TSINCHOW, DIOCESE OF. — In the southern part of the province of Kansu (north-western China).
Erected as an apostolic prefecture on 28 April 1905 under the name of Southern Kansu, by division of the apostolic vicariate of Kansu (q.V. LANCROW), and entrusted to the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (Scheut), in a new territorial arrangement made on 8 May 1922, the prefecture being suppressed, the apostolic vicariate of Eastern Kansu was erected and entrusted to the Capuchins of the regular province of the Rhine-Westphalia. On 3 December 1924 it took the name of apostolic vicariate of T.; on 25 January 1930 it ceded 17 civil sub-prefectures for the erection of the apostolic prefecture of Pingliang (q.v.); on 11 April 1946 it was raised to the rank of a suffragan diocese of Lanchow. It covers an area of 45,000 sq. km. As of 30 June 1950, with a total population of approximately 2,500,000, there were 8,548 Catholics and 424 catechumens, 8 priests (of whom 18 were Chinese), and 33 sisters (11 of them indigenous). Among its works were 3 hospitals, 8 dispensaries, 1 orphanage, and 33 schools.
The first Christians in T. were faithful who had emigrated to Kansu from the neighbouring civil provinces of Szechwan and Shensi in the second half of the last century. From 1876 a missionary of the apostolic vicariate of Shensi brought them the Sacraments once a year; from 1881, however, a Scheutist religious began to reside in this territory, followed shortly afterwards by others. In 1905 there were 10 priests with 775 Christians and 522 catechumens; by 1922 the number of the baptised had risen to about 4,000. Although not fiercely persecuted as in many other regions of China, here too Catholicism encountered opposition from the mandarins and from pagan followers of Confucianism.