Vietnam, home to between 130,000 and 300,000 martyrs and St Paul Tong Buong

This day, in 1833, after much torture and humiliation, St Paul Tong Buong was beheaded and so gained his martyr's crown.
The process of martyrdom in Vietnam, was particularly savage with victims being, literally hacked to pieces one limb at a time; persecution began in the 17th century after missionary work by both the Dominicans and Jesuits. It continued, with a political bias in the 18th century and progressed right up to the excesses of communism in the 20th.
We tend to overlook the value of China, Japan, Vietnam and other parts of Asia in terms of the richness of Church history and the volume numbers of martyrs that this region produced and, even today, in China and North Korea especially, many new martyrs are created, unknown to us in the west, but known to God.

St Paul Tong Buong - Ora pro nobis

The Vietnamese martyrs