Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/184

within the sacred building, and composed motives for wall-tablets. The writer of the Hsiang description—Kingtsing, a priest of the Syrian church—speaking of these pictures, bears incidental testimony to the skill of eighth-century artists; for he says that the portraits were so lifelike that their originals seemed to be actually present, their arms appearing as though one could touch the flesh and their foreheads radiating light.

This munificent patronage continued during the reign of two succeeding Emperors, and at the time (781 A.D.) when the tablet was inscribed, the Nestorians seem to have been in a flourishing condition. Sixty-five years later their priests, then numbering no less than three thousand, were ordered to abandon their holy ministrations and retire into private life. But that was not a special discrimination against Christianity. The priests of Buddha received a similar command from the Emperor Wutsung, a puppet of the Palace eunuchs and an enemy of religion in any form. His successor adopted a diametrically opposite policy so far as Buddhism was concerned, and made no attempt to oppress Christianity, which entered a period of renewed vigour, so that when Marco Polo visited China in the thirteenth century, there were Nestorian churches in Hangchou and Chinkiang, and Nestorian residents in many towns throughout the Empire. Unfortunately at this interesting epoch of the