Bei-Guan - John Bartholomew

Bei-Guan: The Russian Spiritual Mission in China, first published in Tientsin in 1939, tells the story of that community from its beginnings among the Albazins, Russian Cossacks brought to Peking in the seventeenth century, to the churches, monasteries, schools, clergy, and faithful of the Russian Spiritual Mission on the eve of the Second World War.

Written by Mikhail Viktorovich Kolobov, a former Imperial Russian officer living in exile, Bei-Guan is more than a history. It is an eyewitness portrait of a world that was still alive when he visited the Mission in the autumn and winter of 1938: ancient churches and sacred icons, Chinese Orthodox families, Russian émigrés, missionaries and monastics, and the daily life of the Mission itself.

Within little more than a decade, revolution and political upheaval would transform China and bring this extraordinary chapter of Orthodox history toward its end.

Now available in English translation, Bei-Guan preserves the memory of a nearly vanished world and of the Russian and Chinese Orthodox Christians who sustained their Faith across centuries, cultures, revolution, persecution, and exile.