By the time that a new wave of Western Latin Christians arrived from Europe in the sixteenth century, Christian faith and practice had once more virtually disappeared – at least in public. What has become evident in recent years in the countryside beyond the former imperial capital Xi’an, around that extraordinary survival the Ta Qin monastery pagoda, is the likelihood that a consciousness of the Christian tradition and even a Christianity disguised as Taoism did persist. After the Catholic missions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this small area became and remains a stronghold of
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