Zhao Rong was a soldier of the Qing empire, one of the escort assigned to conduct the condemned French missionary bishop Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse from his place of arrest to execution at Chengdu in 1815. What he witnessed on that road unmade him: the bishop's patience, serenity, and kindness toward his guards impressed the soldier so deeply that after the execution he sought out the hidden Christian community and asked for instruction.
Baptized with the name Augustine, he was in time — despite his age — accepted for the priesthood, becoming one of the first diocesan priests of Sichuan. He served the scattered, outlawed congregations of the province in secret, in the years when the imperial edicts made every Mass a capital offense.
Arrested in the same persecution that had claimed the bishop whose death converted him, Augustine Zhao Rong was subjected to atrocious tortures and died in prison at Chengdu in 1815. When John Paul II canonized the martyrs of China in the Jubilee year 2000, the one-time executioner's escort was placed at the head of the company: the 120 are canonized under the title 'Augustine Zhao Rong, priest, and companions.'
His story is the company's story in miniature — the persecutor's man converted by the martyr's peace, dying the martyr's death himself; the Church in China passing, within a single life, from the blood of strangers to the blood of her own sons.