Though the difference between the Northern and Southern Buddhists was already showing itself, and though soon after it manifested itself in a divergence as complete as that which sundered the Greek Orthodox from the Latin Catholic Churches, monumental evidence, harmonising with that derived from its own literary relics, indicates that for four or five centuries after this Buddhism was most successfully propagated almost everywhere save in India. In the land of its origin it was gradually declining, because drawing nearer to the Brahmanism from which it had seceded. Fa-Hian in the end of the fourth century, though describing it as dominant everywhere, found the place of its nativity only a wilderness.[336] Later on, the viharas were deserted, the dagobas in ruins, “the monks were few, the heretics many,” and by the seventh century the process of assimilation with and absorption into Hinduism was in India, save in widely separated and remote localities, almost complete. What it lost in India, however, it was to gain in other directions. Its greatest conquest was in China. In the days of Asoka eighteen missionaries are said to have reached China, where they are held in reverence to this day, their images occupying a conspicuous place in every temple. The faith which they introduced seemed to have struggled with very little success to gain a footing till about A.D. 68.[337] Thirteen years before this date, in obedience to a vision which appeared to him at Troas, St. Paul brought Christianity from Asia to Europe. On the thirtieth day of the twelfth Chinese month in A.D. 68, the Emperor Mingti, in consequence of a dream, sent ambassadors to the distant West for Buddhist monks and manuscripts.[338] Travelling in almost royal state, the invited missionaries were accorded in China a welcome in marvellous contrast to the reception of the Christian apostle in the first colonial city he had reached. From this time onwards a perpetual succession of monks and manuscripts entered China; yet, though tolerated from the first, and often royally patronised, centuries elapsed before it succeeded in winning a place as one of the three religions of China, while Christianity, persecuted from the first, succeeded after a fierce struggle in conquering the Empire of Rome, and then by a long process in evangelising Europe.