This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Emperor Wuzong's Huichang era campaign against organised religion in Tang China was driven chiefly by the state's wish to seize monastic wealth and by hostility toward foreign religion generally, and it targeted Buddhism above every other faith. The campaign widened as it went: it was extended explicitly to Manichaeism in 843, and then, in the culminating edict of 845, to Zoroastrianism and to Nestorian Christianity, the Church of the East, with clergy across all these faiths forcibly laicised and their temples closed.
Historians generally regard the 845 edict as the event that broke the Church of the East's presence in China outright, a community that never substantially recovered there through the rest of the medieval period. The persecution is considered the likely occasion for the burial, for safekeeping, of the community's own great monument from its earlier, tolerated era.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was the effective end of a Christian presence in China that had continued since the seventh century, brought down not by rejection of Christianity specifically but by a fiscal and xenophobic campaign that happened to catch it alongside Buddhism, Manichaeism and Zoroastrianism in the same net. It would be centuries before another sustained Christian mission reached China again.