at Peking where they had died; their remains were gathered there. The veneration was carried on by the Russian Church Abroad through the twentieth century when the Chinese mission itself had ceased to function, and the martyrs are now kept by the Moscow Patriarchate, by the Russian Church Abroad, and by the Orthodox Church in America, whose calendar lists them on this day. They stand at the head of the Chinese Orthodox calendar as its protomartyrs, and as one of the earliest of the twentieth century's very large company of martyrs of the Orthodox East.
Feast and commemoration
June 11 (church date; New Calendar civil June 11, Old Calendar civil June 24). The day is principally the feast of the apostles Bartholomew and Barnabas, and the Chinese Martyrs are a modern addition to it, kept by the Russian Church, the Russian Church Abroad, the autonomous Chinese Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church in America. They are also commemorated collectively with the New Martyrs and Confessors of the twentieth century in the jurisdictions that keep such a synaxis. The service used is that of the martyrs, with proper texts composed in Russian and in Chinese in the twentieth century.
Hymns
Troparion — Tone 4
O holy martyrs of China, who in a strange land bore witness to Christ, and in your own land laid down your lives for Him: with your priest Metrophanes at your head, you would not deny the Name in which you were baptised. Entreat our merciful God to grant our souls forgiveness of offences.
Original translation from the Slavonic
Iconography
The martyrs are painted in the manner developed in the twentieth century for the great companies of new martyrs: Father Metrophanes at the centre in phelonion and stole, holding a cross, and about and behind him the ranks of his people — men, women and children in Chinese dress, each with a martyr's cross in the hand, the men in the long gown and the women with the hair dressed in the fashion of the late Qing; the burning mission compound is often shown behind them, and the inscriptions are given in Chinese characters as well as in Slavonic. Where a single figure is wanted, Metrophanes appears alone as a priest-martyr with the cross. The type is entirely modern, as it must be — the martyrdom is of 1900 — and it belongs to the same iconographic family as the great icons of the Russian New Martyrs.
No pre-1900 icon of these martyrs can exist, since they died in 1900, and every image of them is the copyrighted work of a living or recently living iconographer. None is stored, and none can be under the repository's icon policy unless an iconographer's own free licence is found; they are entered in the list of icons still being sought with that reason.
Disputed questions
- The numbers. 222 is the figure of the Orthodox record and of the calendars. Other contemporary counts of Chinese Christian dead in the rising run into the tens of thousands across all confessions; the 222 are specifically the Orthodox of the Peking mission.
- The date. The commemoration is June 11 in the church reckoning. Because the Julian June 11 of 1900 corresponds to the civil June 24, and because the killings at Peking extended over more than one day, some accounts date the martyrdom to June 10 and some to the days following; the calendars keep one day for all of them. Note that this day's other Russian commemoration of a twentieth-century saint — Luke of Simferopol, whose civil date of repose was 11 June 1961 — is a different case entirely, and the two must not be confused: Luke's church date is May 29, and his entry is filed there.
- The details of the individual passions. These come from mission narratives compiled after the event and repeated with variation; the ages and manner of death of the priest's sons in particular differ between accounts. This entry deliberately withholds them pending verification against the Russian mission archives.