Days of Wine and Rosaries

Ross Perlin posts at The Stream on 'Wine and Catholicism among the Tibetans of China’s Yunnan Province'.

"The story, as I came to understand it, went something like this: the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris (still going strong today after 350 years) was planning to evangelize Tibet. It was the mid-nineteenth century, and French adventurers had slowly been nudging the empire’s influence up the Mekong from its Asian base in Indochina. The Pope granted his assent; the Qing, under duress, added theirs. Barred, sometimes violently, from preaching within Tibet itself, the missionaries set up camp among the Tibetans living right on its edge, in northwest Yunnan."

Where he finds their descendants today, along with the burial place of a revered missionary priest, and the vineyard for the Cabernet Sauvignon varietal used in making their altar wine.