Bai Xiaoman

Lawrence Bai Xiaoman (Chinese: 白小满; in older missionary literature also Laurentius Pe-Man or Lawrence Pe-Man) was a Chinese Catholic layman and martyr of the Qing period. He was born in 1821 in Guizhou province in southwestern China. Surviving notices describe him as a man of poor rural origin who earned his living as a laborer, hired worker, or mason. Like many impoverished men of that region in the nineteenth century, he left his native province in search of work and went to Guangxi, where he settled in the district of Xilin. Christianity in the interior remained legally precarious: even after limited toleration had been conceded in the treaty ports, local magistrates could still treat the faith as a heterodox teaching and punish its adherents.

In Guangxi he encountered the French priest Auguste Chapdelaine of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, who was evangelizing in the province despite remaining restrictions on missionary activity inland. Bai Xiaoman received instruction and was baptized, taking the Christian name Lawrence (Laurentius). The baptism is generally placed in the mid-1850s, so that he died as a recent convert. He remained a layman and is not recorded as having entered any religious order; after baptism he assisted the missionary and lived among a small community of Chinese Catholics. The principal historical summaries prepared for his cause do not establish with certainty whether he was married or had children.

In early 1856 the magistrate of Xilin moved against Christians in his jurisdiction. Chapdelaine was arrested, tortured, and died in custody; the episode became known as the Xilin incident and later entered Franco-Qing diplomacy. Bai Xiaoman was seized in the same repression. Officials pressed him to renounce Christianity and to betray other believers. He refused to apostatize. After imprisonment and torture he was put to death on 25 February 1856 at Xilin in Guangxi. Accounts agree that he was killed for refusing to deny the faith; they are less uniform on the exact Qing method of execution used in his case.

The Church recognized his martyrdom in two stages. Pope Leo XIII beatified him on 27 May 1900 together with Chapdelaine and other victims of nineteenth-century persecutions in China. On 1 October 2000 Pope John Paul II canonized him in Saint Peter’s Square with one hundred and nineteen companions, known collectively as Saint Augustine Zhao Rong and Companions, or the 120 Martyr Saints of China (eighty-seven Chinese and thirty-three foreign missionaries, whose deaths range across several centuries). Their joint liturgical feast is 9 July. Lawrence Bai Xiaoman is venerated as a lay witness among the Catholic martyrs of China; standard directories do not attach distinct personal patronages to him.