Book Review

Asia

Lively and all too human are the people who inhabit D. E. Mungello's latest work on European missionaries and Chinese Christians during the early Qing years. Like his previous efforts, this one is outstanding and accomplishes what every historian seeks to do: put the reader in the time and place where the story happens. Based on a wide variety of Chinese and Roman Catholic sources, the work is meticulously researched and masterfully written. Not only do the sights and sounds of Qing China come alive here but also the foibles, prejudices, and outright hatreds of missionaries, Chinese officials, and converts. The Franciscan Antonio Caballero's first attempt to enter China from the Philippines in 1633 was viewed by the Jesuits, already working in China, as such a threat that their treatment of him, in Mungello's words "fell considerably short of what might be called Christian love." They provided him with an assistant who was instructed to harass him and then had him kidnapped and held aboard a ship for six months before returning him to the place he had entered China! Remorseful for his participation in these acts, the Jesuit vice provincial later sought forgiveness for his role in the affair (pp. 8, 12). Other disputes followed, including one a century later over the Jesuits conducting too elaborate a funeral for one of their members (p. 91).

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Mungello has such command of his sources that he is able to tell us very precise details: that Father Augustinus Paschale arrived in Manila in 1670 aboard a ship owned by Armenian merchants (p. 55), and that orphaned children incarcerated by the authorities in Ji'nan were kept alive only by eating the leftovers of the adult prisoners; upon learning of the children's plight, the very poor local Christians doubled the amount of food they delivered to jailed priests (p. 29).

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