Chinese language and christianity

The encounter between Christianity and the Chinese language largely coincided with the history of the Western world in China. The Christian faith arrived in China during the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368), when scores of missionaries and merchants, mostly Italians, reached China. Before this period, there was very little information about China in the ancient Western world, and even less information about the Roman Empire in China.The presence of Christianity in China, from a very early stage until the end of the 19th century, not only had a great impact on the development of modern tools to study the language by foreigners but also paved the way for a mature romanization system of Chinese (in Latin letters and in Cyrillic) for the development of monolingual and bilingual dictionaries and for the consistent and scientifi c description of grammatical features of standard Mandarin, as well as of a great variety of Chinese dialects