| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Eric Reinders. Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 266. $49.95.
In this carefully crafted multidisciplinary work, Eric Reinders has attempted to answer such crucial questions as what did the nineteenth-century Christian missionaries to China think of Chinese religion and the customs of the Chinese? He addresses these intriguing questions by looking at such diverse topics as the meaning of obeisance, Chinese pidgin English, vegetarianism, how properly to translate God into Chinese, and opium, among others.	1
Reinders concentrates on British missionaries, particularly those of the Church Missionary Society (CMS), and begins his account by describing the Great Missionary Exhibition of 1909, which "recreated" Africa and Asia in an exhibit hall in London to promote mission work and, it was hoped, to bring in contributions. The ersatz China thus created featured Britons dressed up as Chinese so the visitors could better understand where their mission funds were being spent. This was China as understood by the Victorian missionary, and as Reinders explains, that understanding was greatly colored by the missionaries' own prejudices. The anti-Catholicism of the British Protestants, and particularly their views of obeisance in the Catholic Church, led the missionaries to view Chinese who bowed to their ancestral tablets, superiors, and temple gods with the same contempt they had for Catholics. Drawing on contemporary writings such as those of the extreme Anglophile John Macgowan, Reinders argues that the missionaries were predisposed to view with contempt many Chinese customs. Because Chinese, sometimes even monks, could not explain the details of their religious beliefs, the missionaries characterized them as "mentally deficient, in a stupor," to use Reinders's words (p. 46).	. . .

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