On the occasion of the Centenary of the Mission in Shangqiu (Henan, China), the Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine has commissioned the artist Santiago Bellido to make a large oil painting that puts a face to the protagonists and sheds light on one of the most painful and opaque moments in the history of the Augustinian Recollects.
In 1949 the Civil War in China ended with the victory and imposition of the Maoist regime. Christianity was immediately redefined as a harmful foreign ideology and the missionaries were pointed out as enemies of the new homeland.
The disarray in the mission of the Augustinian Recollects in Shangqiu (Henan) was total. After 25 years of work and with a mission already well structured as a Diocese and on the way to permanence, all the religious and social work of the Church was first paralyzed and then sunk in a matter of months.
In the following four years all the Spanish missionaries were forced to leave China, not without several being before arrested, confined or even imprisoned. After leaving the country they would never return but, in addition, from 1955 and for 30 years all communication with the mission from outside China was cut off.
Regarding the Chinese Recollect religious, the professed who were still in initial formation were taken to Hong Kong first and then to Spain. But those who were already priests hoped to be able to continue the task. The reality was different: they began to suffer the control and surveillance of the new Government.
All of them were arrested, interrogated and sent to political re-education camps or condemned to forced labor. By the way, several survived and from 1985 onwards managed to re-establish the mission, the only case in all of China of all the Catholic missions that were closed in 1949.
Five of those Recollect priests died during their sentences, coinciding with one of the most terrifying episodes in the history of humanity, the Cultural Revolution. The Augustinian-Recollect Family considers them martyrs: the suffering they faced was caused solely by their Christian faith and their love for the Augustinian-Recollect way of life, whose charisma they had freely assumed and wished to live.
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the beginning of that mission, the Province of Saint Nicholas of Tolentine of the Order of Augustinian Recollects wanted to give itslef a gift and has turned to the artist Santiago Bellido with the aim of bringing to light, paying homage, remembering and doing historical justice to these five Chinese martyrs.
Materially, this homage is an oil painting on canvas measuring 160 centimetres in height by 210 in width. The main focus, as it could not be otherwise, is on the figures of the five martyrs, the main motif.
The composition is made in horizontal bands, giving a sense of continuity and, as a landscape format, inspiring realism. Read vertically, from top to bottom, they acquire the sense of a temporal reading, of cause and consequence.
In the central, larger and main band, we see the five martyrs dressed in the Augustinian Recollect habit. They appear seated in a placid attitude, outside the suffering of their martyrdom. They are part of the Augustinian Recollect religious community, although they are physically distant and separated from their brothers.
Spiritually, however, they do not abandon these ties and therefore form part of a chain that extends beyond time and space. The five are linked to their brothers, who are not visible in the painting, but who join their hands to theirs, forming a circle that transcends the composition.
The central band emerges from the painting to give that sensation of continuity and alludes to unity despite the difficulties, and above it another horizontal landscape can be seen, that of the Qinghai mines.
At the top are its characteristic arid mountains, a landscape of warm and earthy colours. The soft shape of the mountains transforms at one end into the red flag of the Chinese Revolution, inscribing the scene temporally and thematically.
Below the mountains, and at the height of the faces of the protagonists, is the immense multitude of those enslaved in the labour camps. The depth of the scene extracts the five martyrs from this environment. Their spiritual condition allows them to escape the harsh mechanics of repression.
At the bottom there is another horizontal band, in this case of a symbolic nature. If the real cause is shown at the top, the spiritual consequence is seen at the bottom: the laurel branches represent victory.
Here, naturalism is abandoned to create a celebratory frieze, which does not belong to the perspective of the upper part but to another world that represents the future, the overcoming of the painful present and triumph.
The author
Santiago Bellido Blanco is a doctor of architecture and a university professor. He has taught at universities in Spain and Portugal and currently teaches the subjects of Contemporary Art Movements and Graphic Expression at the European University Miguel de Cervantes in Valladolid.
Specializing in Architectural Graphic Expression, he regularly holds individual and collective exhibitions. As a painter, he works with oil and watercolor, as well as various drawing techniques. He has exhibited, among many other venues, at the Patio Herreriano Museum of Contemporary Art and at the Royal Monastery of Saint Joaquim and Saint Anne in Valladolid.
He has published several books in the artistic and scientific fields, and collaborates as an illustrator for many other authors, including Miguel Delibes and Joaquín Díaz.
A contributor to the publications of the Saint Augustine High School of the Augustinian Recollects in Valladolid, where he studied and made his first sketches of humorous caricatures and portraying the life of St. Augustine, Santiago has portrayed the Japanese Recollect martyrs of the 17th century, the bishop and missionary St. Ezequiel Moreno both in a large painting and in vignettes, and has created the cover of books about the venerable Mariano Gazpio or the history of the Shangqiu mission itself, as can be seen in these links.
The martyrs
These are the final stories of suffering, persecution and death of the martyrs, which we describe according to the order in which they appear in the composition, from left to right.
Lucas Yuo and Pedro Kuo
Lucas Yuo (1917-1958) and Pedro Kuo (1924-1958) were arrested separately. Lucas, arrested in 1955 in Chutsi, was convicted of being a counter-revolutionary and spent two years in prison, then sent to the mines in Qinghai.
Pedro was in Shanghai and was forced to attend indoctrination meetings until his arrest on the night of September 8, 1955, when all the clergy and lay leaders of the local Church in Shanghai were imprisoned.
He was accused of being an anti-communist, a counter-revolutionary, a spy for the Vatican and a spy for the United States, and was subjected to grueling public and private interrogations and trials. Finally, he was also sentenced to the mines in Qinghai.
If they are together in these lines and in the painting, it is because they formed a true “community of silence,” one of the most moving and significant testimonies of the Augustinian Recollect charism.
By pure chance, Lucas and Pedro ended up carrying the same pole in Qinghai from which hung the basket with the newly extracted mineral. They never spoke to each other in public so that no one would know they knew each other and thus not be separated. They greeted each other with a smile and each other’s company gave them mutual comfort and hope.
During the great famine in China (1958-1961), between 15 and 55 million people died in the country. The situation of the prisoners was infinitely worse than that of the general population. Hunger, cold, fatigue and inhuman conditions claimed the lives of both in 1958.
Jose She
Jose She (1920-1958) was forced to abandon his pastoral and ministerial work and to live with his family to help them with the agricultural tasks until he was imprisoned for two years in September 1955. Immediately after serving this sentence, he was sentenced to another five years of forced labor in Minchuang.
In 1958 he died of hunger and fatigue. A good priest and fearless in faith, he used to repeat: “A good priest, if he is not in the church, will be in prison.”
Jose Shan
Jose Shan (1905-1975) was the first Chinese Augustinian Recollect. When the bishop and the Spanish missionaries were expelled, Shan acted as vicar general of the Diocese, hiding it from the authorities, to avoid pressure to unite the Diocese of Shangqiu with the Chinese Patriotic Church.
In addition to fulfilling his obligations as a priest and missionary, he earned his living by growing a vegetable garden, selling fodder, grinding grain and spinning cotton. For a time he managed to form a kind of mixed community with three of the former Catechists of Christ the King, maintaining worship and prayers.
The cover, which allowed them to earn a living and not be bothered by the Government, was a small ophthalmological hospital. The former nuns had worked in the medical service of the mission, trained by the Spanish Recollect doctor Pedro Colomo.
Furthermore, under this pretext, Jose was able to travel to Shanghai to seek medicines and thus meet the only non-Chinese Recollect left in the country, until he was finally expelled in 1955.
In 1955 Jose Shan was accused of espionage and sentenced to two years in prison and then to fifteen years of forced labour on a farm in Shanxian.
In 1962 he was allowed to return home to recover from a serious illness. He collected animal manure on the roads for surviving and looked after his sick mother. He held out until August 1975, when he died practically of starvation.
Gregorio Li
Gregorio Li (1917-1980) had been a seminary teacher and was appointed headmaster of Shangqiu Primary School after the Revolution, until he resigned from the post in 1951 to avoid having to abide by the State ideology.
He was arrested in 1958 and sentenced to 15 years of labour in the Quinghai mines. He died there in March 1980.
