When China’s last empire, the Qing dynasty, ended in 1911, Christianity there entered what many scholars call the “Golden Age” of the missions. New Catholic churches, schools, orphanages and hospitals were emerging throughout the country, and parish photographs through the 1920s, 30s, and 40s reveal how intensely the Church had grown after the turbulence of the Boxer Uprising in 1900, when more than 30,000 Christians had been massacred.
One of the most important Catholic events during the Republican Era, which spanned the end of the Qing in 1911 to the beginning of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, was instigated by the French Lazarist Fr Frédéric-Vincent Lebbe, who formed a powerful movement to unfetter the Catholic community in China from foreign control. Lebbe himself became a Chinese citizen the better to advocate a more indigenous Catholic clergy and hierarchy.
