Saint Auguste Chapdelaine

Auguste Chapdelaine, Chinese name Mǎ Lài (Chinese: 馬賴; 6 February 1814 – 29 February 1856) was a French Christian missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. France used his death—Chapdelaine was executed by Chinese officials—as a casus belli for its participation in the Second Opium War. Chapdelaine was born on a farm in La Rochelle-Normande, France. By the age of twenty, he had entered the seminary at Coutances. He was ordained a priest for the diocese of Coutances in 1843 and in 1851 joined the Institute of Foreign Missions in Paris. He left from Antwerp in April 1852 to join the Catholic mission in the Guangxi province of China. The Taiping Rebellion led to suspicion of Christians, and foreigners were forbidden to enter the area. After a stay in Guangzhou, he moved to Guiyang, capital of the Guizhou province, in the spring of 1854. In December, he went, together with Lu Tingmei, to Yaoshan village, Xilin County of Guangxi, where he met the local Catholic community of around 300 people. He celebrated his first mass there on 8 December 1854. He was arrested and thrown into the Xilin county prison ten days after his arrival and was released after sixteen or eighteen days of captivity. Following personal threats, Chapdelaine returned to Guizhou in early 1855, and came back to Guangxi in December of the same year. He was denounced on February 22, 1856, by Bai San, a relative of a new convert, while the local tribunal was on holiday. He was arrested in Yaoshan, together with other Chinese Catholics, by orders of Zhang Mingfeng, the new local mandarin on 25 February 1856. Chapdelaine was accused of stirring up insurrection and refused to pay a bribe. Condemned to cage torture (zhanlong), he was first beaten one hundred times on the cheek by a leather thong, which caused his teeth to fly out, his face mutilated, and his jaw lacerated. He was locked into a small iron cage, which was hung at the gate of the jail.