It was one of the great encounters of world history: highly
educated European priests confronting Chinese culture for the first
time in the modern era. This journey to the East is explored by
Liam Brockey as he retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries who
sailed from Portugal to China, believing that, with little more
than firm conviction and divine assistance, they could convert the
Chinese to Christianity. Moving beyond the image of Jesuits as
cultural emissaries, his book shows how these priests, in the first
concerted European effort to engage with Chinese language and
thought, translated Roman Catholicism into the Chinese cultural
frame and eventually claimed two hundred thousand converts.
The first narrative history of the Jesuits mission from 1579
until the proscription of Christianity in China in 1724, this study
is also the first to use extensive documentation of the enterprise
found in Lisbon and Rome. The peril of travel in the premodern
world, the danger of entering a foreign land alone and unarmed, and
the challenge of understanding a radically different culture result
in episodes of high drama set against such backdrops as the
imperial court of Peking, the villages of Shanxi Province, and the
bustling cities of the Yangzi Delta region. Further scenes show how
the Jesuits claimed conversions and molded their Christian
communities into outposts of Baroque Catholicism in the vastness of
China. In the retelling, this story reaches across continents and
centuries to reveal the deep political, cultural, scientific,
linguistic, and religious complexities of a true early engagement
between East and West. "
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