The diffusion of Christianity along the Silk Road from Iraq and Iran to China in the pre-modern era has attracted scholarly attention in the West since the discovery of the famous Xi'an (Nestorian) Monument c. 1623. This initial discovery was dismissed as a 'Jesuit forgery' by Voltaire, Edward Gibbon and many other scholars of the Enlightenment. However, its authenticity has been more than vindicated by the discovery of genuine (Nestorian / Jingjiao)...