Trinity Church ( zh, t=三一堂, s=三一堂, w=San1-i1 tʽang2, p=Sānyī táng; also referred to as Protestant Episcopal Church) is a Protestant church situated on Langjiaguai Street in the county-level city of Langzhong,

Nanchong Nanchong (; 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 lived in the built-up (or 'metro') area made of th ...

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

Anglican Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of th ...

church, formerly belonging to the East Szechwan Diocese of the Church in China.

History

Trinity Church was built in 1893 in traditional Sichuanese architectural style, under the supervision of William Cassels, 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 H ...

who was going to be the missionary bishop 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 northern Sichuan, fully blended into the surroundings. The British explorer

Isabella Bird Isabella Lucy Bird, married name Bishop (15 October 1831 – 7 October 1904), was a nineteenth-century British explorer, writer, photographer, and naturalist. With Fanny Jane Butler she founded the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinagar ...

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

References

{{coord missing, Sichuan 19th-century Anglican church buildings in China Langzhong Traditional Chinese architecture Churches completed in the 1890s Buildings and structures in Nanchong

History

See also

References