wholly rooted out on at least two occasions, once in the tenth century and again in the fourteenth, before being replanted. Yet despite this, some communities kept the faith alive through long years of persecution. About 1300, Marco Polo reported Christians who had maintained continuity of practice over seven centuries—that is, from the time of the first Nestorian missions. In 1605, Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci told how “[i]n the central region of China there lived for five hundred years a considerable number of Christians and…there have remained important traces of them in many places.”3
