Modern Catholic Churches In North Shanxi

Along with the Catholic Church came into Shanxi, it had brought a new spiritual architecture, church. As the earliest European architecture, catholic churches in Shanxi area built from mid-19th century on, inevitably would have influenced by society, culture, region and folklore in location, came into being different changes in style, resulted in a vernacular church type, which combined the western spiritual architectural characteristic and the easterntraditional architectural characteristic. Shanxi's modern catholic churches, which are very valuable historical culture, are real demonstrations of the western and the eastern architectural culture contacting to merging.This paper researches into the modern catholic churches in Shanxi, a detailed analysis of the churches in Shanxi north parish. It started with the introduction of background materials about the progress of catholic churches from the development of Catholic Church in Shanxi and location of churches in Shanxi north parish. Following, as time to a clue, it discusses the evolution current and characteristic of Shanxi churches in different period of mid-19th century. Further, on the basis of the churches' forms in Shanxi north parish, the paper tries to find out vernacular features of Shanxi churches by contrasting the western and Shanxi's catholic churches. Finally, this paper sums up the course of developments and changes of the churches in Shanxi. Further more, it makes clear the value of modern catholic churches in Shanxi.It has especial value to study the modern catholic churches in Shanxi that can halp us to find out the west culture spread and communion with Chinese culture in Shanxi. In addition, it can be a reference in some ways to protect and reconstruct modern buildings by means of this investigation and collection.