Shanxi province). The tomb of a Church of the East bishop named Shlemun, who died in 1313, has recently been discovered at Quanzhou in Fujian province. Shlemun's epitaph described him as 'administrator of the Christians and Manicheans of Manzi (south China)'. Marco Polo had earlier reported the existence of a Manichean community in Fujian, at first thought to be Christian, and it is not surprising to find this small religious minority represented officially by a Christian bishop. The relationship between the Catholic Franciscan missionaries and the Church of the East Christians were strained and often in conflict. The Catholics viewed the Church of the East Christians as heretics and rivals while the Church of the East Christians viewed them as political rivals. Roman Catholicism in China was expanded at the expense of the Church of the East during the Yuan dynasty, with some converting to Catholicism. Decline The Church of the East declined in China substantially in the mid-14th century. Several contemporaries, including the papal envoy John of Marignolli, mention the murder of the Latin bishop Richard and six of his companions in 1339 or 1340 by a Muslim mob in Almaliq, the chief city of Tangut, and the forcible conversion of the city's Christians to Islam. The last tombstones in two East Syriac cemeteries discovered in modern-day Mongolia around the end of the 19th century date from 1342, and several commemorate deaths during a plague in 1338. In China, the last references to East Syriac and Latin Christians date from the 1350s, and it is likely that all foreign Christians were expelled from China soon after the collapse of the Yuan dynasty and the rise of the Ming dynasty in 1368. Additional reasons for the decline and disappearance of Church of the East include the foreign character of the religion and its adherents, comprising a Central Asian and Turkic-speaking immigrant community. There was a lack of native Chinese converts, lack of any Chinese translations of the Bible, and a heavy political reliance on patronage by the Yuan imperial court. In consequence of these factors, once the Yuan dynasty fell the Church of the East in China quickly became marginalized and soon vanished, leaving little trace of their existence. Modern China (20th century-present) In 1998, the Assyrian Church of the East sent then-Bishop Mar Gewargis to China. A later visit to Hong Kong led the Assyrian Church to state that: