The Yuan rulers of China quickly conformed themselves to the rich and ancient culture which they had seized and, worse still, successive Yuan monarchs showed themselves steadily more incompetent to rule. Their overthrow by the fiercely xenophobic native Ming dynasty in 1368 was a bad blow to Christianity in the empire. It still had yet to interest more than a minority of Chinese. It is perhaps appropriate that the only apparent modern linguistic survival of the Syriac missions in the Far East is the word for ‘tomb’, qavra, used by the Turco-Mongol people known as the Uyghur, in the Xinjiang
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