When Catholic bishop Zéphyrin Guillemin unveiled plans “to build a huge church to impress and attract the Chinese” in Canton, his vision of a Gothic cathedral got off to a rocky start in the 1850s, writes architectural historian Thomas Coomans. The locals believed that the brick cathedral’s design clashed with the principles of fengshui, or traditional geomancy, as “the vertical spires would bring bad luck on the city.” Worse, the church was in the same spot as a palace destroyed in the Second Opium War in 1857—making its design “unknown, foreign, and thus imperialist, and particularly humiliating.”
Churches like these—the brainchild of Western missionaries in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China—acted as a “laboratory at a local level,” suggests Coomans. That’s as this type of church was “interconnected with global networks through Western colonialism and the universal Christian mission, and contributed to spread aspects of Western modernity.”
In fact, Bishop Guillemin’s cathedral was built by members of the Christianized Hakka ethnic group, with Coomans highlighting the contributions of some “remarkable ‘intermediaries.’” For instance, a Hakka man named Ngai A-Ji was involved in the project “from the beginning to the end.” Having been taught to draw plans by a French architect, Ngai “became the main constructor of the cathedral” and also handled aspects of budgeting, purchases, and contracts.
Technical knowledge was exchanged among foreign missionaries, architects, engineers, and the exclusively Chinese construction crews—in the “treaty ports” where Western powers operated as colonial administrations, and even in small towns and villages. Documents used on worksites developed a new Chinese-language vocabulary for the French terms used in Gothic architecture, notes Coomans. Flying buttresses became “oblique arches,” rose windows were “large circle flower windows,” and vaults were “arch ceilings.”
Coomans adds that the transfer of knowledge was “reciprocal because the missionaries gained experience by adapting what they did to suit the local craftsmen, materials and climate.”
For example, in the 1870s, the French Catholic bishop of Guiyang oversaw the building of St Joseph’s—a church that Coomans describes as “a remarkable hybrid construction that combines Gothic ogee windows and oculi with a wooden pagoda-shaped tower perched on top of the apse.” Meanwhile, the Anglican Saint Saviour’s Cathedral in Beijing, which was built in the early 1900s, “combines a Western barn timber structure with two Chinese-style lantern towers at the crossings and Norman-style Chinese blue brick walls.”
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China’s encounter with Western missionaries is tied to prolonged religious and imperial conflict, and debates over church architecture were no exception to this fraught history. The West’s decisive suppression of the Boxer Uprising in 1900 extracted crippling financial reparations from China, and some of the funds were invested in more lavish church construction. Indeed, Coomans points out that this period “coincides with the triumph of Gothic church building in China” and an emphasis on “‘pure’ Western styles.”
In a handbook published by French Jesuits in 1926, “a great deal of attention is paid to Chinese building techniques and materials; some of them are recommended in particular circumstances.” Still, Eurocentric assumptions prevailed. “Chinese decoration and ornament, however, are condemned because [they are] considered as superstitious, superfluous and expensive,” Coomans notes.
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But, after the fall of the Qing Empire, missionaries in a modernizing republic had to switch tacks. For example, the Holy See posted Archbishop Celso Costantini to China in 1922 “with the mission to adapt the Eurocentric Catholic mission to the society in transition,” which included the task of moving “from Western styles to a sinicised Christian art and architecture.” In response, Costantini called for “a Sino-Christian style that would neither be traditional Chinese, nor hybridised with Western elements, but Chinese, modern and rational,” with the use of modern building materials like reinforced concrete and steel replacing old timber structures.
Unfortunately, this Sino-Christian evolution in church-building was cut short by the outbreak of World War II and the Chinese Civil War.
Looking back, Coomans writes that “the encounter between two building traditions and the reciprocal transfer of knowledge and building techniques thanks to church construction is an important, yet still largely unrecognised moment both in mission history and global architectural history.”
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