We’re experimenting during Orthros with including readings from the Menologian about the saints of the day, and since I think it isn’t the norm, people may not have gotten to hear this this morning. It touched my heart.

On this day we commemorate the Holy Sacred-Martyr Metróphanes Tsi-Chung, Priest of the Orthodox Mission in Peking; his wife Tatiana and their sons Esaias and John; Maria, the betrothed of Esaias; Paul Wan, Mission catechist; Ia Wen, teacher at the Mission School; Matthew Hai Tsuan and his brother Vitus; Clement Kui Kin; Anna Chui; and two hundred and eleven other holy Martyrs with them that were slain by the godless in the year 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion in China.

The Holy Martyrs of China were native Chinese Orthodox Christians brought up in piety at the Russian Orthodox Mission in Peking, which had been founded in 1685. During the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 against the foreign powers occupying China, native Chinese Christians were commanded by the Boxers to renounce Christianity or be tortured to death. Two hundred and twenty-two members of the Peking Mission, led by their priest Metróphanes Tsi-Chung and his family, refused to deny Christ and were deemed worthy of a martyric death.

On the tenth Christ’s Table was adorned with the finest of China.

Curious, I thought, for this reading to end in the last sentence with a sort of pun on the word ‘China.’ But then, even for this writing, which must be of relatively recent origin, there is a prescripted kind of poetry to even the most terrible events. And this double-meaning seems to be picked up in the short troparion included for these saints:

When baked in the mystical furnace of torments,
Your clay was transformed into vessels of glory.

May their memory be eternal.