Augustine Zhao Rong and the martyrs of China

Augustine Zhao Rong was a soldier whose duty was to escort condemned Christians to execution; the constancy of Bishop Jean-Gabriel Taurin Dufresse converted him. Ordained a priest, he died in prison in 1815, on a date the Martyrology calls unknown. He gives his name to the hundred and twenty martyrs canonised together by John Paul II in 2000, killed between 1648 and 1930 — eighty-seven Chinese and thirty-three foreign missionaries, many of them during the Boxer rebellion. The youngest was under ten; the youngest the canonisation homily names is Anna Wang, fourteen. The date chosen for the canonisation, 1 October, China's national day, raised a diplomatic controversy.