1650 - General Sung

1650 -General Sung

The Manchu, an ethnic group spread across northeast China, took advantage of the political and social unrest that had troubled the Ming Dynasty leaders in China throughout the 1630s and early 1640s. In 1644 they broke through the Great Wall, seized Beijing, and after several decades of conquest succeeded in establishing the Qing Dynasty, which ruled China until its demise in 1911.

Catholic work commenced in Manchuria (now the three northeast provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang) in 1620.[I] As Manchu rule spread throughout China numerous handpicked Manchu magistrates and military leaders were placed over different regions of China.

As China’s new rulers established their authority isolated outbreaks of persecution against Christians occurred, such as the martyrdom of the Austrian Andrew Xavier Koffler and Michel Boym, who were killed by Manchu soldiers in Guangxi on 12 December, 1651.

The territory of Liaodong (the southern part of today’s Liaoning Province) was placed under the leadership of General Sung, who was a man of deep Christian conviction. The soldiers under Sung’s command respected him, but when the government in Beijing failed to send money to pay the soldiers’ wages unrest rose in the ranks. Many other officials sent bribes to Beijing in order to secure the release of funds, but General Sung refused to contemplate such an action, as bribery went directly against his Christian convictions. Sung wrote to the government, explaining that his army was falling into a state of insubordination, but he received no reply from the overstretched officials. The Qing armies were expanding into Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang, and hundreds of thousands of troops were employed to gain territory never previously held in Chinese history. The coffers were empty, and paying General Sung’s men was not high on the list of priorities at the time. The patience of the soldiers under Sung’s command finally ran out. In desperation they raided a town, pillaging food, money and possessions.

“By this act of violence the soldiers understood very well that they had ruined their general, and that the only chance of safety for him lay in his declaring himself openly against the emperor; and they omitted nothing to drive him into this desperate step, promising to follow wherever he should lead them, and swearing never to lay down their arms till they had placed him on the imperial throne….

General Sung saw as well as his troops that his fall was inevitable, and that if he wished to save his life he had no choice but to accept this offer; but he was a Christian, and he could not reconcile treason with his principles; on the contrary, he expressed in the most energetic terms to his captains the horror with which he regarded the crime proposed to him.”[II]

News of the mutiny soon reached the palace in Beijing. The emperor immediately summoned General Sung to appear before him. Sung’s men strongly urged their beloved leader not to obey the emperor’s command. Another Manchu leader offered Sung asylum in his territory. In the midst of such pressing temptations,

“…the Christian general listened only to the voice of his conscience. He endeavoured to persuade his soldiers to imitate his fidelity, and then tearing himself from them, he went heroically to place himself in the hands of enemies, who, incapable of being touched by such magnanimity, pitilessly condemned to death a man so worthy to live.”[III]

I Milton T. Stauffer (ed.), The Christian Occupation of China (Shanghai: China Continuation Committee, 1922), 252.
II Huc, Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet, 295-296.
III Huc, Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet, 297.