China’s Catholic Church during the nineteenth century passed through two distinct eras. The first was during the first half of the century when foreign missionaries lived and served their congregations underground, still under restrictions from the Yongzheng Emperor’s prohibition of Christianity in 1724, and the second was during the era of freedom granted to missionaries after the Opium War treaties were signed beginning in 1842. These two eras coincide with the period during which the Jesuit order was suppressed and absent from China and the era after which they returned to the empire to resume their mission in 1842. Three locations functioned as the centers of the Roman Catholic mission in China: one in Beijing that was operated by the French Vincentians, one in Shanghai established by French Jesuits, and a third one built in Xianxian, also by French Jesuits. The dramatic eruptions of three conflicts within the empire threatened and transformed the lives of foreign missionaries: the Opium War between China and Britain; the Taiping Rebellion between the followers of the quasi-Christian, Hong Xiuquan, and the Qing court; and the Boxer Uprising, a conflict between Chinese and Western forces. All of these changes, clashes, and concessions contributed both to the collapse of the Qing empire and the assent of Western influence in China. European nationalism combined with the French Protectorate to exert their own influence over the religious aims of foreign missionaries, which by the end of the nineteenth century had changed the contours of Catholicism in China.