TSINING, DIOCESE of. — Situated on the borders of the two provinces of Suiyuan and Chagar in Mongolia, it has an area of 40,000 sq. km and a population of 600,000.
On 8 February 1929, the apostolic vicariate of T. was erected, detached from that of Siwantze. The same vicariate was elevated to a diocese on 11 April 1946. It has 38,500 Catholics and 326 catechumens; 64 national priests; 11 major seminarians; and 100 national sisters. The territory, whose centre is now occupied by T., belongs to the semi-mountainous region which rises—as a powerful buttress—in defence of the Mongolian plateau.
At first the country was inhabited only by Mongols, devoted exclusively to pastoralism, and apart from a few groups of tents and miserable houses, the region had only rare and tiny centres of commercial exchange. After 1750, some Christian families established their homes at T. Later, other Christians founded three further small villages, where several families from the East joined them. In 1892, the first Scheut missionaries, attracted by the region’s possibilities for settlement and cultivation, made an initial attempt to purchase parcels of land sufficient for the settlement of colonists. The attempt failed. The experiment was resumed in 1895 by Fr. Rubbens and crowned with success, thanks to the support of the mandarins. The mission, with full observance of the legal formalities, resold in separate portions to Chinese colonists, who had come from various Christian communities, the lands purchased from the Mongols, who were nevertheless granted grazing rights for their herds. Thus, in four stages, from 1895 to 1925, numerous Christian communities were established in agricultural villages. During the period between 1906 and 1910, it was the cultivators themselves who invited the missionaries to settle in the new centres they had founded, because their presence provided an element of order, moral discipline, and unity necessary for the prosperity of the enterprise. This was also observed by journalists and travellers who went to see the missionaries’ work.
The socially Christian and charitable work carried out by the Fathers of Scheut reached its culmination when, in 1933, the Pontiff elevated a native, Mgr. Giuseppe Heng-An Fan, to the episcopate and entrusted him with the apostolic vicariate of T. (now a diocese).