1905 - Henri Mussot & Gong Wenhin

April 5, 1905

Batang, Sichuan

The remote mission of Batang reached out to Tibetan people living in a vast region from the present-day western Sichuan Province into northwest Yunnan and adjacent areas of southeast Tibet. The missionaries were required to travel for weeks at a time through isolated, sparsely populated regions inhabited by bandits and robbers. From time to time certain Tibetan lamas, jealous of the missionaries’ success, hired gangsters to beat the foreigners as they passed. The violence spilled over into death on several occasions.

George Henri Mussot was born at Ouge, France, on June 26, 1854. After studying to become a priest in Paris, Mussot was appointed to be a missionary to the Tibetan people. He left France on January 19, 1881, arriving at Calcutta, India, five weeks later. The original plan was that Mussot would enter Tibet by foot from India. The way was blocked, however, and Mussot ended up in a forest in the corner of Nepal, awaiting permission to cross into the Forbidden Land, as Tibet was known at the time. Mussot and his colleagues constructed a small mission station in Nepal during the years of waiting, and some of tribesmen from the local area became Christians.

Finally around the turn of the 20th century Mussot was granted permission to proceed into Tibet. On the night of December 31, 1901, a band of bandits attacked his residence. Mussot fled into the hills and barely escaped with his life. When he later returned, he found the Tibetans had burned his house down after plundering all the valuables they could find.

A later attack at Batang, made with the complicity of the local authorities, resulted in Mussot being

“tied with a cord around the neck and led into the mountains. On the way his persecutors beat him cruelly with their weapons, so that his back and arms were ravaged. Thankfully, his hands were untied so he was able to defend himself from the many blows intended for his head. Suffering from a fractured wrist, Mussot finally collapsed on the path. The persecutors, intending to keep him alive as a hostage, stopped striking him.”[1]

On April 3, 1905, Mussot was captured by men hired by the Buddhist lama of Batang. At the same time, they also captured Jean-André Soulié at another location. Soulié was viciously attacked but managed to survive until his death on April 14th. Henri Mussot, however, was held inside the Buddhist monastery for three days where he endured a series of barbaric tortures. The Frenchman

“begged his captors to spare the life of his faithful Chinese servant, Gong Wenhin, the head of a large family. The Buddhists were merciless, however, and Gong was bound and thrown into the river. Mussot was extracted from the monastery, tortured with spikes, and finally shot. His torturers cut off Mussot’s head and displayed it like a trophy above the entrance of the monastery.”[2]

One account of the persecution at Batang said, “two priests were killed, and converts who would not deny their faith were shot.”[3] The Catholic mission at Batang was delayed in their objectives but not crushed. After several setbacks they restarted the work and by 1924 the mission numbered two bishops, 15 French missionaries, and 4,800 baptized converts of whom “about two-fifths were Tibetans.”[4]

1. My translation of the Henri Mussot Obituary in the Archives des Missions Etrangères de Paris, China Biographies and Obituaries, 1900-1999.
2. Henri Mussot Obituary in the Archives des Missions Etrangères de Paris.
3. Marku Tsering, Sharing Christ in the Tibetan Buddhist World (Upper Darby, Pa: Tibet Press, 1988), 86.
4. Covell, The Liberating Gospel in China, 50.