LOU TSENG-TSIANG (PETER CELESTINE), abbot. — Born in Shanghai on 12 June 1871, died in Bruges (Belgium) on 15 January 1949. In 1892 he was appointed interpreter at the Chinese legation in St. Petersburg, where he remained for fourteen years and married a young Belgian woman in 1899, with a dispensation from the impediment of mixed religion, since he was Protestant and she Catholic. Appointed minister to the Netherlands, he moved to Amsterdam and in 1911 returned to St. Petersburg as minister, where he embraced the Catholic faith, receiving conditional baptism on 23 December 1911.
After the founding of the Chinese Republic he was called to serve as the first Minister of Foreign Affairs of the new Republic. He held this office, with brief intervals, from 1912 to 1919, and after the Versailles Peace Conference he retired from political life. Later, he accepted for a short time the post of minister plenipotentiary to Switzerland in 1926. After the death of his wife, he sought admission to the Abbey of St. Andrew in Bruges, where on 15 January 1929 he made his profession and on 29 June 1935 was ordained to the priesthood. On 18 May 1946 he was appointed titular abbot of St. Peter in Ghent and received the abbatial blessing on 12 August following. He was a man of the highest rectitude and of valuable political experience. He cultivated a profound filial piety toward his parents, and in his monastic life transformed this Confucian piety into a filial love toward the Divine Father and the Blessed Virgin. He hoped for the encounter of Eastern and Western civilization through Christianity. He left two works: a brief autobiographical history, Souvenirs et pensées (Paris 1945, Italian ed. Brescia 1947), and a short philosophical-theological reflection, La rencontre des Humanités et la découverte de l'Évangile, posthumous, Paris 1950.