St. Anna Wang

Saint Anna Wang was a Chinese Catholic laywoman and martyr of the Boxer Rebellion. She was born in 1886 in the village of Machiazhuang in Wei County (Weixian), in the former Zhili province of northern China, now Hebei. She belonged to a Catholic family in a region that had seen Catholic missionary activity during the nineteenth century. Her mother died while Anna was still a child, and she was thereafter raised with a stepmother. Accounts of her life describe her as a pious girl who knew her catechism and was attached to prayer and the practice of the faith.

In the summer of 1900 the Yihetuan, or Boxer, movement attacked foreign interests and Chinese Christians across northern China. Catholic villages in Hebei suffered raids and massacres. In July 1900 Boxers seized a group of Catholics from the Wei County area, including the fourteen-year-old Anna Wang together with members of her family and other local faithful. The captives were ordered to renounce Christianity and to worship before non-Christian images. Hagiographical traditions record that some prisoners were tempted to apostatize and that family members, including Anna’s stepmother in some tellings, urged her to save her life by recanting.

Anna Wang refused to deny her faith. Narratives preserved in later beatification materials and in Catholic writing portray her as encouraging her companions to remain steadfast, declaring that she was a Catholic, that she would not abandon God, and that she desired heaven. She is said to have prayed as she awaited death. After others had been killed, she was executed, according to the usual accounts by beheading, in late July 1900, most often dated to 21 or 22 July. Precise details of the exact site of the killing and of her burial are not firmly established in the sources readily available, a common limitation for many rural victims of the 1900 persecutions.

Anna Wang was beatified by Pope Pius XII in 1955 among Chinese Catholics who had died during the Boxer uprising. She was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 1 October 2000 as one of the 120 Martyrs of China, a group of Chinese faithful and foreign missionaries killed between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Their feast is kept on 9 July. She is venerated as a lay martyr and as an example of youthful constancy. She did not belong to a religious order and is not recorded as having married.