Story
A door with no house behind it
At the top of a long flight of steps in the old city of Macao stands one of the most photographed church fronts in Asia. It is only a front. The granite façade of the church of Mater Dei, 23 metres across and 25.5 metres high in five tiers, is all that survived the fire of 1835 that destroyed the church and the Jesuit college of St Paul beside it.Its doors open on to the sky.
On its carved surface, the city's office lists biblical images, Chinese characters, chrysanthemums, Chinese lions, the founding saints of the Society of Jesus and a Portuguese ship.And in the crypt built behind it, where the high altar used to be, the Macao Museum records relics of Japanese and Vietnamese martyrs along the side walls, and in the centre a tomb that may have been that of the college's founder, .
For Japan's Catholics the image fits. For a hundred years Macao was the door through which the Church came into Japan, and then the door it was pushed out of, and the door it kept trying to open again. This page is about that door.
The Portuguese city
Macao lies at the mouth of the Pearl River in southern China. Heibonsha's encyclopedia and the Yamakawa dictionary say the Portuguese were allowed to settle there in 1557 after helping the Ming against pirates; they paid a yearly fee of 500 taels to keep the right.In Japan the city was known as Amakawa.With and Malacca it became one of the three great Portuguese bases in Asia, and above all the hub of the trade in Chinese silk for Japanese silver, carried on with .Mypedia adds that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was the base of the in the East.
The trade and the mission ran on the same ship. Nipponica says Portuguese trade in this period was always closely tied to the Jesuit mission.Every summer the great ship sailed from Macao for Japan, and the priests, letters and supplies of the Japan mission travelled with it.Valignano stayed at Macao before he first landed in Japan in 1579, and it was at Macao, on 28 July 1588, that he heard had expelled the missionaries.On the way home from Europe, the four boys of the waited there, and a press with movable type was set up there before they reached Japan, printing its first two books.
A college for Japan
The college of St Paul stood beside the church on the hill. Macao's Cultural Affairs Bureau calls it the first Western-style institution of university level in the Far East, with a programme that included theology, mathematics, geography, Chinese, Portuguese, Latin and astronomy, and says it prepared a significant number of missionaries for China, Japan and the rest of the region.The Macao Museum names Valignano as its founder.He died at Macao on 20 January 1606.
The college mattered to Japan because the Church there wanted Japanese priests. , who would become one of the first two Japanese ordained priests, went to Macao for theology in 1595 or 1596 and was made subdeacon there in 1598 with Julian Yamada and Luis Niabara., the great interpreter, was ordained at Macao (1594 or 1596; ). studied philosophy at Macao in 1603 and was ordained there in 1608.For a generation, Japanese and European Jesuits learned their theology side by side on the hill.
The exiles of 1614
In 1614 the shogunate banned Christianity and expelled the missionaries. In November ships left Nagasaki for and Macao.Pagès counts thirty-three Jesuit fathers and twenty-nine brothers who went to Macao; the catechists and students went with them.Konishi Mansho, born on Tsushima in 1600 and said to be a grandson of the Christian general , was one of the young exiles.Luis Niabara, one of the Japanese priests, went too; he tried to return in 1618, but his ship was wrecked in a typhoon and he never saw Japan again.
Macao now had a Japanese Christian community in exile. The college went on, but not easily. Our page on tells the hardest part honestly. Kibe reached Macao in 1615 hoping to study and join the Society. In 1616 he was told he could join, but would not be ordained. The sources point to two causes: the Japanese students met prejudice from their superiors, and money was short, so the provincial cut back their studies and the course was closed.Kibe would not accept that the door was closed. With his friends Miguel Minoes and Mansho he left Macao for Goa in the autumn of 1616 (our Kibe and Mansho pages; a spring 1618 date found in some accounts cannot fit Kibe's presence in Jerusalem on 2 April 1618), and from there went on, alone and largely on foot, by way of Jerusalem to Rome, where he was ordained on 15 November 1620.Mansho went by sea and entered the Jesuit novitiate of Sant'Andrea in Rome on 28 August 1623.Both found their way back into closed Japan: Mansho landed in Satsuma from Manila in 1632 and worked in secret around and Osaka.Kibe died under torture in Edo in 1639; Mansho, by then perhaps the last priest left in Japan, was martyred in 1644.
The base for return
Macao remained the base from which the mission tried to keep Japan alive. João Rodrigues, sent away from Japan in 1610, lived there for the rest of his life, taught and preached, wrote the yearly report for Rome, and published his short Japanese grammar, the Arte Breve, there in 1620.When the Dutch attacked Macao in 1622 and the Chinese ordered the new walls pulled down, he argued so hard against it that a Chinese official blamed him personally.He died on 1 August 1633 and was buried in the church of São Paulo before the altar of St Michael.Boxer published a study of the Japanese Christians buried in the same church in the first volume of Monumenta Nipponica (1938).
News of Japan came back slowly. When word came that Ferreira had given way under torture in 1633, the Visitor André Palmeiro was so shaken that he fasted and scourged himself; he died at Macao on 14 April 1635.Ferreira himself was dismissed from the Society at Macao in November 1636.Volunteers set out to bring him back to the faith. The Visitor Antonio Rubino, named in 1639, decided to go to Japan himself after the Portuguese embassy from Macao was executed there in 1640.
That embassy was Macao's last plea. When the shogunate forbade the Portuguese ships in 1639, Macao sent envoys, among them Luís Paes Pacheco, to ask for the trade to be restored. They reached Nagasaki in the fifth month of 1640, were held at Dejima, and on the sixteenth day of the sixth month were beheaded at with the crews.Rubino and his companions were arrested in 1642 as they tried to land in Satsuma and were taken to Nagasaki; a second group, with , was caught in 1643. Their stories are told on our pages on Ferreira and Chiara.Rubino's group in fact sailed from Manila in July 1642, and Chiara's came ashore on Kajime Ōshima, off Chikuzen, on 27 June 1643.They went knowing what had happened to the envoys.
Fire and memory
The college outlived the Japan mission by two centuries. In January 1835 fire destroyed the college and the church of Mater Dei, leaving the façade.From 1990 to 1996 the government of Macao excavated the site and built the Museum of Sacred Art and the crypt in the place of the old chancel, opened on 23 October 1996.The only work of the old college to survive the fire, the museum says, is a seventeenth-century painting of St Michael the Archangel, the saint before whose altar Rodrigues was buried.On 15 July 2005 the Historic Centre of Macao was inscribed on the World Heritage list.
Many visitors are told that the façade was carved by Japanese Christian exiles working with Chinese craftsmen. A heritage website repeats the story, giving the years 1620 to 1627; the official pages we checked do not say it.We label it until a primary or official source is found.
What is not in doubt is what lies behind the façade. The relics of Japanese martyrs rest there, in the church of the college that trained the priests who went back to Japan to die.A Catholic who climbs the steps in Macao today is standing at the door of the Japan mission.
Where to go next
Read the pages on Alessandro Valignano, João Rodrigues, Sebastião Kimura, Petro Kasui Kibe, Konishi Mansho, Cristóvão Ferreira and Giuseppe Chiara; the ; and the great ship trade.