Rensselaer Union, Volume 6, Number 42, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 9 July 1874 — The Massacre of Chinese Christians. [ARTICLE]

The Massacre of Chinese Christians.

The French periodical, Mission# Cafholiquet, gives an authentic and detailed narrative of the recent massacre of Roman Catholic native converts in China. The account, as translated for the London Tablet, relates that the massacre broke out on the 25th of February, when the “ literates,” as the persecuting party is called, opened the campaign by beheading two men in the service of Pere Deare and a Christian, whom they then threw into the river. The same day they burned the three villages of Trun-Lam, Nio-Vinh and Bau Tach, and massacred the inhabitants in them. Those who succeeded in escaping to the woods were hunted down with hounds, brought back, and killed on the following days. The river -was Covered over with bodies floating down it from the side of Lareg. At that time the murderers were massacring the Christians of the parish of Holven, and were burning their villages. Those who took refuge in the cliffs of the neighborhood were hunted down and burnt alive. The Grand Mandarin of Justice was at the market of Sa-Nam with 800 soldiers, but remained an inactive spectator of the massacre of the Christians of NamDuong, only a few of whom were able to escape. * * * The literates who were the heads of the militia appointed to massacre the Christians say that the work of extermination carried out under the eyes of the Mandarins was concerted between the court and the literates, and was done in reprisal for recent events. The Mandarins have just received orders from the court not to employ any other means save those of persuasion to stop the murderers in their career. One of the chiefs who had just caused two Christians to be murdered on the highroad went on the parade before the Governor of the citadel, by whom he was dismissed with honor. On his return twenty women or children fell under the swords of this man and his followers. In several localities they take an entire family—father, mother and children —bind them together with bamboos, and then fling the bundle of living humanity into the waves. First, however, they take care to cut off the man’s head. The multitude of dead bodies thus fastened together in groups of from eight to ten blocks up the principal river, but to the great surprise of everybody does not send forth any bad* smell. There are then flye parishes containing pearly 10,Qp0 Christians, which will have to be blotted, out of the mission—namely, Lang Thank-Huyen, Nam-Duong, Hoy-Yen, and Doreg-Thank. Many m the victims

died in the midst of flames. A village of more than 400 Christians was attacked by the literates and soon became a prey to the flames. Among these 400 Christians there were 120, more 'or less, wlio succeeded in saving themselves by taking refuge in a village near by. The remainder —about 200 —w'ere all massacred. Two small villages of Christians situated two hours’ walk from the place at which I then was were hemmed in by the pagans. The'Mayor visited each house numbered, the Christians and forbade them, under the threat of some severe punishment, to go out of doors. A few of the Christian women attempted tb go to the market to keep themselves from starving. They never Some pagan women that went with them say that the Christian women' were captured and beheaded. Two men from one of these same villages hazarded a flight during the night; they crossed the great river by swimming, and came to me to tell their-misfortunes. “Alas!” writes Archbishop Gauthier, from whose letter this information is chiefly derived, “ I could do nothing but weep with them, being unable to do , anythiifg to succor them. Two or three days afterward I learned tha tall the men in that village had had thei heads cut off, but the women and children were spared. And as their houses wqre intermingled with those.of the pagans it was forbidden to burn them down ”