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Christianity

The first recorded Christian missionary in China was Alopen, a Syriac -speaker, who arrived in Xi'an (then known as Chang'an) in 635 along the Silk Road. The Nestorian Stele, now located in Xi'an's Beilin Museum, is a Tang Chinese stele erected in 781 that documents the 150 years of early Christianity in China following Alopen. It is a 279-centimeter-tall (110- inch) limestone block with text in both Chinese and Syriac describing the existence of Christian communities in several cities in northern China. The Daqin Pagoda, a Buddhist pagoda in Zhouzhi County of Xi'an, has been suggested to have originally been a Nestorian Christian church from the Tang dynasty.

Baptist missionaries from England ran a hospital in Xi'an. In 1892, Arthur Gostick Shorrock and Moir Duncan founded the Sianfu Mission, in present-day Xi'an.