IT IS not mentioned in guidebooks. Few people know about it, or ever go there, and even then special permission is required. Yet for westerners in particular it is one of the most evocative historic sites in the whole of China - the cemetery where the Jesuits who gained such power and influence in the Middle Kingdom three centuries ago are buried.
The graveyard is located in the most unlikely of places - the grounds of the Beijing Municipality Communist Party School in western Beijing. It contains dozens of 10 foot high stone gravestones, some with dragons carved on the top, standing close together like a petrified forest.
The graves themselves are not marked. There is a reason for this. Thirty years ago, during the Cultural Revolution, as bands of communist zealots roamed the country destroying everything old and foreign, some Red, Guards arrived and ordered the president of the party school to break up the graveyard.
When they came back they were furious to find the gravestones still standing. But an employee of the party school said: "Let's dig holes and bury them and get rid of them that way." The Red Guards happily dug three pits, into which they lowered the heavy obelisks using ropes. It was, a full day's work.
Thus did a quick thinking communist cadre actually save this unique resting place for the Jesuits from his fanatical comrades. In 1979, after calm had returned to China, the stones were unearthed, well preserved, and put up again.
However, no one remembered the precise grave markings. So the monuments were erected on the approximate site. The bones might be underneath, or a little distance away. There are 49 gravestones, all with Latin and Chinese writing giving details of the European priests who came seeking converts in China. Fourteen were from Portugal, 10 from Italy, nine from Germany, nine from France, three from Czechoslovakia, two from Belgium, one from Yugoslavia and one had no nationality.
Another 14 stones with less elaborate carvings commemorate Chinese Jesuit priests. Pride of place goes to Matteus Ricci, the famous Italian missionary who became the first westerner to be given permission to reside in Beijing. He lived in China from 1583 to 1610. Ricci became an influential figure in court. So too did Father Johann Adam Sehall von Bell from Germany, who in the mid 17th century befriended the young Chinese emperor, Shunzhi, and became director of the Imperial Astronomy Bureau.
In the last two decades of the 1600s they were the top advisers to the emperor in matters of cartography and engineering, and in 1689 they acted as interpreters, and map makers in negotiating the northern border with Russia. Their main mission was nevertheless to reap a harvest of souls and they began to make headway when Emperor Kangxi issued an edict granting tolerance to the Christian religion. He insisted however that missionaries regard Chinese rites of ancestor worship as civil rather than religious ceremonies, so they could be carried on by converts and the Jesuits agreed.
It was not the Chinese that eventually did for the Society of Jesus in China but intrigue in Rome. Pope Clement XI, concerned that the Jesuits had weakened the integrity of the church by their concordant with Kangxi, sent an emissary who forbade, missionaries to obey Kangxi's orders. The emperor responded by expelling any priests who refused to sign a certificate accepting his position. The Franciscans and Dominicans would not and were kicked out. Most of the Jesuits defied the papal envoy and stayed.
But the Jesuits thereafter lost influence in China, went into decline in Europe, and were suppressed by the Vatican in 1773, and a historic opportunity to spread western teaching and science through the missionaries was lost. There will always be respect in China, however, for the three great Jesuit intellectuals after whom the graveyard is named: Ricci, von Bell and the Italian priest painter Giuseppe Castiglione, all of whom conveyed to the west their admiration for the philosophical richness of China and the sophistication of its bureaucracy.
The graves were desecrated once before, in the anti Christian Boxer rebellion of 1900, but were quickly restored. The characters on a stone tablet in the cemetery wall (translated for me by Endymion Wilkinson, the EU ambassador to China) said Emperor Guangxu had decreed in 1901, that the site should be an eternal resting place for the foreign priests.
There was a Catholic mission here until 1949 when the communists took power and foreign, clergy were expelled. It consisted of a school, a church and some dormitory building. In 1956 the establishment was given to the party school and the teaching of atheism replaced that of religion. The church still drew believers and the cadres would peer curiously through the windows during services, according to a Chinese historian who compiled an illustrated record of the cemetery. But it was soon converted to a store house, and then pulled down to make way for a canteen.
The old buildings are in a dilapidated condition, with grass growing from the gutters. On one roof a little Bavarian clock tower proclaims the time to be permanently 7 o'clock.
Since 1984, however, the Jesuit cemetery has been decreed a historical and cultural site. An ancient oak tree, planted by the missionaries, today spreads its protective branches over the graves. It too has been given a protection order. And the communist students and professors today make sure the Jesuit cemetery is kept in good order.