1900 - The Qian'an Massacre

1900 - The Qian'an Massacre

July 1900

Qian’an, Hebei

Qian’an, a city today numbering approximately 700,000 people, is located in eastern Hebei Province, about 150 miles (243 km) east of Beijing and just south of the Great Wall. During the Boxer Rebellion more than 100 Christians were spitefully slaughtered in Qian’an. One missionary later wrote:

“About a hundred were killed with every cruelty. Many were first tied up to posts in a temple, and their faces burned with lighted incense until the oil dropped on the ground. Then they were taken outside and chopped to pieces, beginning at the fingers, and hacking off a joint at a time, and then from the toes in the same way. One man exhorted them, and they slit his mouth from ear to ear. One man was buried alive.”[1]

Bishop Bashford, who had spent eight years in China when the Boxer Rebellion broke, provided the following testimony:

“I recall the case of a pastor, wife, son, and daughter, whose lives the Chinese offered them if they would simply step upon a piece of paper with the name of Jesus written upon it; they refused and died as martyrs. At Qian’an one hundred and twelve schoolboys were cut to pieces or burned and the local preacher was bound to a temple pillar. As he continued preaching, a Boxer cried, ‘You still preach, do you?’ and slit his mouth from ear to ear. Another church member was buried alive.”[2]

Today approximately 40,000 of the 670,000 people in Qian’an County are Christians.[3] The blood of the martyrs has been the seed of the church. Following are accounts of some of the individual martyrs at Qian’an.

© This article is an extract from Paul Hattaway's epic 656-page China’s Book of Martyrs, which profiles more than 1,000 Christian martyrs in China since AD 845, accompanied by over 500 photos. You can order this or many other China books and e-books here.

1. Miner, China’s Book of Martyrs, 167-168.
2. G.M. Mathews & S. S. Hough, The Call of China and the Islands: Report of the Foreign Deputation, 1911-1912, for every Member of the United Brethren Church (Dayton, Ohio: Foreign Missionary Society United Brethren in Christ, 1913), 26-27.
3. Approximately 14,000 Protestants and 27,000 Catholics live in Qian’an. The city contains 23 Three-Self churches with a total of about 7,000 members, plus a similar number of house church Protestants.

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