Qualla: Chapel of St. Francis Xavier

Chapel of St. Francis Xavier: Introduction

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit K.C. Tang, CC BY-SA 3.0. The chapel stands at the southwestern edge of Coloane, Macau's southern island, beside a small square and a monument commemorating a 1910 victory over pirates. It is not large. Its facade is white and yellow, in the Portuguese colonial style common to Macau's older religious buildings. Built in 1928, it looks like many other chapels in this part of the world — which makes it easy to miss what was kept inside. For decades, the Chapel of St. Francis Xavier held some of the most freighted Christian relics in Asia: the bones of men crucified in Japan in 1597, the remains of Christians killed in a seventeenth-century rebellion, and a fragment of bone from the arm of Francis Xavier himself, the Jesuit who brought Christianity to Asia and died within sight of China's coast. The chapel was a small room at the end of a very long road.

Image: K.C. Tang | CC BY-SA 3.0

Chapel of St. Francis Xavier: The Martyrs of Nagasaki

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LN9267, CC BY-SA 4.0. In February 1597, twenty-six Catholic men were executed on a hill outside Nagasaki under orders from the Japanese ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi. They were crucified — left on crosses in the winter cold — and then killed with spears. Among them were six Franciscan friars from Europe, t...

Image: LN9267 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Chapel of St. Francis Xavier: A Bone Fifty Miles from China

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Abasaa, Public domain. Francis Xavier arrived in Goa in 1542 and spent a decade moving through India, Southeast Asia, and Japan, establishing Christian communities and arguing with local rulers. By 1552, he had fixed his ambition on China — the largest, most populous civilization he had not yet reached...

Image: Abasaa | Public domain

Chapel of St. Francis Xavier: Coloane and the Pirates

Fri, 12 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Slleong, Public domain. The chapel stands near a monument that marks a different kind of history: a battle in 1910 in which the residents of Coloane, helped by Portuguese forces, defeated a pirate raid. The pirates had kidnapped children from the village, and the subsequent fight to recover them became ...

Image: Slleong | Public domain