Russian Embassy Garage formerly the Dormition Church
Governor S.M. Darkin of Primorsky Region met in Moscow with the chairman of the Department of External Affairs of the Moscow Patriarchate, Metropolitan Kyrill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad. In the course of their conversation Vladyka Kyrill thanked the governor for his attention to re-establishment of an Orthodox church in Beijing. Beijing's churches were destroyed even prior to the 1966 cultural revolution. In 1956, after the church turned over the territory of the Russian Spiritual Mission in Beijing to the USSR embassy, Ambassador Yutan decided to blow-up the Holy Martyrs' Church and the Mission's belltower, while the Church of the Dormition was turned into the embassy's garage. Today the Church of the Dormition, still a garage, is the only surviving church structure in Beijing. Its restoration and re-establishment should begin to bring back the historical appearance of the territory of the Russian embassy.
The number of our compatriots who work and visit Beijing increases with each year. The government's attention to the spiritual problems of its countrymen, including those abroad -- is an important factor in building the contemporary Russian society. Care for the spiritual welfare of Russians in Beijing is not restricted to attending to the territory of the Russian embassy; living beyond the embassy are hundreds of our compatriots, thousands of Orthodox believers (from the CIS). In Primorye a design of a wooden church has been prepared -- one that could be given as Russia's gift to Beijing, which would solve the question of an Orthodox church in China's capital at the start of the Olympic Games.
Priest Dionisy Pozdnyaev