'Nestorian' Christians and Manichaeans as links between Rome and China

Abstract

This chapter presents the activity of ‘Nestorian’ Christian and Manichaean missionaries in the early Tang Empire. Christianity and Manichaeism, two world-religions with common roots in the Roman Empire, shadowed each other in their diffusion across Central Asia to China. Persia, rather than the more distant Rome or Constantinople, would therefore have equal claim to be the land of origin of Jingjiao and certainly the source of Christian mission to Tang China. The identification and decipherment of Manichaean texts and documents in Central Asian languages at Turfan should in theory have prepared scholars for the discovery of Manichaean texts in Chinese given the important role China played in Central Asia in the Tang period. Manichaean texts are also written in the popular cursive Uygur-Sogdian script and in a few instances in the Old Turkic Runic script. As foreign religions, Manichaeism and the Church of the East flourished in Changan and Luoyang, the western and eastern capital cities of Tang China.