The icon "Synaxis of the Holy Chinese Martyrs" glorifies the Orthodox Christians who suffered martyrdom during the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing in 1900

By the beginning of the twentieth century several hundred Orthodox Christians lived in Beijing, and almost all of them were killed in the course of the Boxer uprising against foreign interference. Several tens of thousands of people took part in the rebellion. In June 1900 mass killings of foreign subjects and diplomats began in Beijing and its environs; Christian churches, missions, schools, hospitals and homes were destroyed, and believers, among them Chinese converts to Christianity, were murdered, put to torture, and required to renounce their faith and trample on Christian symbols.

The most horrifying episode was the "St Bartholomew's Night in Beijing", the night of 23 to 24 June 1900, when the "Boxers" fell upon the homes of all the Christians of Beijing, literally butchering entire families, burning people alive locked inside their dwellings, cutting off heads and beating victims to death. By morning some 30,000 Christians of various confessions had been killed.

The Russian Ecclesiastical Mission was left wholly in ruins, together with its two churches, library, school and almshouse. Among the victims were no fewer than 222 Orthodox Christians, including Russian men, old people, women and children. An even greater number of the dead were so mutilated that it proved impossible to identify them. The Orthodox priest Father Mitrofan, his wife, his daughter-in-law and his children all suffered martyrdom.

But the persecutions did not cease with the morning; they continued after 24 June. In the end, of the foreign subjects in Beijing, only the few inhabitants of the Legation Quarter survived.

The Chinese martyrs were canonised by the Russian Orthodox Church as locally venerated saints in 1902. Their icon was painted and a special service composed at the same time. Veneration throughout the whole Church of "the Hieromartyr Mitrofan the Presbyter and the many martyrs who suffered with him, who received the crowns of martyrdom in Beijing in 1900" was established in 2016.