CHAPTER LXXIII.. Of the City of Chinghianfu.

OF THE CITY OF CHINGHIANFU.

Chinghianfu is a city of Manzi. The people are Idolaters and subject to the Great Kaan, and have paper-money, and live by handicrafts and trade. They have plenty of silk, from which they make sundry kinds of stuffs of silk and gold. There are great and wealthy merchants in the place; plenty of game is to be had, and of all kinds of victual.

There are in this city two churches of Nestorian Christians which were established in the year of our Lord 1278; and I will tell you how that happened. You see, in the year just named, the Great Kaan sent a Baron of his whose name was MAR SARGHIS, a Nestorian Christian, to be governor of this city for three years. And during the three years that he abode there he caused these two Christian churches to be built, and since then there they are. But before his time there was no church, neither were there any Christians.{1}

NOTE 1.—CHIN-KIANG FU retains its name unchanged. It is one which became well known in the war of 1842. On its capture on the 21st July in that year, the heroic Manchu commandant seated himself among his records and then set fire to the building, making it his funeral pyre. The city was totally destroyed in the T’ai-P’ing wars, but is rapidly recovering its position as a place of native commerce.

Mar Sarghis (or Dominus Sergius) appears to have been a common name among Armenian and other Oriental Christians. As Pauthier mentions, this very name is one of the names of Nestorian priests inscribed in Syriac on the celebrated monument of Si-ngan fu.

From this second mention of three years as a term of government, we may probably gather that this was the usual period for the tenure of such office. (Mid. Kingd., I. 86; Cathay, p. xciii.)