Jonah of Hankou

Jonah of Hankou, known in the world as Vladimir Pokrovsky, was a Russian Orthodox bishop and monk who served Russian émigrés in China after the Revolution. He was born on 17 April 1888 in the village of Kozli in the Kaluga Governorate of the Russian Empire. Orphaned in childhood, he was raised by a village deacon and educated in church schools. He completed the Kaluga Theological Seminary and then the Kazan Theological Academy, graduating in 1914. While still at the academy, in 1912, he was tonsured a monk with the name Jonah and ordained hierodeacon and hieromonk, following the usual path of academically trained monastic clergy in the pre-revolutionary Russian Church.

After his studies he taught in theological schools and served as a military chaplain during the First World War. The revolutions of 1917 and the Civil War ended that settled career. He was in the Urals and Siberia as Bolshevik authority spread; biographies record arrest, escape, chaplaincy with White forces, and a long eastward retreat. With other clergy and lay refugees he reached the Chinese Eastern Railway zone in Manchuria, where the Russian Orthodox mission in China was trying to care for large numbers of displaced Russians. In 1922 he was consecrated to the episcopate in Beijing and given the title Bishop of Hankou, as a vicar of the Diocese of Beijing. Hankou lay far to the south on the Yangtze; his actual pastoral work was in northern Manchuria.

Jonah’s flock was concentrated in the border railway town of Manzhouli (Manchuli). There he organized an orphanage, a free dining hall, a library, and workshops so that refugee children and the unemployed might have food, shelter, and some means of livelihood. He was remembered for extreme personal poverty and for giving away his own clothes and money when he saw need, and for visiting the sick without regard to rest. Russians and local Chinese both attested to his accessibility. His episcopate lasted only about three years, but his reputation for charity spread through the diaspora in China.

In the autumn of 1925 he contracted a severe throat infection that developed into blood poisoning. He died on 20 October 1925 (7 October on the Julian calendar then used by the Russian Church), at the age of thirty-seven. Traditional accounts say that shortly before death he wrote a word of blessing for a child who was not expected to live, and that the child recovered. He was buried in Manzhouli. In 1996 the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia glorified him as a saint. He is commemorated on 20 October and is remembered as a pastor of refugees, orphans, and the poor in the Russian emigration in China.