Pilgrims to Shangchuan Island: (re-)constructing a holy topography and celebrating St. Francis Xavier (1688–1933)

In December 1552, St. Francis Xavier S.J. (1506–1552) died on the island of Shangchuan 上川, part of what is now the Chuanshan 川山 Archipelago in Guangdong Province, in Southern China. Xavier's odor sanctitatis, emanating from his wooden coffin, and the miraculous discovery of his incorruptible body convinced Antonio de Santa Fe, a Chinese novice and one of Xavier's closest followers before his death, and Portuguese merchants present on the island to set out on a journey to bring the body to the Portuguese enclave of Goa, in India. From then on, and especially after Xavier's canonization in 1622, Goa became the center of the Saint's cultic relevance, outshining the island of Shangchuan . Given its remote location and its declining commercial significance, Shangchuan became a liminal cultic place. 2 On the one hand, the island is portrayed in the manifold depictions of the death of St. Francis Xavier, starting with the famous painting by André Reinoso (ca. 1590 -after 1650) held in the church of São Roque in Lisbon. On the other, Jesuit missionaries struggled to establish a lasting cultic memory of the Saint on the island. One of the earliest attempts to . One of the earliest attempts to establish ‘pilgrimages’ to the island of Shangchuan occurred as early as 1554. According to Manuel Teixeira, on April 18, 1554, a group of seven Catholic missionaries, including Fr. Melchior Nuñez Barreto S.J. (1520–1571), and five seminarians left Goa for Japan. Nine of them, all except Fr. Luis Frois S.J. (1532–1597) and two seminarians, reached the island of Shangchuan in July of the same year. There, according to Teixeira, they celebrated mass at the place where Francis Xavier was buried (Teixeira: 1940, 36–37). In the memoirs of Fernão Mendez Pinto (1509–1583), a Portuguese explorer who reached the island with the Jesuit missionaries, he and his companions found the location they associated with the tomb of Francis Xavier covered with weeds and bushes. After this initial attempt to perpetuate the Saint’s living memory on the island, the precise location of Xavier’s burial place on Shangchuan went gradually unnoticed and was then lost. Only in 1644, and even more firmly in 1688, did Catholic communities try, amidst several practical difficulties, to establish lasting cultic landmarks celebrating St. Francis Xavier in Shangchuan. After the establishment of a memorial chapel in the late 19th century, still standing to this day, Catholic missionaries established several Catholic institutions to follow in Xavier’s footsteps, creating a novel holy topography for the island and re-imagining its contemporary relevance for Sino-Catholic communities. This article investigates the longue durée efforts to restore a vivid cultic memory of St. Francis Xavier on the island of Shangchuan. It provides selected case studies from the early modern era to 1933, when a major pilgrimage was organized by the Maryknoll Catholic clergy in Shangchuan, together with Catholic communities in Macao and Hong Kong.