1900 - Catholic Martyrs in Heilongjiang

July 1900

Heilongjiang, Northeast China

In the three Northeast China provinces then known as Manchuria came more grim reports. In the first week of July several hundred Catholics in Shenyang were slaughtered. The Boxers then set their sights on the town and villages in the countryside. One report lamented, “One after another every church, hospital, school, and foreign house was burned, and many Christians were killed.”[1]

The Boxer violence reached all the way to China’s most northerly and coldest province, Heilongjiang. Louis Leray, from the French town of Ligné, was sent to northeast China after he graduated from the seminary of the Missions Etrangères de Paris in 1898. Soon after his arrival he was given charge of a small mission at Wuqinggai, where he was shot dead by the Boxers on July 16, 1900. Leray was 27-years-old.

Jean François Georjon had been in China since 1892, serving at a small town in Heilongjiang Province. On July 20, 1900, Georjon “was attacked by the Boxers who massacred him with the refinements of cruelty. They began by cutting off his arms and ears, then folded back the skin of his face and finally sliced his head off.”[2] The Room of the Martyrs at the seminary of the Missions Etrangères de Paris contains the chain with which the torturers secured Georjon before his death.

The final missionary martyred in Manchuria by the Boxers was Jean François Souvignet. Souvignet was one of the more experienced Catholic missionaries in Manchuria, being 55-years-old and having served in China since 1882. After a short time at Yingkou in Liaoning Province, Souvignet made his way north across the frozen plains to the town of Jiamusi in Heilongjiang Province. He later worked at Hulan, just north of Harbin City. Even though no missionary had ever lived in Hulan before, Souvignet “built a church, opened schools, and recorded several hundred baptisms of adult believers.”[3] When the Boxer troubles broke out in July 1900, Souvignet was travelling in another part of the province. When he heard the news he immediately returned to Hulan so he could help the flock under his care. The Frenchman was slain on July 30th.

In all, 12 Catholic missionaries (ten men and two women) were martyred by the Boxers in Manchuria,[4] but the Chinese believers fared far worse. Latourette estimated that “fourteen or fifteen hundred Christians were massacred”[5] in Manchuria.

1. Christie, Thirty Years in Moukden, 143.
2. My translation of the Biographical Note of Jean François Georjon in the Archives des Missions Etrangères de Paris, China Biographies and Obituaries, 1800-1899.
3. Biographical Note of Jean François Souvignet in the Archives des Missions Etrangères de Paris.
4. Smith, China in Convulsion, Vol.2, 649.
5. Latourette, A History of Christian Missions in China, 511.