Missionary history is entangled with empire, and that entanglement is real, but it is not the whole of the historical record: a mission carried out nine centuries before European colonial expansion shows a different shape entirely.
In 635, a Persian monk named Alopen, representing the Church of the East, sometimes called the Nestorian church after the fifth century christological dispute over Christ's nature, arrived at the Tang dynasty capital of Changan and was received by Emperor Taizong, who authorized the translation of Christian scripture into Chinese and the building of a monastery. The mission, known in Chinese as Jingjiao, the Luminous Religion, operated under imperial protection rather than any foreign colonial power, translated Christian texts using Buddhist and Daoist vocabulary already familiar to a Chinese audience, and is documented today chiefly through a stone stele erected in 781 at Changan recording the mission's history and doctrine in Chinese and Syriac.
Official favor did not last. Around 845, Emperor Wuzong ordered a broad suppression of foreign religions across the empire, and organized Christian practice in Tang China did not survive it in any continuous institutional form. The episode still stands as a documented case of Christian mission traveling east along Silk Road trade networks under a non Christian empire's own authority, centuries before colonial entanglement became the dominant pattern the later historical record shows.