1870 - The Tianjin Massacre

June 21, 1870

Tianjin

The Notre Dame des Victories (now known as the Wanghailou Catholic Church), the site of the 1870 Tianjin Massacre. [China Insight]

Tianjin, today the third most populated city in China after Shanghai and Beijing, sprung to worldwide prominence in 1870 when 11 Catholic missionaries and “perhaps a hundred Chinese”[1] believers were ferociously massacred. At a time when photography was not yet commonplace, shocked Europeans were left to imagine the carnage as they read the newspaper reports of the day.

After a series of military clashes with the navies of Britain, France, and America, the Chinese were forced to sign the Treaty of Tianjin in 1858. This gave free access to those Western nations for trade. Not content with that treaty, the British bombed the city in 1860 and in an era of gunboat diplomacy managed to coerce the Chinese into declaring Tianjin a ‘treaty port.’ Over the next few decades the British, French, and Americans were joined by the Germans, Italians, Belgians, Austro-Hungarians, and Japanese. Each nation claimed a piece of Tianjin for itself, building ‘concessions,’ each of which “was a self-contained world with its own prison, school, barracks and hospital.”[2]

The majority of Chinese people in Tianjin deeply resented the presence of so many foreigners in their city. This resentment boiled over into violence in the summer of 1870. The French were especially despised, due to their perceived arrogance. In 1869 they constructed the provocatively-named Notre Dame des Victories on the site of a former temple and imperial garden. The cathedral was destined to be the focal point of the 1870 massacre. Over the course of history, the cathedral was destroyed twice by the Chinese, only to be rebuilt three times by the defiant French.

The Catholic mission at Tianjin had grown into an extensive work. In one 12-month period during 1868-1869 they had distributed

“56,700 portions of soup and food given to the most distressed; 48,000 cared for at the dispensary; 174 received and nursed in the hospital of the house; fifty adults baptized at the moment of death; twenty-one pagan women instructed by the catechumens, of whom fourteen were sufficiently prepared to receive the work of baptism….

The Holy Childhood work registered…196 babies put out to nurse, 179 in the orphanage, nineteen girls, of whom twelve were pagans, in the external school.”[3]

By 1870 the Daughters of Charity ran an orphanage in Tianjin, which was attached to their convent. It was staffed by five French, two Belgian, one Irish, and two Italian nuns. These ten Sisters were receiving more abandoned children on their doorstep than they could cope with. The anti-foreign sentiment in the city created a highly-charged atmosphere and rumours abounded. One report explains that the nuns

“were accustomed to purchase [abandoned] children, with a view to…saving their souls. Many that were sold to them were sickly; and also an epidemic broke out; and the result was that small coffins were continually coming out of the establishment for burial. This seemed to the ignorant populace to confirm the belief that the eyes and hearts of children were being used in the manufacture of drugs; and one woman who had been employed as a cook declared that she had herself witnessed the whole operation and had fled in terror.”[4]

Due to the epidemic, a total of 34 Chinese children in the orphanage had died in the preceding months. By the middle of June 1870, rumours that the nuns were murdering Chinese babies was believed by so many that even some of the Tianjin Christians stayed away from their churches in protest. The missionaries stayed indoors for fear of violence on the streets. Soon after noon on June 21st, the fire-gongs were sounded across the city and a mob gathered. There was no fire to douse, however. One report said,

“The terrible scenes of this dreadful massacre were ushered in by the sounding of the fire-gongs, at which time all the fire-guilds rushed to arms, instead of seizing their buckets as ordinarily, and hastened towards the French consulate where the first attack was made.”[5]

The mob was angry but not necessarily bent on killing, but this all changed when the French Consul, Henri Fontanier, “lost his temper and fired his pistol at the City Magistrate, missing and instead killing his assistant. (This action would seem strange for a person in a non-life threatening situation who had merely lost his temper, especially one trained to be a diplomat).”[6] This senseless murder incensed the mob, which “surrounded and killed him, stripped him of his clothes, mutilated his corpse and threw it into the canal.”[7]

After the French Consulate was burned to the ground and everybody in it murdered, the mob turned their sights on the Catholic orphanage about one mile away. En route they stopped to demolish the English Protestant chapel. Inside the orphanage the nuns and children were aware of the savage calamity brewing outside. Maria Andreoni prepared a favourite lunch for the children, but none of them was disposed to eat. The Sisters tried their best to console the children. One account of the intense moments before the carnage commenced says,

“When [the Sisters] went before the Tabernacle, they cried quietly. Their lips were seen to move in prayer; their faces were whiter than the white cornettes; the fingers clutched the big beads that hung by their sides; and they looked straight before them, as if they saw Something far beyond the convent walls, far over the howling mob, as if…as if…they saw…God.”[8]

By the time the frenzied mob reached the orphanage the men had been taken over by a spirit of hateful revenge. The reports of what happened next vary slightly. According to one,

“The orphanage was plundered and burned, the ten nuns were stripped naked before the mob, barbarously stabbed, hacked to death, and thrown into the flames. Every French man and woman who could be laid hands on was killed, with every accompaniment of outrage and mutilation…and between thirty and forty Chinese employed in the mission and orphanage [were killed].”[9]

An historian recounts how “the crowd plundered and set fire to the French consulate, the orphanage, the church, and other Catholic properties, and killed and savagely mutilated every Frenchmen that could be found.”[10] Only the charred remains of the ten nuns were later recovered from a nearby river. The demonically-inspired rage continued even after the nuns had been killed. One gruesome report noted:

“A lance, twelve feet long and very thin, was passed through their bodies, coming out at the neck, then they were exposed in the street on each side of the great door—these were the trophies of the victory. Others were cut in pieces, and then distributed to the mob. These monsters even devoured the hearts of the sisters, and ate their flesh. They dragged out their eyes, cut off their breasts, and tore out their entrails.”[11]

By the end of the day, 21 foreigners lay dead, including French Lazarist priest and Director of the District of Tianjin, Claude Chévrier. Ten European nuns connected to the orphanage were slaughtered. Their testimonies have been provided separately in this book.

A 48-year-old Chinese Lazarist priest, Vincent Ou, was choked to death, just one of approximately 100 Chinese Catholics and Protestants to perish. Even some of the little Chinese babies in the orphanage were killed. Among the Chinese victims was Chen Taipo, the principal of the boys’ school; a scholar from Beijing named Bei who was working in Tianjin at the time; and a female schoolteacher named Martha Bei, who was beaten to the ground and sliced to death.

The local people had falsely accused a Christian barber named Wang of sorcery. He was treated horribly on the day of the massacre, and died from his wounds a short time later. Two of the Sisters’ Christian servants were also done to death: a porter named Tong, and a water-carrier named Li. Both

“had been put in prison, where they suffered horribly, their legs being opened and swollen, and they died of their wounds. A fourth Christian [a man named Hou] was brought to us in a chair entirely naked. He could not move. His legs, squashed in the wooden vice where they had been encased, were a mass of corruption, out of which worms crawled in hundreds. This man was partly cured by a Chinese doctor, but sunk a year after.”[12]

Although the mob had targeted the Catholic mission, the Protestant community also suffered to a lesser extent. One publication summarized the persecution:

“Eight Protestant chapels, including the valuable premises of the American Board were destroyed, and some of the native converts lost their homes, and all their earthly possessions. From sixty to seventy Catholic converts are reported to have been killed, and many Protestant converts wounded, beaten and imprisoned.

All missionary operations have been brought to a stand-still. The schools are closed—the missionaries have no chapels, not can they even preach in the street. The whole surrounding country is in a disorganized state.”[13]

Chinese history books have portrayed the people who attacked the Catholic orphanage in 1870 as national heroes. The Tianjin massacre of 1870, and later attacks on Christians during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 and other occasions, contributed to a generally-poor view of Christianity among the people of China’s third largest city; a perception which continues to the present time. Today Tianjin has one of the lowest percentages of Christians of any major city in China.

1. John A. Swem, “Understanding Tianjin’s Resistance to the Gospel: A Brief Review of Modern History,” Unpublished report, 1998.
2. Michael Buckley et al., China: Travel Survival Kit (4th edition, Hawthorn, Australia: Lonely Planet Publications, 1994), 678.
3. Lady Herbert (trans.), The First Martyrs of the Holy Childhood (London: Art and Book Company, 1900), 270.
4. A. J. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor & China’s Open Century: Book Five – Refiner’s Fire (London: Overseas Missionary Fellowship, 1985), 241.
5. “The Massacre at Tientsin,” The Chinese Recorder (November 1870), 150.
6. John A. Swem, “The Tianjin Massacre,” Unpublished report.
7. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor & China’s Open Century, Book Five, 243.
8. Maynooth Mission to China, Heralds of the Orient (Galway, Ireland: Maynooth Mission, 1924), 110.
9. Broomhall, Hudson Taylor & China’s Open Century, Book Five, 243-244.
10. P. A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Anti-Foreignism, 1860-1870 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), 232-233.
11. Herbert, The First Martyrs of the Holy Childhood, 332.
12. Herbert, The First Martyrs of the Holy Childhood, 340.
13. “The Massacre at Tientsin,” The Chinese Recorder (November 1870), 150.