The Chapel from Tao Fong Shan, meaning "mountain of the Christ Wind," sits atop a mountain in Hong Kong as the center of the Christian Mission to the Buddhists

Catholic missionaries inspired by Francis Xavier first brought Christianity to China. They planted a small Christian community, but China remained closed to westerners. In the nineteenth century, economic colonialism led to the Opium War in which England forced China to open several port cities to foreigners. Missionary societies and Orders quickly sent personnel to China, where they sought Chinese converts who could become evangelists. An unexpected development was the Tai Ping rebellion. This Chinese agrarian mass movement invoked certain elements of Christianity in a rebellion against the ruling dynasty. In 1853 this movement took over the city of Nanking. By 1865 the Chinese government suppressed the movement at the cost of perhaps twenty million lives. That same year Hudson Taylor began the China Inland Mission, which became for a time the largest missionary project in the world.