1797 - Paul Souviron

May 13, 1797

Guzngzhou, Guangdong

The façade of the 400 year-old St. Paul’s Cathedral in Macau, built in 1602 and visited by numerous Catholic missionaries like Paul Souviron, who entered China from the Portuguese colony, never to return. [Paul Hattaway]

Paul Souviron was born on October 31, 1768 in the Pyrenees, France. As a boy he showed a hunger for spiritual things that belied his youth. Souviron entered the seminary of Saint Sulpice in Paris, but after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 he emigrated to London, England, where he was ordained a Catholic priest in 1793. While in London the directors of the Missions Etrangères de Paris learned about their zealous compatriot and wrote to him asking if he would consider becoming a foreign missionary.

Souviron departed for the Orient in April 1795, and after stopping at several ports along the way he arrived at Macau in June the following year. For the first year he studied Chinese in the Portuguese colony. One of his colleagues at the time was Mgr. Letondal, who said, “For nine months that I lived with him I never heard one word from his mouth that wounded another, or was spoken without love and compassion.”[1]

Aware of the dangers that faced him inside China, Souviron left Macau on March 2, 1797, accompanied by five Chinese Christians whose job it was to deliver the missionary to his appointed field in Sichuan Province. Nine days later into their journey the police chief in Guangdong Province stopped the group. Souviron was imprisoned at Guangzhou and made to appear before the city magistrates on several occasions. His arrest caused widespread repercussions among the Catholic community in southern China, and the government announced harsh penalties for any Chinese involved in helping foreigners enter the country.

On May 13, 1797, while the Guangzhou authorities were debating what to do with the Frenchman, Paul Souviron suddenly died after contracting a malignant fever, which he had caught from another prisoner. Two of the missionary’s Chinese travelling companions were arrested, tortured, and banished to Xinjiang where they were enslaved for the rest of their lives.

1. My translation of the Biographical Note of Paul Souviron in the Archives des Missions Etrangères de Paris, China Biographies and Obituaries, 1700-1799.