Martyrs Holy Chinese Martyrs

The Russian Orthodox Mission in Beijing traces its origin to 1685, when the priest Maxim Leontyev arrived from the Albazin fortress on the Amur, captured by Qing forces, together with captive Albazinian Cossacks who formed the first Orthodox community in China. By 1899 the mission's flock numbered about a thousand Chinese Orthodox Christians.

During the anti-Christian Yihetuan ("Boxer") uprising in May-June 1900, a wave of arson and violence against Christians swept through Beijing. On the night of June 11, Boxers and government troops attacked the homes of Orthodox Chinese across the city; the mission building itself burned that same day.

The priest Mitrofan (secular name Ji Chun, Chinese 弥特若梵) was born December 10, 1855, in Beijing to a Manchu family; orphaned young, he was raised by his grandmother and mother, teachers at the mission school. He studied under Archimandrite Palladius (Kafarov); in 1882 in Tokyo he was ordained deacon and then presbyter by St. Nicholas of Japan (Kasatkin) — becoming the first ethnically Chinese priest in the history of Orthodoxy. For 15 years he served as translator of liturgical and catechetical texts into Chinese.

On the night of June 10, 1900, about 70 Chinese Christians — mostly women and children — took refuge in Fr. Mitrofan's home. The house was surrounded by Boxers and soldiers; the priest was repeatedly pierced with a spear and died beneath a date tree in his courtyard. His wife, the deaconess Tatiana, was beheaded on June 11 along with 19 others sheltering there; his eldest son Isaiah (23) was executed July 7; his younger son John (8) was tortured; only his son Sergius survived and later himself became a priest.

The head of the mission, Archimandrite Innokenty (Figurovsky), compiled an official list of 222 Orthodox Chinese martyred specifically for refusing to recant (out of a total death toll estimated at about 300); about a quarter of the 222 were children and adolescents. In 1903 a Church of All Holy Martyrs was built on the mission grounds over the relics, demolished in 1956 when the site became the USSR embassy; the relics were moved to the Orthodox cemetery, later desecrated during the Cultural Revolution (now a public park).

Their feast is kept on June 10-11/23-24.

HISTORY OF GLORIFICATION (note): veneration proceeded in several stages — Holy Synod Decree No. 2874 of April 22, 1902, established annual commemoration; the Synod of the Moscow Patriarchate confirmed local glorification on February 17, 1997; church-wide veneration throughout the entire Russian Orthodox Church was established in 2016.