Christians in Late-18th-century Sichuan Province

The life of Christians in 18th-century China is marked by the consequences of Pope Clement XI's bull Ex Illa Die, which mandates a change in the ancestors’ worships and in the honors paid to Confucius from the “Ricci doctrine,” the Guangzhou Conference of 1666-67 and previous pronouncements of the Holy See. The closure to the spread of Christianity that followed would produce an era of repeated restrictions on religious freedom, although imperial edicts would not always be matched by actual persecution on the ground. In Sichuan province, for example, Christians continue to remain fire beneath the ashes. This was also thanks to Li Ande (1692-1774, 李安德), or André Ly, a priest native of Hanzhong 汉中 in Shanxi 陕西 and trained in the Mahapram seminary of the Missions Étrangères de Paris in Siam. He would remain the province's only priest for many years, and he would work unsparingly for the province's community. It was on his pastoral work, which continued to increase the number of baptized, that the presbyters sent from Europe could build their missionary work. Thanks to him and his diary, which he wrote in Latin, we can analyze the underlying dynamics of the social and human relations of those times, looking with a brighter light at what we find in the almost contemporary documents regarding the trial brought against Liu Ju'an 刘举菴 – a 70-year-old man from Ba district 巴, in the 47th year of the Qianlong 乾隆 reign, because he was a Christian – published by the Sichuan Provincial Archives in 1991.