YANZHOU A visit to the first mission of the Marianists in China (1903-09) By Fr. Dave Fleming In his history of the Society of Mary, vol. II, pp. 1038-1053 in the Spanish original, Fr. Antonio Gascón treats the first foundation in China of the Society of Mary by three (later four) Alsatian Marianists. This foundation took place in the town then spelled in French documents as Yen-tcheou-fou. Today its Chinese name is Yanzhou. This town was then the headquarters of the mission of the German St. Vincent DePaul fathers in the southern part of the Province of Shandong. Missionary work in China at the beginning of the 20th century was particularly challenging because of the circumstances of the Boxer Rebellion. The SVD Founders and leaders of this challenging mission have now been beatified. These outstanding missionaries arranged for and guided the first Marianist brothers in China.
During visitations to Korean Marianists studying in China shortly after the year 2000, I was able to visit, together with Bro. José María Alvira (then General Assistant for Education) the sites of the later Marianist works founded by American Marianists in China between the two World Wars: Hangkow (now Wuhan) and Jinan (capital of Shandong Province). I was also able at that time to visit Qingdao, where one or the other Marianist brother assisted the SVD missionaries in the school attached to their cathedral during some months in 1908-09 immediately before their withdrawal from China. Yanzhou was the only site of a Marianist work the very first one that I had not visited. During a six-week course I taught for the University of Dayton China Center at Suzhou in 2017, I was able to visit the site of this remaining (and first) community, that of Yanzhou. In 1903, this community was described as remote, three days journey from the nearest train station on the then-new railroad built by Germans who sought to exert a strong influence on the province of Shandong; today it can be reached by a three-hour bullet-train journey from the UD Center at Suzhou. My visit to Qufu-Yanzhou took place on Nov. 10-11, 2017.
Qufu, the nearest bullet-train stop, is a place of great historic interest as the home-city of the sixth-century B.C. philosopher and spiritual leader Confucius, the place of a key temple dedicated to him, of his tomb and of the home from which his descendants have exerted great influence for nearly 80 generations. As we will see below, many Chinese people feel that other religions should not establish centers in Qufu; perhaps it was partly in reaction that that the SVD founders established their center in the town of Yanzhou, some 20-30 kilometers distant. On Nov. 10, 2017, I visited the fascinating center of Confucian tradition at Qufu. Then on the morning of Nov. 11, a Chinese-speaking friend drove with me to Yanzhou, a fairly small city with many smallish buildings that contrast to the modern high-rises that now dominate larger Chinese cities. Yanzhou seems like a pleasant and bustling place, with many buildings more than 50 years old. As we entered the city, we were routed past an extensive and imposing Buddhist sanctuary, museum and tourist-center, which has been built by the government since 2008 in a place where ancient Buddhist documents were unearthed. We drove on through narrower streets and older buildings to the place of the Catholic mission, which is still housed in the derelict German buildings of the beginning of the 20 th century. (The year 1901 is engraved on the façade.) I will attempt to attach some photos of this mission site. We learned that the resident priest (who did not know of our coming) was away on a visit to a rural mission, but we were able to gather a bit of information through a couple of Chinese-speaking elderly Catholic gentlemen and through a choir of children which was rehearsing for a Sunday Mass. Today the mission consists of some ramshackle buildings in the style of 1900-German construction. There are ruins and photos of an impressive medieval-germanic-style cathedral on the spot, which (we were told) was destroyed by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. (Incidentally, the Red Guards also tried to destroy any traces of Confucius at Xufu.) We were told that money was now raised and plans almost complete (50 years after the Cultural Revolution) to rebuild the Church and erect a modern school on the site.
At present there was a substantial but ill-repaired building which has served since the beginning as a residence for the clergy, and where apparently the Marianist brothers were housed and took their meals. Possibly some of their classrooms were attached to this building. Behind this building were remains of what might have been schools, where the Brothers taught secondary classes to the boys and some Sisters ran a school for girls. There seems to have been a school for catechists on the same premises. At the far end of the property there is another poorly maintained building which was said to be a convent for Sisters, who still seem to run a day-care center. We were not able to meet any of the Sisters. Plans for the imminent new construction on this site include a church (cathedral?), and a modern school. This was about all we could find out on the spot. This Yanzhou mission ran into difficulties by 1909, as the German government met with tensions in China and as funding for the schools dried up. Marianist superiors of the era mainly wanted a work that would please the German government and qualify us for reopening a formation house at Saint-Hippolyte in Alsace (then still part of predominantly-lutheran Germany). Once this was clearly not to happen and salaries in China dried up, Marianist withdrawal was probably inevitable. At any rate the German presence in Shandong Province was not very possible much longer. After World War I, it faded. (Still, the most famous beer in China is brewed even today at Qingdao, the port-city of Shandong.) It appears that the mission center at Yanzhou continued as a center of worship. We were told that the cathedral was used until its destruction at the hands of the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution of the 1960 s. Afterwards, somehow a Catholic community seems to have continued, centered in the large house that had served as the dwelling of the SVD Fathers and more briefly for the Marianists. Still later, even in the past few years, there has still been some resistance in the area to the building of any religious centers, out of the prominence given since the latter years of Mao-ze-Dong to a renewed interest in the teachings of Confucius. Protestants in the area have met with opposition in efforts to build their church, at least in the growing town of Qufu itself. But I believe that this opposition has become more quiet. Clearly Qufu and its whole region are primarily to be promoted in China as the center of the Confucian tradition.