Church of the East (Nestorian Christianity)

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The eastern Christian church that separated from the imperial churches after the Council of Ephesus in 431 and expanded along the trade routes through Persia, Central Asia, India and China. The label Nestorian is an outsider's term the church itself rejected. Its arrival in China is documented precisely: a stele erected at Chang'an in 781 records that the missionary Alopen reached the Tang capital in 635 and received imperial permission to preach. The Tang proscription of foreign religions in 845 curtailed it in China, but it revived under the Mongols, several of whose ruling families included Christians, and it remained the most geographically extensive Christian church of the Middle Ages. A belief system, not a place.

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