nationalities into the heart of China.

Buddhism entered China from India in the first century of the Christian
era. Alexander Wylie tells us that "according to the testimony of one of
the stone tablets in the synagogue at Kai-fung foo, the Israelites first
entered China during the Han dynasty" and we are further told in the
letters of the Jesuits that "they came during the reign of Ming-ti (A.D.
58-75) from Si-yih, _i. e._ the western regions. It appears by all that
can be gathered from them that this western country is Persia and that
they came by Khorasan and Samarcand. They have many Persian words in their
language and they long preserved a great intercourse with that country"
(The Israelites in China, Wylie's Chinese Researches, Shanghai, 1897).

Some other interesting facts related by Wylie deserve mention here. In
translating the name of Jehovah into Chinese, the Israelites in China, to
the present day, say Teen, "just as the scholars of China do when they
explain their term Shang-te." We thus observe a growing practice in
western Asia, among the Hebrews, of designating Jehovah as the God of
Heaven and sometimes as Heaven. In Chinese history distinct mention is
made of a foreign sect distinguished as the "worshippers of Heaven,"
spoken of as existing in China at the beginning of the sixth century.
Wylie has surmised that the Hebrews were thus designated and remarks "that
this name, as the designation of a foreign sect, is the more remarkable
inasmuch as the state ritual of China has designated the Supreme by the
name of Heaven, from the earliest times down to the present day."

It is a curious reflection that it may possibly have been due to a gross
misconception of the Hebrew religion on the part of the Chinese and a
supposed identity of worship that caused the Israelites to be treated with
such tolerance and hospitality in China that their colony situated in the
heart of the country still exists to the present day. It is, in fact,
related of the Dowager Empress Ling, in the first half of the sixth
century, that she "abolished the various corrupt systems of religious
worship, excepting that of the foreign tien-spirit." A strange insight
into the Chinese view of the Christian religion is likewise afforded by
the following native documents cited by Wylie: "Now Jesus, the Lord of
Heaven, is worshipped by the Europeans. They say that this is the ancient
religion of Ta-tsin (Syria)."

The following remarkable pass