Nestorian Stele - Discovery of The Stele

Discovery of The Stele

The stele is thought to have been buried in 845, during a campaign of anti-Buddhist persecution, which also affected the Nestorians.

The stele was unearthed in the late Ming Dynasty (between 1623 and 1625) beside Chongren Temple (崇仁寺). According to the account by the Jesuit Alvaro Semedo, the workers who found the stele immediately reported the find to the governor, who soon visited the monument, and had it installed on a pedestal, under a protective roof, requesting the nearby Buddhist monastery to care for it. The newly discovered stele attracted attention of local intellectuals. It was Zhang Gengyou (Wade-Giles: Chang Keng-yu) who first identified the text as Christian in content. Zhang, who had been aware of Christianity through Matteo Ricci, and who himself may have been Christian, sent a copy of the stele's Chinese text to his Christian friend, Leon Li Zhizao in Hangzhou, who in his turn published the text and told about it to the locally based Jesuits.

Alvaro Semedo was the first European to visit the stele (some time between 1625 and 1628). Nicolas Trigault's Latin translation of the monument's inscription soon made its way in Europe, and was apparently first published in a French translation, in 1628. Portuguese and Italian translations, and a Latin re-translation, were soon published as well. Semedo's account of the monument's discovery was published in 1641, in his Imperio de la China.

Early Jesuits attempted to claim that the stele was erected by a historical community of Roman Catholics in China and called Nestorianism a heresy and claimed that it was Catholics who first brought Christianity to China, but later historians and writers admitted that it was indeed Nestorian, not Catholic.

The first publication of the original Chinese and Syriac text of the inscription in Europe is attributed to Athanasius Kircher. China Illustrata edited by Kircher (1667) included a reproduction of the original inscription in Chinese characters, Romanization of the text, and a Latin translation. This was perhaps the first sizeable Chinese text made available in its original form to the European public. A sophisticated Romanization system, reflecting Chinese tones, used to transcribe the text, was the one developed earlier by Matteo Ricci's collaborator Lazzaro Cattaneo (1560–1640).

The work of the transcription and translation was carried out by Michał Boym and two young Chinese Christians who visited Rome in the 1650s and 1660s: Boym's traveling companion Andreas Zheng (Chinese: 郑安德勒; pinyin: Zhèng Āndélè, Wade-Giles: Cheng An-to-le) and, later, another person who signed in Latin as "Matthaeus Sina". D.E. Mungello suggests that "Matthaeus Sina" may have been the person who traveled from China to Europe overland with Johann Grueber.