East Asia and Pacific Holy Sites

1. What East Asia and the Pacific Hold for a Pilgrim

East Asia and the Pacific hold Christian holy places of four kinds: execution grounds where martyrs died, village churches built by communities that kept the faith without clergy, Marian shrines that grew out of persecution rather than out of an approved apparition, and the graves of missionaries and founders. Nagasaki, the Korean martyr shrines in Seoul, La Vang in Vietnam, Sheshan outside Shanghai, the Portuguese-rooted Holy Week of Larantuka, the tomb of Mary MacKillop in North Sydney and the grave of Bishop Pompallier at Motuti are the anchors. Most of these are small shrines held by local churches rather than the great international destinations, and they reward a pilgrim who reads the history before travelling.

This page is a map of the region for someone deciding where to go and what they are looking at when they arrive. It gives the history, the person buried at each place, the act of the Church where an act exists, and it says plainly where no act exists at all. It carries no prices, no opening hours, no timetables and no tour operators, because all of those change and a page that published them would be lying to you within a year.

The geography this page covers

The pages on this site divide the Christian world by pilgrimage geography rather than by continent. This one takes Japan, Korea, China and its two special administrative regions, Taiwan, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines' neighbours across maritime Southeast Asia, Pakistan, Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea. India has enough sites to carry a page of its own, and those are set out in our guide to pilgrimage sites in India. Kalaupapa is the one Pacific site this page hands to a sibling. The peninsula on the north shore of Molokai, where the Kingdom of Hawaii exiled people diagnosed with Hansen's disease from 1866 and where Saint Damien de Veuster and Saint Marianne Cope both worked and died, sits in Hawaii, a state of the United States, and is covered in full on our guide to pilgrimage sites in the United States and Canada, with Damien's own story on our page about Saint Damien of Molokai. Damien's body was returned to Belgium in 1936 and his right hand was reinterred in his original grave at Kalawao in 1995, so the grave a pilgrim stands at on Molokai holds a relic rather than the body.

2. Why Pilgrimage Here Is Shaped by Martyrdom

Christian pilgrimage in East Asia is built on execution grounds because Christianity in East Asia spent long periods as a capital crime. Japan banned it in 1614 and enforced the ban for two and a half centuries. Korea's court persecuted the Church in waves through the nineteenth century, in 1801, 1839, 1846 and 1866. Vietnamese emperors issued edicts against Christians from the late eighteenth century into the 1880s. China's Boxer violence in 1900 killed Chinese Catholics and Protestants in large numbers along with foreign missionaries. The shrines that grew afterwards mark the ground where the killing happened.

That history produces a distinctive kind of holy place. In Europe a pilgrim usually visits a tomb, a relic or an apparition site. In this region the pilgrim more often visits a hill, a riverbank or a fortress wall, and the object of veneration is the ground itself. Jeoldusan in Seoul is a bluff over a river. Nishizaka in Nagasaki is a slope beside a railway station. Songkhon in Thailand is a churchyard on the Mekong. The buildings are usually modern, because they were put up after the persecution ended, and the antiquity is in the event rather than in the stone.

The second theme: the faith kept without priests

The other thread running through the region is lay transmission. Japan's hidden Christians kept baptism, the calendar and a memorised body of prayer for over two hundred years with no priest, no Mass and no Bible in their hands. Korea's Church was founded by lay scholars who read Catholic books brought from Beijing and sought baptism before any missionary arrived, which makes Korea one of the very few national churches in history begun by its own laity. Saint Peter To Rot in New Britain was a catechist, a married layman, who kept the sacramental life of his village going while the priests were interned during the Second World War.

The Catholic teaching underneath that is ordinary and worth stating. Baptism can be administered by any person, including a layperson, in case of necessity. Canon law also provides that where no authorised priest can be reached without grave inconvenience, spouses may contract marriage validly before witnesses alone (canon 1116). The Church has held that where clergy cannot reach the faithful, the faithful themselves carry what they can carry, and God supplies. These communities put that teaching under a longer strain than any European parish has known, and it held.

Two rules for reading this page honestly

• An old devotion is not an approved apparition. La Vang, Sheshan and Donglu all carry real Church history, and none of them rests on a decree recognising a vision. Our page on approved Marian apparitions and what approval actually means sets out the framework, including the 2024 norms under which the Church ordinarily makes no declaration of supernatural origin at all.
• Not every church in this region is Catholic, and the differences are real. Australia and New Zealand have large Anglican and Presbyterian histories, Korea has an enormous Protestant population with its own memorial sites, and Japan's hidden Christian communities split at the end of the persecution, with some rejoining the Catholic Church and others continuing a separately transmitted practice of their own. Each is described here in its own terms.

3. Nagasaki and the Hidden Christians

Nagasaki is the centre of Christian pilgrimage in Japan, and its sites tell one continuous story from the crucifixions of 1597 to the atomic bomb of 1945. Francis Xavier landed at Kagoshima in 1549 and the mission spread quickly in Kyushu, with Nagasaki itself developing as a port largely under Christian influence. Toyotomi Hideyoshi turned against the mission, and on 5 February 1597 twenty-six Catholics were crucified on Nishizaka hill above the harbour: six Franciscan missionaries, three Japanese Jesuits including Paul Miki, and seventeen Japanese laymen and boys, the youngest of them children. Pius IX canonised them in 1862.

The Tokugawa shogunate outlawed Christianity in 1614 and hunted it for the next two hundred and fifty years, using the fumie, a bronze plaque of Christ or the Virgin that suspects were made to tread on. The Shimabara rising of 1637 and 1638, put down at Hara Castle in the Amakusa and Shimabara region, ended organised Christian resistance and hardened the ban. The ruins of Hara Castle are a component of the UNESCO listing for the region, and the site is a bare headland above the sea with almost nothing standing, which is exactly what makes it worth walking.

Oura Church and 17 March 1865

Oura Church was built in 1864 by the Paris Foreign Missions for the foreign residents of the newly opened treaty port and dedicated to the Twenty-Six Martyrs, its front deliberately turned toward Nishizaka. On 17 March 1865 a group of villagers from Urakami entered and told the priest, Bernard Petitjean, that their hearts were the same as his and asked where the statue of Santa Maria was. They were descendants of Christians who had held the faith through the whole ban. Japanese Catholics call the moment the Discovery of the Hidden Christians, and it is the reason Oura is a national treasure of Japan and was raised to the rank of a minor basilica by Pope Francis in 2016.

The discovery was followed by more persecution, not by relief. The ban was still in force. Arrests at Urakami began in 1867 and from 1868 the authorities deported the Christian population of the village to domains across Japan, in what is remembered as the fourth Urakami crackdown. Many died in exile. The edict boards proscribing Christianity were removed in 1873 under foreign pressure, and the survivors came home to rebuild.

Urakami Cathedral and 9 August 1945

The returned villagers of Urakami built a brick cathedral between 1895 and 1925, and it was among the largest Catholic churches in East Asia when it was finished. On 9 August 1945 the second atomic bomb detonated a few hundred metres from it and destroyed it, killing the people at prayer inside and a large proportion of the Catholic population of the district. The cathedral was rebuilt in 1959. A section of the old belfry lies where the blast threw it, in a small park beside the river below, and a scorched wooden head of the Virgin recovered from the ruins is kept and venerated in the cathedral.

Takashi Nagai, a Catholic doctor of radiology at the Nagasaki medical school, survived the blast, lost his wife in it, and wrote from a small hut beside the ruins until his death in 1951. His hut, Nyokodo, and the museum beside it stand in Urakami. His writing is the theological voice of the place, and pilgrims who read The Bells of Nagasaki before arriving understand what they are looking at.

Source for the UNESCO listing: the Hidden Christian Sites in the Nagasaki Region were inscribed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO in 2018, in twelve component parts spread across Nagasaki Prefecture and Kumamoto Prefecture. Component names used on this page follow the inscription. Figures for the number of people killed in the atomic bombing, and for the Catholic share of them, vary between sources and are not given here.

4. The Goto Islands and the Village Churches

The Goto Islands are an archipelago off the west coast of Kyushu holding dozens of small Catholic churches built by families who fled there during the persecution. Christians from the Sotome coast near Nagasaki migrated to Goto from the late eighteenth century onward, taking farmland nobody wanted on steep and remote shores, precisely because remoteness was safety. After the ban was lifted, those villages spent their own money on churches, often with a French missionary priest as designer and the villagers as labour, and the results are among the most affecting small buildings in Japanese Christianity.

What is worth seeing

Egami Church on Naru Island is a wooden church of 1918, built by the carpenter Tetsukawa Yosuke for a village of four families, painted cream with blue trim, with wood grain painted onto the interior columns because the congregation could not afford marble. Kashiragashima Church was built by the villagers themselves out of stone quarried on the island. Nokubi Church on Nozaki Island stands in a village that no longer exists, the population having left decades ago, and it is reached by boat. Dozaki Church near Fukue is the oldest of the Goto churches and holds a museum of the hidden Christian period.

On the mainland side, Shitsu village in Sotome holds the church and the workshops of Marc Marie de Rotz, a French priest who arrived in 1879 and spent the rest of his life there building a church, a dispensary, a macaroni factory and a weaving shed to give the women of a starving fishing village paid work. He is buried in the village. Ono Church nearby was built for a community that had until then met in a house. Both are UNESCO components.

The kakure kirishitan and how to speak about them accurately

When the ban ended in 1873, the hidden communities divided. Many returned to the Catholic Church and were reconciled to it, and their descendants fill the churches described above. Others declined, because what they had transmitted for two centuries had become a distinct practice of its own, with its own prayers in a Latin and Portuguese so worn by oral transmission that the words had changed, its own calendar, its own leaders, and its own devotional objects hidden in Buddhist and Shinto forms. Those who continued separately are called kakure kirishitan, the hidden Christians, and small groups of them survive today, chiefly on Ikitsuki Island near Hirado.

They are not a Catholic community and they do not claim to be. A visitor should describe them as they describe themselves, as the keepers of a transmission received from their ancestors, and should not treat their practice as a folkloric curiosity or as a variety of Catholicism. Kasuga village and the sacred places on Hirado, also UNESCO components, are where that tradition is most visible in the landscape, in a hill and an island held sacred rather than in any building.

5. Akita and Marian Devotion in Japan

Akita is the modern Marian site in Japan most written about outside the country, and its status is more limited than the internet suggests. A small community of the Handmaids of the Eucharist at Yuzawadai, in the hills outside Akita city in the north of Honshu, reported that a wooden statue of Our Lady in their chapel wept over a period running from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s, and that one of the sisters, Agnes Katsuko Sasagawa, received messages in 1973. Bishop John Shojiro Ito of Niigata issued a pastoral letter on 22 April 1984 recognising the supernatural character of the events and authorising veneration of the Holy Mother of Akita in his diocese.

That diocesan letter is the whole of the documented approval. No decree of the Holy See on Akita has ever been published, and claims that the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued a judgment on it rest on reports of private conversations rather than on any document that can be produced. A bishop's act binds his own diocese. Our full treatment of the case, the messages and the claims made about them is at the real status of Our Lady of Akita.

Japanese Catholicism is a small minority within the country, and its Marian devotion largely runs through the martyrs rather than through apparitions. The image the hidden Christians preserved was Maria Kannon, a small figure of the Buddhist bodhisattva Kannon holding a child, used and prayed to as the Virgin and the Christ Child because possessing an obviously Christian image was fatal. Museums in Nagasaki hold them, and they are among the most eloquent objects in the Christian world.

6. La Vang, Vietnam

La Vang is the national Marian shrine of Vietnam, in Quang Tri province in the centre of the country, north of Hue. The tradition holds that in 1798, during the persecution launched under the Tay Son emperor Canh Thinh, Catholics who had fled into the forest at La Vang and were dying of sickness and hunger saw a woman in Vietnamese dress holding a child, who spoke to them, comforted them and told them of a leaf that would serve as medicine. They understood her to be the Mother of God, and the devotion spread from the survivors.

No bishop has ever issued a decree declaring those events supernatural, and no Roman act on them exists. What exists is recognition of the shrine. A church was built at the site in the nineteenth century and replaced in 1901, the bishops of Vietnam designated La Vang the national Marian centre, and Pope John XXIII raised the church to the rank of a minor basilica in 1961. Pilgrimage to La Vang has continued through French rule, war, partition and the years after 1975 when Catholic gatherings were restricted, which is a substantial part of what the place means to Vietnamese Catholics.

What stands there now

The 1901 basilica was destroyed in the fighting of 1972 during the war, and its bell tower survived as a shell. That ruined tower is the visible landmark of La Vang and the image most Vietnamese Catholics carry of the place. A large new basilica has been built on the site over recent years, and an open-air sanctuary with a statue of Our Lady of La Vang in the ao dai receives the crowds. The national pilgrimage gathers in August around the Assumption, and it draws Vietnamese from across the country and from the diaspora.

Anyone writing that La Vang is a Vatican-approved apparition is repeating a claim no document supports. That takes nothing from the shrine. Guadalupe has no apparition decree either, and both cases show that the Church's approval of a devotion often runs through basilicas, feasts and papal acts rather than through a judgment on a vision.

7. Phat Diem and the Vietnamese Martyrs

Phat Diem Cathedral in Ninh Binh province is unlike any other Catholic building in Vietnam, because it was built in the architectural language of the country instead of in an imported European one. It was built between 1875 and 1898 under Father Peter Tran Luc, known to Vietnamese Catholics as Cu Sau, who put up a Catholic cathedral in the architectural language of a Vietnamese communal house. Stone and ironwood, curved tiled roofs turning up at the corners, a bell tower shaped like a village gate house with a great stone slab inside, and a complex of chapels around a lake in front. The materials were floated in over years across the delta.

Phat Diem is a working cathedral of a Vietnamese diocese and a pilgrimage in its own right for what it argues architecturally. It states that the Catholic faith in Vietnam is Vietnamese, using the local building tradition rather than importing a French Gothic model, at a moment in the 1880s and 1890s when that was a real question. Anyone interested in the inculturation of the liturgy in Asia should stand in front of it.

The martyrs of Vietnam

Vietnam produced one of the largest groups of martyrs in the modern history of the Church. Persecutions ran under the Tay Son, then under the emperors Minh Mang, Thieu Tri and Tu Duc through the middle of the nineteenth century, and continued in the anti-Christian Van Than violence of the 1880s. Pope John Paul II canonised one hundred and seventeen martyrs of Vietnam on 19 June 1988, Vietnamese and Spanish and French together, headed by the priest Andrew Dung-Lac. Their feast is kept on 24 November. Andrew Phu Yen, a young catechist killed in 1644 and honoured as the protomartyr of Vietnam, was beatified in 2000.

Source: the canonisation of the 117 Vietnamese martyrs took place in St Peter's Square on 19 June 1988; the group is listed in the Roman Martyrology under Andrew Dung-Lac and companions, with the memorial on 24 November. Estimates that circulate for the total number of Vietnamese Christians killed across all the persecutions run into the tens of thousands and are not verifiable, so no figure is given here.

Martyr sites are spread across the country rather than gathered in one place, and many are marked by parish churches and diocesan shrines rather than by national monuments. Hanoi's St Joseph's Cathedral, the church at Bui Chu, the Marian shrine at Tra Kieu in Quang Nam and the seminary sites of the Paris Foreign Missions all feature in Vietnamese Catholic pilgrimage. A pilgrim travelling in Vietnam does best to ask the local diocese which martyr belongs to the district being visited.

8. The Martyr Shrines of Seoul

Seoul contains a network of martyr shrines built on the actual execution grounds of the nineteenth-century persecutions, and they are close enough together that Korean parishes walk between them in a single day. The Korean Church began among lay scholars of the Silhak movement who read Catholic works brought from Beijing, and it was formally born when Yi Seung-hun was baptised in Beijing in 1784 and returned to baptise others. A church founded by laypeople without a missionary is close to unique, and the court read it as a threat to the Confucian order, which is why the persecutions were so severe.

Seosomun

Seosomun, outside the Little West Gate of the old city wall, was the state execution ground, and more of the canonised Korean martyrs died there than at any other site. The area is now a park in central Seoul with a martyrs' monument, a shrine church and the Seosomun Shrine History Museum built underground beneath the park. Pope Francis prayed at Seosomun on the morning of 16 August 2014, before beatifying one hundred and twenty-four Korean martyrs at Gwanghwamun, headed by Paul Yun Ji-chung, who had been executed in 1791.

Source: the figure for the number of canonised Korean martyrs who died at Seosomun, conventionally given as forty-four of the one hundred and three, is the figure published by the Seosomun shrine and the Archdiocese of Seoul. Attendance figures for the 2014 papal Masses vary widely between the organisers, the police and the press, and none is given here.

Saenamteo

Saenamteo, a sandy stretch on the north bank of the Han River in Yongsan, was used for the execution of those the state classed as traitors, and it is where Saint Andrew Kim Taegon was beheaded on 16 September 1846 at the age of twenty-five. He had been smuggled out of Korea as a boy, studied at Macau, was ordained in Shanghai in 1845, returned to arrange sea routes for missionaries and was caught within a year. The shrine church at Saenamteo stands over the site, with a memorial hall and relics of the martyrs killed there, among them the French bishops and priests of the Paris Foreign Missions who were put to death alongside Koreans.

Jeoldusan

Jeoldusan means Beheading Hill, and the name was given after the event. It is a rock bluff over the Han at Mapo, and it was used for executions during the Byeongin persecution of 1866. The killing at Jeoldusan followed the arrival of a French naval squadron on the river that autumn, and Catholics were put to death there in large numbers. The martyrs' shrine and museum on the summit were built for the centenary in the 1960s. The museum holds relics, documents and instruments of the persecution, and the crypt below the church holds the remains of martyrs recovered from the site.

The 1984 canonisation was held in Seoul rather than in Rome, which was unusual and was read in Korea as a recognition that the Korean Church had earned its own saints on its own ground. The Archdiocese of Seoul has since laid out a walking pilgrimage route linking the city shrines, and it can be done on foot in stages over a day or two.

9. Solmoe, Mirinae and Haemi

Three sites outside Seoul complete the Korean martyr pilgrimage, and together they cover the beginning, the end and the burial of Andrew Kim Taegon. Korean Catholics call Solmoe the cradle of the Korean Church, and the phrase is not marketing: an unusual number of the early martyr families came from that stretch of Chungcheong province, and the faith spread there through kinship networks.

Solmoe

Solmoe, in Dangjin, Chungcheongnam-do, is the birthplace of Andrew Kim Taegon, born there in 1821 into a family that had already given martyrs to the persecutions and would give more. The site holds a reconstruction of the family house, a memorial church, an outdoor way of the cross and a wide field used for gatherings. Pope Francis visited Solmoe in August 2014 during the Asian Youth Day, which raised its profile considerably among younger Korean Catholics.

Mirinae

Mirinae, in Anseong in Gyeonggi province, is where Andrew Kim is buried. After his execution at Saenamteo his body was recovered, at real risk, by a Catholic named Yi Min-sik and carried into the hills, and it was buried in the valley where a hidden Christian settlement had formed. Mirinae means Milky Way in Korean, and the name is said to come from the lights of the hidden villages scattered up the valley at night. The shrine now holds a memorial church, the tomb of the saint, the graves of his mother and of Bishop Ferreol of the Paris Foreign Missions, who asked to be buried beside him, and a long wooded path that pilgrims walk in.

Haemi

Haemi, in Seosan, is a walled fortress town of the Joseon period where Catholics of the surrounding countryside were held, tortured and killed through the nineteenth-century persecutions. Most of those who died at Haemi were ordinary country people whose names were never recorded, which is the particular character of the place: it commemorates martyrs the Church cannot name. A tree in the fortress yard is preserved as the one prisoners were tied to, and at Yeosutgol outside the walls there are memorials at the ground where bodies were disposed of. Pope Francis celebrated the closing Mass of the Sixth Asian Youth Day at Haemi Castle on 17 August 2014.

10. Sheshan and the Church in China

Sheshan Basilica is the national Marian shrine of China, standing on a wooded hill about thirty kilometres west of central Shanghai, in Songjiang. Jesuits established a chapel there in the nineteenth century after the community had been driven out of the city during the Taiping upheavals and had vowed to build a church to Our Lady if it was spared. The present basilica was built between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s in a heavy grey and red brick, with a bell tower carrying a statue of the Virgin holding the child with his arms outstretched in the form of a cross. Pope Pius XII granted it the rank of minor basilica in 1942.

May is the Marian month and the traditional pilgrimage season at Sheshan, when Catholics come up the hill on foot past the stations of the cross set into the slope. Access to the hill and the scale of the gatherings depend on what the civil authorities permit in a given year, and that has varied considerably. Pope Benedict XVI composed a prayer to Our Lady of Sheshan in 2008, and in his 2007 letter to Catholics in China he designated 24 May, the memorial of Our Lady Help of Christians, as a day of prayer for the Church in China to be kept by Catholics worldwide.

The situation of the Church in China, stated plainly

Catholics in China have lived for decades under an arrangement in which a state-supervised body, the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, oversees registered church life, while many Catholics remained in communities that would not register and were treated as illegal. A provisional agreement between the Holy See and the government of the People's Republic on the appointment of bishops was signed in 2018 and has been renewed since. The agreement is disputed among Catholics, defended by the Holy See as a limited instrument concerning bishops rather than a settlement of religious freedom, and criticised by others, including Cardinal Joseph Zen, the emeritus bishop of Hong Kong, as a concession that abandons the unregistered communities. Our guide to Christianity in China sets out the history and both sides of that argument.

The practical consequence for a pilgrim is that Christian sites in mainland China are visited under conditions that change, and that a foreign visitor's presence can create difficulties for local Catholics. Ask before photographing anyone in a church, do not press people for their view of the Patriotic Association, and follow the lead of whoever receives you.

11. Zhalan and the Jesuit Graves in Beijing

Zhalan cemetery in Beijing holds the tombs of Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit astronomers who followed him, and it is the ground where the history of the China mission is buried. Ricci, the Italian Jesuit who reached Beijing in 1601, spent his life learning Chinese, translating Euclid with the scholar Xu Guangqi and presenting the faith in terms the Confucian literati would engage with. When he died in 1610 the Wanli emperor granted land for his burial, which was an extraordinary concession to a foreigner and effectively an imperial recognition of the mission.

Buried alongside him are Johann Adam Schall von Bell, the German Jesuit who ran the imperial astronomical bureau under the Ming and the early Qing, and Ferdinand Verbiest, the Fleming who succeeded him and cast the instruments still standing on the Beijing observatory. Dozens of other missionary graves are in the same enclosure. The cemetery sits inside the grounds of an administrative college in the Xicheng district, and access is arranged rather than open.

Xu Guangqi, Ricci's collaborator and one of the first great Chinese Catholic laymen, is buried in Shanghai in the district named after him, Xujiahui, which grew into the centre of Catholic Shanghai with its cathedral of St Ignatius, its library and its observatory. A visitor with a day in Shanghai can reasonably take Xujiahui in the morning and Sheshan in the afternoon.

Beijing's cathedrals

Four historic churches survive in the old city and are known by their compass names. Nantang, the South Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, stands on the site of the house Ricci was given and is the oldest Catholic foundation in Beijing. Beitang, the North Church of the Saviour at Xishiku, is the great Gothic building where Catholics were besieged during the Boxer violence in 1900. Dongtang and Xitang complete the set. All are working churches with Mass in Chinese and, at some, in English.

Source: the tombs at Zhalan and the identifications of Ricci, Schall von Bell and Verbiest are documented on the cemetery's own stelae and in the standard histories of the China mission. No visitor figures, access arrangements or entry conditions are given on this page because they are set locally and change.

12. Macau and the Trail of Francis Xavier

Macau is where the mission to China and Japan was launched from, and its historic centre is a compact and genuinely walkable Christian pilgrimage. The Jesuits built the Church of Mater Dei with St Paul's College beside it between 1602 and 1640, and the college trained the missionaries who went into China, Japan and Vietnam. Japanese Christian exiles who had fled the persecution worked on the carving of the façade, which is why its stone reliefs carry Japanese characters and a Japanese chrysanthemum alongside the Portuguese and the Chinese elements.

The church burned in 1835 and only the front wall survived. What remains, the Ruins of St Paul's, is now the signature image of Macau, and most visitors treat it as a photograph rather than as a church. Behind it a crypt and a small museum hold the tomb of Alessandro Valignano, the Jesuit visitor to the East Indies who shaped the strategy of the whole Asian mission, together with relics of Japanese and Vietnamese martyrs. Reading the façade properly takes half an hour: it is a catechism in stone, with the Virgin, the ship, the fountain of life and a skeleton with an inscription in Chinese warning against sin.

Xavier in Macau and at Shangchuan

Francis Xavier died on 3 December 1552 on the island of Shangchuan, off the Guangdong coast, waiting for a passage into China that never came. His body was taken to Malacca and then to Goa, where it remains at the Basilica of Bom Jesus. A relic of his arm bone has long been venerated in Macau and is kept at the church of St Joseph's Seminary, an eighteenth-century Jesuit foundation with a baroque interior of unusual quality. The small chapel of St Francis Xavier in the village of Coloane, built in 1928, carries the same dedication and is the quiet end of the same story.

Shangchuan Island itself has a memorial chapel at the place of Xavier's death and receives pilgrims from Guangdong. Access, like everything on the mainland, depends on the arrangements of the day.

Hong Kong, an hour away by ferry, holds the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Caine Road and the Catholic cemetery at Happy Valley, and it functioned for decades as the point of contact between the Church in China and the Church outside it. The city is a natural pairing with Macau for a visitor with a few days.

13. Wanjin Basilica, Taiwan

Wanjin Basilica of the Immaculate Conception is the oldest surviving church building in Taiwan and the centre of Catholic pilgrimage on the island. Spanish Dominicans, who returned to Taiwan in 1859 after a long absence, founded the mission at Wanjin, a village in Wanluan township in Pingtung county in the far south, among Hakka and Indigenous Paiwan communities. The present church was built around 1869 and 1870 out of lime, sugar water, oyster shell and sand, in a thick-walled whitewashed Spanish style that looks nothing like anything else in Taiwan.

The mission met hostility from the surrounding population in its first years, and the Qing court intervened on the side of the Christians: a stone tablet placed over the door records that the building stands by imperial decree, warning against interference with it. That tablet is still there, and it is the single most striking object at the site. Pope John Paul II granted Wanjin the rank of minor basilica in 1984.

The village keeps the feast of the Immaculate Conception in December with a procession that carries the statue of Our Lady through the streets, and it draws Catholics from across Taiwan. The rest of the year Wanjin is a quiet country parish. Taipei's Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and the parishes that grew out of the Wanjin mission complete the small Catholic map of the island, where Catholics are a modest minority in a largely Buddhist, Taoist and folk-religious population.

14. Sendangsono and Larantuka, Indonesia

Indonesia is a predominantly Muslim country with a substantial Christian minority concentrated in particular regions, and it holds two Catholic pilgrimage places of real significance. Sendangsono in Java is where the Javanese Catholic Church began. Larantuka in Flores keeps a Holy Week that has been performed continuously since the Portuguese period and preserves confraternity forms that disappeared elsewhere.

Sendangsono

Sendangsono lies in the hills of Kulon Progo, west of Yogyakarta, at a spring under a sono tree, which is what the name means. On 14 December 1904 the Dutch Jesuit Frans van Lith baptised a large group of Javanese there, the first substantial body of Javanese Catholics, using the water of the spring. The site became a Marian grotto and is now the principal pilgrimage of Catholic Java, busiest in May and October and during Lent.

The shrine was redesigned in the 1970s by the priest and architect Yusuf Bilyarta Mangunwijaya, known as Romo Mangun, who laid it out in local stone with terraces, water channels and Javanese proportions rather than a European grotto. The design has been recognised by the architectural profession in Indonesia and is studied as a model of building a Catholic sanctuary in a local idiom. The stations of the cross climb the hillside, and the whole design assumes that people arrive on foot and stay for hours.

Larantuka

Larantuka, on the eastern tip of Flores in East Nusa Tenggara, was a Portuguese trading and mission post from the sixteenth century, and its Catholic life kept forms that came from Portugal and never left. The town venerates a statue of the sorrowful Mother called Tuan Ma, kept enclosed in its chapel and unveiled once a year, and a figure of the dead Christ called Tuan Ana. Lay confraternities, the Confreria, have the custody of these, and the offices are inherited within families, a structure directly descended from the Portuguese brotherhoods.

Holy Week at Larantuka, called Semana Santa, runs on the old sequence. The statues are washed and the chapel opened on Holy Thursday, and on Good Friday the processions move through the town and by boat across the water, with the Latin and Portuguese-derived chants that have been transmitted orally for centuries. Pilgrims come from across Indonesia and from the diaspora. It is a working parish devotion rather than a performance, and visitors are expected to walk in it rather than to watch it.

15. Songkhon, Thailand

Songkhon is a village on the Mekong in Mukdahan province in northeastern Thailand, and it is the site of the martyrdom of seven Thai Catholics in December 1940. During the border conflict with French Indochina, Catholics in the region came under pressure from local officials to abandon a faith presented as foreign and disloyal. The catechist and lay leader Philip Siphong Onphithak was lured away and killed on 16 December 1940. When the pressure continued, two Sisters of the Lovers of the Holy Cross, Agnes Phila and Lucia Khambang, and four laywomen and girls of the parish refused to give up their faith and wrote to the officer saying so. They were taken to the village cemetery and shot on 26 December 1940.

Pope John Paul II beatified the seven on 22 October 1989. A shrine church, Our Lady of the Martyrs of Thailand, was built at Songkhon over the site, and the remains of the martyrs are kept there. It is the principal Catholic pilgrimage of Thailand and the focus of the annual commemoration in December.

Thailand's Catholic community is a small minority in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, and its other significant figure is Nicholas Bunkerd Kitbamrung, a Thai priest who died in prison in 1944 after being arrested on a charge of spying during the same period of suspicion, and who was beatified in 2000. Pope Francis visited Thailand in November 2019 for the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Mission of Siam.

Source: the beatification of the Blessed Martyrs of Songkhon, Philip Siphong Onphithak, Sister Agnes Phila, Sister Lucia Khambang, Agatha Phutta, Cecilia Butsi, Bibiana Khamphai and Maria Phon, took place in St Peter's Square on 22 October 1989. Their memorial is kept in Thailand on 16 December.

16. Bukit Mertajam and Melaka, Malaysia

Malaysia's two Catholic pilgrimage centres are St Anne's Church at Bukit Mertajam on the mainland side of Penang state, and the historic Christian sites of Melaka on the Straits. The first is a living devotion with a huge annual gathering. The second is the oldest Christian ground in the country and is bound up with Francis Xavier.

St Anne's, Bukit Mertajam

The mission at Bukit Mertajam was founded in the 1840s, and the old church of St Anne was built in 1888. The annual feast of St Anne on 26 July, preceded by a novena, grew over generations into a very large annual gathering, drawing pilgrims from across Malaysia and Singapore and from further afield, many of them Tamil Catholics whose devotion to St Anne came with them from South India. A large new shrine church was built in 2002 to hold the crowds, and the old 1888 church stands beside it and is still used.

The feast has an unmistakable local character. Pilgrims walk up the hill, light candles, carry out vows made during the year, and a substantial number of the people who come are not Catholic at all, since St Anne has acquired a following across religious lines in the region. The Church receives them without pretending the devotion is something other than what it is.

Melaka

Melaka was taken by the Portuguese in 1511 and became the base from which the mission moved into the archipelago and toward Japan. Francis Xavier used the city repeatedly between 1545 and 1552 and preached in the church on the hill, then called Nossa Senhora da Annunciada. After his death at Shangchuan his body was brought to Melaka and buried in that church for some nine months in 1553 before being taken on to Goa. The open grave is still there, railed and empty, in the roofless ruin now called St Paul's Church, with a statue of Xavier outside.

St Peter's Church, built in 1710, is the oldest functioning Catholic church in Malaysia, put up by descendants of the Portuguese settlers when the Dutch relaxed the restrictions. Its Good Friday procession, which fills the surrounding streets, is one of the oldest continuous Catholic observances in the country. The Portuguese Settlement in the city, home to the Kristang community with its Portuguese-derived creole, keeps the same feasts.

The Dutch and then the British left their own marks. Christ Church Melaka, built by the Dutch in the 1750s and now Anglican, is the oldest Protestant church building in Malaysia and is described accurately as a Dutch Reformed foundation later transferred to Anglican use. A pilgrim in Melaka is walking through four centuries of a divided Western Christianity as well as through the Catholic story.

17. Novena Church, Singapore

Novena Church in Singapore is the Church of St Alphonsus on Thomson Road, run by the Redemptorists, and it is known by the devotion rather than by the dedication. The Saturday novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help began there in 1949 and became so large that it runs in repeated sessions through the day. The district around the church took the name Novena, and so did the train station, which means an entire Singapore neighbourhood is named after a Catholic devotional exercise.

The devotion itself is the standard Redemptorist novena to Our Lady of Perpetual Help, built around the icon of that title, with petitions and thanksgivings read aloud from slips submitted by the congregation. Anyone can walk in. A significant proportion of those who attend are not Catholic, which is a recurring feature of Marian devotion across Southeast Asia and which the Redemptorists there have long treated as an opportunity rather than a problem.

The other Catholic sites in Singapore are the Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, the oldest Catholic church in the country, and the Church of St Joseph in Victoria Street, a Portuguese Mission foundation whose Good Friday procession is a long-standing city observance. Singapore is small enough that all three can be visited in a single day on foot and by train.

18. Mariamabad, Pakistan

Mariamabad is the national Marian shrine of Pakistan, a village in Sheikhupura district in Punjab whose name means the place of Mary. The annual national pilgrimage in early September draws Christians from across Pakistan, and a large share of the pilgrims walk in, some of them for days, along the roads from Lahore, Faisalabad and the surrounding districts. The shrine church is dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima, and the devotion is carried overwhelmingly by Punjabi Catholics, many from poor and marginalised communities.

Christians are a small minority in Pakistan and live under real pressure, including the blasphemy laws and periodic mob violence against Christian neighbourhoods. That context is part of what the Mariamabad pilgrimage means. Walking publicly for three days as an identifiable Christian in that setting is a confession of faith, and the Pakistani bishops treat it as such.

Pakistan sits at the western edge of the geography this page covers, and its Christian history connects to the wider South Asian story of the Thomas Christians, the Portuguese missions and the modern Catholic dioceses. Those threads are set out in our guide to pilgrimage sites in India, which covers the tomb of St Thomas at Mylapore, Velankanni and the Goa shrines.

19. Penola, North Sydney and St Mary's Cathedral

Australian Catholic pilgrimage runs through Mary MacKillop, and the two places that matter are Penola in South Australia, where her work began, and Mary MacKillop Place in North Sydney, where she is buried. She was born in Melbourne in 1842 to Scottish immigrant parents, and with the priest Julian Tenison Woods she founded the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart to teach the children of poor and remote families across the Australian colonies, opening the first school in a disused stable at Penola in 1866.

The excommunication

The episode people remember is the excommunication. In September 1871 Bishop Laurence Sheil of Adelaide excommunicated her, in a conflict over the governance of her congregation and its refusal to be placed under diocesan control, in a situation aggravated by the priests advising him. The sentence was lifted about five months later, in February 1872, and the bishop is recorded as having withdrawn it before his death. She was subsequently vindicated, the congregation grew, and the Holy See approved its constitutions.

That story is told honestly at both shrines, which is unusual and to their credit. It is also the reason she is a saint many Australians who have left the Church still respect: she was punished by ecclesiastical authority, she did not retaliate, and she was right.

The sites

At Penola, the restored Woods-MacKillop schoolhouse of 1867 and the interpretive centre beside it hold the story of the founding, in a small town in the wine country of the Limestone Coast. At Mary MacKillop Place on Mount Street in North Sydney, the Memorial Chapel holds her tomb, and the museum, the Josephite motherhouse and the garden surround it. Her feast is 8 August.

St Mary's Cathedral in Sydney is worth a visit on its own account. It was the centre of World Youth Day in 2008, its crypt floor is a mosaic on the days of creation, and Polding, the English Benedictine who was the first archbishop, is buried there. Australia's patroness is Our Lady Help of Christians, given that title for the country by the first provincial synod under Polding in the 1840s, with the feast on 24 May, the same date Benedict XVI later set for prayer for the Church in China.

Australian devotional prayer is collected separately on this site, in the Australian prayers collection, which carries the texts rather than the places.

20. Hiruharama and Motuti, New Zealand

New Zealand's two Catholic pilgrimage places are Hiruharama on the Whanganui River and Motuti in the Hokianga, and both are on Maori land and held by Maori communities. That is the defining feature of Catholic pilgrimage in New Zealand and it shapes how a visitor should behave at both.

Hiruharama

Hiruharama, the transliteration of Jerusalem, is a settlement up the Whanganui River reached by a narrow road, with a small white wooden church of St Joseph above the water. It was a Catholic mission from the 1850s, and in 1892 the French-born Suzanne Aubert, known in Maori as Meri Hohepa, founded the Daughters of Our Lady of Compassion there. She had come to New Zealand in 1860, learned Maori, published a manual of the Maori language, prepared herbal remedies from native plants, and built the community's work around caring for people nobody else would take, including foundling children.

Suzanne Aubert was declared Venerable by Pope Francis in December 2016, the first step in the formal process toward beatification, and her cause continues. Her remains rest at the chapel of the Home of Compassion at Island Bay in Wellington, which is the second place in the country associated with her. Hiruharama is also where the poet James K. Baxter formed a community in his last years and where he is buried, and a number of visitors come for that.

Motuti

Motuti, on the Hokianga harbour in the far north, holds the tomb of Bishop Jean Baptiste Francois Pompallier, the French Marist who was the first Catholic bishop in New Zealand. He arrived at the Hokianga in January 1838 and celebrated the first Mass in the country at Totara Point on 13 January 1838. He died in France in 1871 and was buried there. In 2002 his remains were brought back to New Zealand at the request of Maori Catholics, carried around the country over several weeks and received at marae after marae, and finally interred beneath the altar of St Mary's church at Motuti marae, in the care of the local hapu.

Visiting Motuti means visiting a marae, and the protocol is the protocol of the marae. Contact is made in advance, visitors are welcomed formally, and the community decides the terms. That is the correct way to approach it, and it is a good illustration of how Catholic pilgrimage adapts to the culture that holds the holy place.

21. Peter To Rot and Papua New Guinea

Peter To Rot is the martyr of Papua New Guinea and the country's principal pilgrimage figure. He was born around 1912 at Rakunai in East New Britain, a Tolai village evangelised a generation earlier by the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. He trained as a catechist, married Paula Ia Varpit and had three children, and he was running the catechetical life of his village when the Japanese occupation of the island interned the missionary priests during the Second World War.

With no priest available, To Rot baptised, prepared people for the sacraments, led prayer, kept the register and witnessed marriages, all of which a lay catechist may lawfully do or be delegated to do. When the occupying authorities permitted and encouraged a return to polygamy, he refused to accept it and continued to teach Christian marriage, which is what brought him into direct conflict with them. He was arrested, held at a camp, and killed in July 1945 by a lethal injection administered in his cell.

Pope John Paul II beatified him at Port Moresby on 17 January 1995, during a visit to Papua New Guinea, and he was canonised in Rome in October 2025 as the first saint of Papua New Guinea. The shrine at Rakunai, near Rabaul, is the pilgrimage site, and his feast is kept on 7 July.

The wider Pacific holds other Catholic memory. Vunapope, the Sacred Heart mission headquarters near Rabaul, was the centre of the Church in New Britain and suffered heavily in the war. In the Solomon Islands the Melanesian Brotherhood, an Anglican religious community, lost seven members murdered during the civil conflict in 2003, and they are commemorated by Anglicans across the Pacific. Naming that accurately matters: the Melanesian Brotherhood is Anglican, not Catholic, and the Anglican Church of Melanesia honours its own martyrs on its own calendar.

22. What Is Not Approved in This Region

Two sites in this region are widely promoted online as approved Marian shrines and are not. Getting this right matters, because a pilgrim who travels to a place the Church has judged negatively is putting time and money into something their own bishop has warned them against.

Naju, South Korea

Naju, in South Jeolla province, is associated with reports that began in the mid-1980s of a weeping and bleeding statue of Our Lady, of messages received by a woman living there, and of phenomena involving the Eucharist. The Archdiocese of Gwangju, the competent authority, investigated and issued a negative judgment declaring the phenomena not supernatural, and it has since attached canonical penalties to participation in the rites conducted at the site. Successive archbishops have reaffirmed that position. The correct summary is that Naju is judged negatively and Catholics are directed to stay away from it.

Donglu, China

Donglu is a village in Baoding in Hebei with two separate things attached to it, and they are constantly confused. The first is the devotion to Our Lady of China, which is genuine: the title and its image belong to a devotion that the Church has long recognised, and the bishops of China consecrated the country to Mary in the 1920s. The second is an alleged apparition reported at Donglu in 1995, which has never received any ecclesiastical approval from anyone, and which has additionally been the occasion of severe restrictions imposed by the civil authorities on gatherings at the village. Pilgrimage there is not a normal option and the alleged apparition is not approved.

The same discipline applies to the sites this page does endorse. La Vang has no apparition decree and is a basilica and a national shrine. Sheshan has no apparition at all and is a basilica with a papal prayer attached. Akita has a diocesan approval from 1984 and no Roman act. Stating each of those accurately is what allows a reader to trust the rest of the page.

23. Planning a Pilgrimage in This Region

A pilgrimage in East Asia or the Pacific is planned around one country and one thread rather than around a circuit. The distances defeat any attempt to combine them: Nagasaki to Seoul to Shanghai to Flores to Sydney is a set of separate journeys with nothing in common except the faith. Choose one thread from the sections above and follow it properly.

The four threads worth following

• The Japanese thread. Nagasaki city for Nishizaka, Oura and Urakami, then Sotome for Shitsu and Ono, then a boat to the Goto Islands. A week, walkable and coherent, and the strongest pilgrimage in the region.
• The Korean thread. The Seoul shrines on foot over two days, then Solmoe, Haemi and Mirinae by road. Korean parishes run this constantly and joining one of their groups is straightforward.
• The Vietnamese thread. La Vang and the Hue churches in the centre, Phat Diem and the northern delta parishes, and the martyr sites your host diocese identifies. August around the Assumption for the national pilgrimage.
• The southern thread. Penola and North Sydney in Australia, then Hiruharama and Motuti in New Zealand if the trip allows, with the marae arrangements made well in advance.

Travel with the local church

The single most useful principle in this region is to go through the diocese or the parish that keeps the site. Korean archdioceses organise the martyr circuit. Japanese parishes in the Goto Islands need notice before a group arrives. Motuti is on a marae and the community sets the terms. Mainland Chinese sites are visited under whatever conditions apply locally, and a foreign visitor who improvises can create problems for the Catholics who live there. In every case the local church produces a better pilgrimage than a commercial arrangement.

Conduct at other Christians' sites

Several sites in this region belong to other Christian bodies or are shared. Christ Church Melaka is Anglican. The Melanesian martyrs of the Solomon Islands are Anglican. Korea's Protestant memorial sites belong to Presbyterian and Methodist churches with their own histories of persecution under the Japanese occupation. A Catholic visits these as a guest, does not receive Communion where the Church does not permit it, and represents his hosts' beliefs as they hold them. Our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church and to the Oriental Orthodox churches sets out the same courtesies for the Eastern traditions, which are two distinct families and are not in communion with each other.

What this page deliberately does not tell you

No prices, no opening hours, no ferry timetables, no tour operators, no visa or entry requirements appear anywhere on this page. All of them change, several change quickly, and a page that published them would be handing you stale information. Check current conditions with the relevant diocese, with the national bishops' conference, and with your own government's travel guidance before committing to anything.

If you cannot travel

Most people reading this will never stand at Nishizaka or walk into Mirinae, and the Church has never taught that physical travel is required of anyone. The martyrs of Japan, Korea and Vietnam are in the general calendar of the Latin Church, so they are commemorated at Mass worldwide on their days: Paul Miki and companions on 6 February, Andrew Kim Taegon and companions on 20 September, Andrew Dung-Lac and companions on 24 November. Our guides to making a virtual pilgrimage, to what a pilgrimage actually is and to Christian pilgrimage sites worldwide set out how the interior journey is made without the flight.

The test after any pilgrimage is the ordinary one. Do you pray more than before. Do you read Scripture more. Are you more patient with the people you live with. A journey that produces those things has done its work.

24. Related Guides

The nearest neighbours to this page on the site are the country hubs and the apparition explainers. Pilgrimage sites in India covers the Thomas Christian tradition, Mylapore, Velankanni and Goa. Pilgrimage sites in the United States and Canada covers North America, and Hawaii sits in that page rather than in this one. Christian pilgrimage sites worldwide is the hub that ties all of the regional pages together.

For the status questions this page keeps raising, approved Marian apparitions and what approval means is the reference, and Our Lady of Akita is the single case in this region with a documented diocesan approval. For the background to the Chinese sections, Christianity in China covers the history, the Patriotic Association and the 2018 provisional agreement. For prayers rather than places, the Asian prayers and Australian prayers collections carry the texts used by these communities.

For the doctrine behind the martyr shrines, our guides to the saints and why Catholics venerate them, to the Eucharist and to baptism explain what the hidden Christians were keeping when they had nothing else, and the Rosary is the prayer most of these pilgrimages are actually made with.