Trinity Church,; Sichuanese romanization: ''San I Tʽang''. also referred to as Protestant Episcopal Church, is a

Protestant Protestantism is a branch of Christianity that emphasizes Justification (theology), justification of sinners Sola fide, through faith alone, the teaching that Salvation in Christianity, salvation comes by unmerited Grace in Christianity, divin ...

church situated on Langjiaguai Street in the

county-level city A county-level city () is a County-level divisions of China, county-level administrative division of the China, People's Republic of China. County-level cities have judiciary, judicial but no legislature, legislative rights over their own local or ...

Langzhong Langzhong (formerly known as Paoning) is a county-level city in northeastern Sichuan province, China, located on the middle reaches of the Jialing River. It is administered as part of the prefecture-level city of Nanchong. Langzhong has a total ...

Nanchong Nanchong ( zh, c=南充 , p=Nánchōng , w=Nan-ch'ung; Sichuanese: lan2cong1) is a prefecture-level city in the northeast of Sichuan province, China, with an area of . At the 2020 census it was home to 5,607,565 people, of whom 1,936,534 liv ...

Sichuan Province Sichuan is a Provinces of China, province in Southwestern China, occupying the Sichuan Basin and Tibetan Plateau—between the Jinsha River to the west, the Daba Mountains to the north, and the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau to the south. Its capita ...

. Founded in 1893, the building is the city's oldest surviving

Anglican Anglicanism, also known as Episcopalianism in some countries, is a Western Christianity, Western Christian tradition which developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the ...

church, formerly belonging to the East Szechwan Diocese of the Church in China. It has been subjected to the control of the state-sanctioned Three-Self Patriotic Church since 1954.

History

Trinity Church was built in 1893 in traditional Sichuanese architectural style, under the supervision of

William Cassels William Wharton Cassels (11 March 1858 – 7 November 1925) was an Anglican missionary bishop. Early life and education Cassels was born in Oporto, Portugal, the sixth son of John Cassels, a merchant, and Ethelinda Cox, a distant relation of Wa ...

, one of the

Cambridge Seven The Cambridge Seven were six students from Cambridge University and one from the Royal Military Academy, who in 1885, decided to become missionaries to China through the China Inland Mission. The seven were: * Charles Thomas Studd * Montagu ...

who was going to be the

missionary bishop A missionary bishop is one assigned in the Anglican Communion to an area that is not already organized under a bishop of a church. The term was also used in the Methodist churches at one time, but this was discontinued in 1964. Anglican churches I ...

of the Diocese of Western China. As the first Anglican church built in Langzhong (then known as Paoning), the chosen style is in consideration of being more acceptable to the locals. It adopted the style of traditional residential buildings in northwestern Sichuan, fully blended into the surroundings. The British explorer

Isabella Bird Isabella Lucy Bishop (; 15 October 1831 – 7 October 1904) was an English explorer, writer, photographer and naturalist. Alongside fellow Englishwoman Fanny Jane Butler, she founded the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinagar in modern-da ...

described in her book ''The Yangtze Valley and Beyond'', that the church 'is Chinese in style, the

chancel In church architecture, the chancel is the space around the altar, including the Choir (architecture), choir and the sanctuary (sometimes called the presbytery), at the liturgical east end of a traditional Christian church building. It may termi ...

windows are "glazed" with coloured paper to simulate stained glass, and it is seated for two hundred'. Despite its small size, 'the church was crammed at

matins Matins (also Mattins) is a canonical hour in Christian liturgy, originally sung during the darkness of early morning (between midnight and dawn). The earliest use of the term was in reference to the canonical hour, also called the vigil, which w ...

, and crowds stood outside, where they could both see and hear, this publicity contrasting with the Roman practice.' More than ten years of missionary work yielded visible results, Trinity Church was no longer capable of accommodating the growing congregation. Implementation of a cathedral construction project started in 1908, after a series of problems, the neo-Gothic Cathedral of St John the Evangelist was eventually built on Yangtianjing Street, just 50 metres away from Trinity Church. After the communist takeover of China in 1949, Christian Churches in China were forced to sever their ties with respective overseas Churches, which has thus led to the merging of Trinity Church into the communist-established Three-Self Patriotic Church. Today, the traditional environment has long gone. Trinity Church, however, maintains its original style, with its serenity that is free from the bustling tourist area nearby.

Notes

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* {{coord missing, Sichuan

Churches completed in the 1890s 19th-century Anglican church buildings in China Buildings and structures in Nanchong

History

See also

Notes

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Bibliography