Monument father Jan Mallet - Hechtel-eksel

This monument is located on the Pater Malletstraat where he was born, in Hechtel Eksel.

He had left for the Chinese Empire in his twenties in 1896 . Dressed in a silk robe, he proclaimed the word of God; on the steppes of Inner Mongolia he built a mission station where he taught orphans, healed the sick and read Mass.

But after two years , that peaceful period came to an end.

With the support of Empress Cixi, a secret society set the Empire on fire. It should be over with those meddlesome foreigners and their crazy beliefs. The fists of justice or the boxers got their name from their religiously-inspired martial arts. They were masters of the sword and the fist. Through magical rituals they entered a kind of bloodthirsty trance in which they thought themselves immortal and intangible. According to the boxers, there were two devils in the empire: the missionaries and the Chinese converts . If they did not intervene, they would end the Chinese traditions. In fact, the Empress proclaimed that it would not rain as long as Westerners were around. The massacre that followed was excessively brutal. Some 32,000 Chinese Christians and 500 missionaries were murdered . European missionaries, priests and merchants were beheaded, hacked to pieces or burned alive. Jan hid behind the walls of his mission post after ominous reports.

Willem Vandenameele