Cathay large Christian population, while the Jesuits in China had not found any Christians there. In retrospect, the Central Asian Muslim informants' idea of the Ming China being a heavily Christian country may be explained by numerous similarities between Christian and Buddhist ecclesiastical rituals – from having sumptuous statuary and ecclesiastical robes to Gregorian chant – which would make the two religions appear externally similar to a Muslim merchant. This may also have been the genesis of the Prester John myth. To resolve the China-Cathay controversy, the India Jesuits sent a Portuguese lay brother, Bento de Góis on an overland expedition
Cathay Building the whole complex. Cathay Building and the Picturehouse would showed its last movie in 2000 before closing for redevelopment. The front facade of its theatre building structure was gazetted as a national monument for conservation on 10 February 2003, while the rest of the building structure was later demolished. Thus the new building incorporated conservation of the original art-deco façade of the 1939 and combined together with a modern-day design by Paul Tange of Tange Associates Japan and RDC Architects Pte Ltd Singapore. The Cathay as it is currently known, was opened on 24 March 2006. The building houses retail,