Mission route to China – 1905
Missionaris Cyriel Van Lantschoot vertrok in 1905 naar het missiegebied van Zuidwest-Mongolië (Ordos). De reis verliep vermoedelijk via de klassieke stoomscheepvaart route door het Suezkanaal en de Indische Oceaan.
The mission station Siao-Sa-Kiai, mentioned in the letter of pater Cyriel Van Lantschoot dated 10 January 1914, was located in the vast steppe region of Ordos in what is today Inner Mongolia (China). This area lies within the great bend of the Yellow River (Huang He), north of the Chinese heartland and south of the Mongolian plateau.
The name Siao-Sa-Kiai is not a modern Chinese spelling but an older missionary transcription, written according to the phonetic systems used by European missionaries at the end of the nineteenth century. Many Scheut missionaries used spellings derived from early French or Wade-Giles romanisation systems. The elements of the name probably correspond to Chinese words such as xiao (小, “small”) and sha (沙, “sand”). Cyriel himself translated the name freely as “Little Sand Road”, which fits well with the sandy steppe landscape of the Ordos plateau.
At the beginning of the twentieth century this region formed part of the Apostolic Vicariate of South-West Mongolia, entrusted to the Belgian missionaries of Scheut (CICM). Mission stations were often small villages consisting of a modest chapel, a priest’s house and a few Christian families scattered among much larger non-Christian communities. According to Cyriel’s letter, the station of Siao-Sa-Kiai and two nearby villages together counted about 160 families, of which roughly fifty had converted to Christianity.
Missionaries serving these remote communities travelled long distances across the steppe, often on horseback or by cart, and endured extreme winters. Cyriel writes that the faithful would otherwise have had to walk more than an hour in temperatures of thirty degrees below zero to attend Sunday mass. For that reason he regularly travelled to the small chapel of Siao-Sa-Kiai himself to celebrate the liturgy there.