St. Francis Xavier Church

This guide to St. Francis Xavier Church in Shanghai opens on Pentecost Sunday 1853, the day of its first mass, after a century in which Catholicism was banned and the city's only chapel seized. It follows the Spanish Jesuit Joannes Ferrer, who designed and raised the building over six years and turned its grounds into a studio teaching Chinese students to paint and carve in the Western style his own father had practiced. Ferrer died only three years after that first service, at just thirty nine.