1856 - Auguste Chapdelaine

February 29, 1856

Xlin, Guangxi

Auguste Chapdelaine.

Auguste Chapdelaine was born in La Rochelle-Normande, France, in 1814, the youngest of nine children. From an early age he felt the call to priesthood, but his parents opposed him, saying they needed him to work on the family farm instead. He obeyed his parent’s wishes until two of his brothers suddenly died. Their deaths forced Chapdelaine to urgently reconsider his life’s vocation, and his parents finally approved.

He joined the Catholic seminary at Mortain. For nine long years he studied, often alongside boys half his age. It led to him being nicknamed ‘Papa Chapdelaine’—a name that stayed with him for the rest of his life. Chapdelaine was finally ordained a priest in 1843. His first assignment was as an associate pastor at Bouncy, where he faithfully served for seven years. As he matured as a follower of Christ, a strong desire arose in his heart to serve God in China.

After a lengthy struggle Chapdelaine finally gained permission from his bishop to work overseas, and in 1852 he was sent out as a missionary with the Missions Etrangères de Paris to work in the southern Chinese province of Guangxi. This rugged mountainous province was to witness numerous martyrdoms. One missionary declared,

“Missionaries who entered Guangxi met with open hostility. They were threatened, stoned, attacked by mobs, and repeatedly had to make a hurried retreat in order to escape mob violence. During those early pioneer days, the martyr spirit was always in evidence, as grave men whose hearts burned with a passion to save the lost, repeatedly attempted to enter the province, heroically facing the hardships and dangers, counting their lives not dear that they might finish their course with joy.”[1]

Soon after arriving at Hong Kong in October 1853, Chapdelaine started out for Guangxi. Just three days into his journey pirates on the West River robbed him of all his belongings. He was forced to turn back, and started a second journey through the city of Guiyang in Guizhou Province, where a Chinese Catholic named Lin Zhao taught him Chinese for several months. The teacher also gave Chapdelaine a Chinese name, Ma Li. After Chapdelaine finally arrived in Guangxi he was appointed Missionary Apostolic for the province. His superior, Philippe Guillemin, later wrote,

“When Chapdelaine came in sight of his promised land, he threw himself on his knees to thank God for having brought him to the place of his inheritance, and offering himself to Him once more, he consecrated his whole power and life to labour in the glorious work which was entrusted to him. The fruits he produced soon corresponded to his zeal. After two years’ work he could reckon about two hundred converts.”[2]

In March of 1855 he baptized nine people including an elderly man who had converted from Buddhism. The following year the Frenchman found himself in Xilin, a small town in western Guangxi that was home to approximately 300 Christians, mostly members of the Miao ethnic minority group. They had already started to experience persecution because of French influence in the region.

A sketch showing Auguste Chapdelaine being bound to a stake and publicly flogged.

Two soldiers were ordered to arrest Chapdelaine on February 24, 1856. Afraid that the Christians would defend their leader, the soldiers gathered a mob of about 100 ruffians, “armed with long pikes and large knives, besides other weapons of offence”[3] to assist in the attack. The day before the arrest, according to eyewitnesses,

“There appeared in the air a cross of light, surrounded by a brilliant crown, which seemed to hang over the village…and was visible alike to pagan and Christian. The pagans considered it unfavourable…but the Christians, on the contrary…saw in it new evidence that the crown was only to be reached by means of the cross, and therefore with redoubled prayers prepared themselves for every trial to which it might please God to subject them.”[4]

Local believers heard the approaching soldiers and encouraged Chapdelaine to escape. He replied, “If I leave, you will suffer for it. To save you from greater harm, I must stay with you.” After much fervent insistence by the local Christians, Chapdelaine agreed to take refuge in the home of a respected citizen, Luo Gongye. Despite this man’s pleadings, Chapdelaine was arrested on February 26th, along with five other Chinese believers. Chapdelaine was accused of leading a rebellion against the government. There was a widespread Hui Muslim uprising taking place across many parts of China at the time, and part of the reason behind the missionary’s arrest was that the authorities could not tell the difference between Christians and Muslims.

When the magistrate ordered Chapdelaine to renounce his faith, he replied, “My religion is the true religion and I cannot betray it. I have done no evil, but only persuaded people to do good and win eternal life in heaven.”[5] The magistrate was unimpressed and locked Chapdelaine up in a cangue—a Chinese cage for prisoners in which their heads and hands are immobilized through holes in the top and sides, causing severe pain and discomfort. Before being secured inside the torture-device, Chapdelaine was ordered

“to receive a hundred blows on the cheeks with a cruel thong of leather. One stroke was enough to draw blood, so that a hundred, administered with all the force that fanaticism and revenge could inspire, must have entirely broken the jaws, knocked out the teeth of the glorious martyr. Being thus rendered incapable of speaking and answering, he received three hundred blows on the back with a cane.”[6]

Chapdelaine being tortured inside a cangue before crowds of people.

The faithful priest tried to imitate his Savior by enduring the punishment in silence. The torturer thought that Chapdelaine’s apparent lack of pain was due to magic and ordered a dog sacrificed and the blood poured over the captive, in an attempt to break whatever spell the missionary had conjured up in order to immunize himself from the pain. By the end of the torture Chapdelaine was almost dead, and was dragged back to the prison cell. An eyewitness said,

“It was impossible for him to walk a step. But by the merciful goodness of God, he was shortly afterwards able to rise and walk, as if he was in perfect health. The officers who witnessed this new miracle came up to enquire how it was that at one moment he was unable to stir and he was walking with ease the next. The father answered with a smile: ‘It is the good God who protects and blesses me.’”[7]

Attributing Chapdelaine’s miraculous recovery to magic powers, the magistrate secured the priest’s bloodied and torn body inside a cangue for further punishment. He died during the night of February 29, 1856.

The Chinese believed a man’s strength and character resided in his heart. They were so impressed by Chapdelaine’s courage that after his death a ghastly act was committed on the martyr’s body. Philippe Guillemin wrote,

“The mind recoils from believing it, the tongue refuses to tell it, the hand trembles to write it. It [Chapdelaine’s heart] was taken out of the body, and placed, still beating, on a dish, where it was examined with great curiosity by the bloodthirsty savages. It was then cut into pieces, put into a frying pan, and cooked with the fat of a pig, after which the cannibals devoured it with the voracity of wild beasts.”[8]

Even then the authorities were not finished. They decided to behead the Frenchman as a warning to the public not to follow Christ. The head was tied to a tree near the city. Even then the demonic insults did not cease, as “boys and passers-by knocked it down with stones, so [Chapdelaine’s head] was seen rolling about in the dust and mud, until it was devoured by the unclean animals, who fought for the fragments of it.”[9]

A shocked Europe was aghast at the news of Chapdelaine’s cruel murder. Various newspapers and magazines gave much column space to the details of his martyrdom, while his story was made more famous by the publication of two beautiful yet gruesome sketches by A. J. Woolmer, depicting the torture Chapdelaine had endured prior to his death. Harper’s Weekly had this to say about the ministry of the gentle French priest:

“The Reverend Father Chapdelaine had laboured for a number of years faithfully and quietly in various provinces of the Chinese empire. Genial, inoffensive, ingenious, and a man of letters even in the Chinese sense of that term, the good Father was more than usually successful in gaining the good-will of the people among whom he laboured.”[10]

Chapdelaine’s death was the pretext used by France to join Britain in a war against China.

A portrait of Auguste Chapdelaine painted not long before his death.]

Pope Leo XIII beatified Auguste Chapdelaine in 1900, and a century later (October 1, 2000) he was elevated to the position of saint by the Catholic Church when Pope John Paul II canonized him. After the Vatican announced the list of Chinese martyrs they intended to promote to sainthood in 2000, the Chinese government came out strongly, demonising the memories of many of the martyrs and distorting facts to try to make the martyrs as perverse as their own hearts.

Of Auguste Chapdelaine they said, “He collaborated with corrupt local officials, raped women and was notorious in those areas…. It was also known that he cohabited with an attractive widow by the name of Cao, and induced other pretty women to join the church so that he could fool around with them….”[11] Slanderous accusations of an even more vile nature are not worth repeating.

The Chinese authorities never released a single document to support their dirty claims. Much evidence does exist in Catholic archives, however, that show Chapdelaine was a man of God, humble and self-sacrificial in his dealings with his fellow men. Chapdelaine no longer cares. He is safe in the arms of Jesus Christ, who promised, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”[12]

1. W. H. Oldfield, Pioneering in Kwangsi: The Story of Alliance Missions in South China (Harrisburg: Christian Publications, Inc., 1936), 57.
2. The New Glories of the Catholic Church: Translated from the Italian by the Fathers of the London Oratory, at the Request of the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster. With a Preface by His Eminence (London: Richardson, 1859), 131.
3. The New Glories of the Catholic Church, 133.
4. The New Glories of the Catholic Church, 132-133.
5. CRBC, The Newly Canonized Martyr-Saints of China, 92.
6. The New Glories of the Catholic Church, 145.
7. The New Glories of the Catholic Church, 146.
8. The New Glories of the Catholic Church, 149-150.
9. The New Glories of the Catholic Church, 149.
10. Harper’s Weekly (April 17, 1858).
11. Lateline News (October 3, 2000).
12. Matthew 5:11-12.