This book features a collection of essays on China's modern Catholic Church by a scholar of China-West intellectual and religious exchange. The essays and reflections were mostly written in China while the author was traveling by train, or staying in villages or large cities near to Roman Catholic cathedrals or other important historical sites during research trips to the country. It is clear that Clark's understanding of Catholicism in China evolved from the first entry to the final ones in 2019. The essays included in this compendium were written in disparate contexts and in response to different events. As such, there is no obvious theme or order to the content. However, despite this, the book provides valuable insights for readers wishing to gain a better understanding of the complex topography of Catholic history in China, the contours of which have undergone stark transformations with each dynastic, political, and ecclesial transition. The information presented serves to highlight and explain the lives of Catholic people and the events that have punctuated one of the most significant dimensions of China's long history of friendship, conflict and exchange with the West.

In this first book-length critical study of Ban Gu and his works, Anthony Clark provides both biographical and historical information about Ban Gu and his political context, while also reflecting on how that context formed his portrayal of history. Clark's book argues that the precarious position court scholars and ministers occupied motivated Ban Gu to restructure long-hallowed Confucian political ideas into an entirely new notion of Heaven's Mandate (tianming). Unlike the earlier model, which held that Heaven assigned or removed its sanction based upon moral merits, Ban's new Mandate model held that the ruling dynastic family's Mandate was permanently bestowed, and thus irrevocable, regardless of the ruler's good or bad behavior. This book offers new insight to previous scholarly assumptions regarding the ancient Chinese idea of Heaven's Mandate, while also providing historical information about Ban Gu and his family during the Han dynasty. Ban Gu's History of Early China is an important book for anyone interested in the history, philosophy, and literature of early China.

Western missionaries in China were challenged by something they could not have encountered in their native culture; most Westerners were Christian, and competitions in their own countries were principally denominational. Once they entered China they unwittingly became spiritual merchants who marketed Christianity as only one religion among the long-established purveyors of other religions, such as the masters of Buddhist and Daoist rites. A Voluntary Exile explores the convergence of cultures. This collection of new and insightful research considers themes of religious encounter and accommodation in China from 1552 to the present, and confronts how both Western Europeans and indigenous Chinese mitigated the cultural and religious antagonisms that resulted from cultural misunderstanding. The studies in this work identify areas where missionary accommodation in China has succeeded and failed, and offers new insights into what contributed to cultural conflict and confluence. Each essay responds in some way to the "accommodationist" approach of Western missionaries and Christianity, focusing on new areas of inquiry. For example, Michael Maher, SJ, considers the educational and religious formation of Matteo Ricci prior to his travels to China, and how Ricci's intellectual approach was connected to his so-called "accommodationist method" during the late Ming. Eric Cunningham explores the hackneyed assertion that Francis Xavier's mission to Asia was a "failure" due to his low conversion rates, suggesting that Xavier's "failure" instigated the entire Chinese missionary enterprise of the 16th and 17th centuries. And, Liu Anrong confronts the hybridization of popular Chinese folk religion with Catholicism in Shanxi province. The voices in this work derive from divergent scholarly methodologies based on new research, and provide the reader a unique encounter with a variety of disciplinary views. This unique volume reaches across oceans, cultures, political systems, and religious traditions to provide important new research on the complexities of cultural encounters between China and the West.

This book is the first scholarly study of the famous Jesuit Chinese children's primer, the Four Character Classic, written by Giulio Aleni (1582-1649) while living in Fujian, China. This book also includes masterful translations of both Wang Yinglin's (1551-1602) hallowed Confucian Three Character Classic and Aleni's Chinese catechism that was published during the Qing (1644-1911). Clark's careful reading of the Four Character Classic provides new insights into an area of the Jesuit mission in early modern China that has so far been given little attention, the education of children. This book underscores how Aleni's published work functions as a good example of the Jesuit use of normative Chinese print culture to serve the catechetical exigencies of the Catholic mission in East Asia, particularly his meticulous imitation of Confucian children's primers to promote decidedly Christian content.

Western missionaries in China were challenged by something they could not have encountered in their native culture; most Westerners were Christian, and competitions in their own countries were principally denominational. Once they entered China they unwittingly became spiritual merchants who marketed Christianity as only one religion among the long-established purveyors of other religions, such as the masters of Buddhist and Daoist rites. A Voluntary Exile explores the convergence of cultures. This collection of new and insightful research considers themes of religious encounter and accommodation in China from 1552 to the present, and confronts how both Western Europeans and indigenous Chinese mitigated the cultural and religious antagonisms that resulted from cultural misunderstanding. The studies in this work identify areas where missionary accommodation in China has succeeded and failed, and offers new insights into what contributed to cultural conflict and confluence. Each essay responds in some way to the "accommodationist" approach of Western missionaries and Christianity, focusing on new areas of inquiry. For example, Michael Maher, SJ, considers the educational and religious formation of Matteo Ricci prior to his travels to China, and how Ricci's intellectual approach was connected to his so-called "accommodationist method" during the late Ming. Eric Cunningham explores the hackneyed assertion that Francis Xavier's mission to Asia was a "failure" due to his low conversion rates, suggesting that Xavier's "failure" instigated the entire Chinese missionary enterprise of the 16th and 17th centuries. And, Liu Anrong confronts the hybridization of popular Chinese folk religion with Catholicism in Shanxi province. The voices in this work derive from divergent scholarly methodologies based on new research, and provide the reader a unique encounter with a variety of disciplinary views. This unique volume reaches across oceans, cultures, political systems, and religious traditions to provide important new research on the complexities of cultural encounters between China and the West.

While previous works on the history of Christianity in China have largely centered on the scientific and philosophical areas of Catholic missions in the Middle Kingdom, China's Saints recounts the history of Christian martyrdom, precipitated as it was by cultural antagonisms and misunderstanding. Anthony Clark shows that Christianity in China began and grew under similar circumstances to those during the Roman Empire, with the notable exception that Catholic missionaries were not successful at producing a "Chinese Constantine." One of the principal results of Catholic martyrdom in China was the increased indigenization of Christianity. During the reconstruction of mission churches, hospitals, and orphanages after the hostilities of the Boxer Uprising (1898-1900), the Roman Catholic tradition of venerating martyrs was attached to the reinvigoration of Christian communities. Not only did Catholic architecture accommodate to Chinese sensibilities, but causes for sainthood were also begun at the Vatican to add Chinese names to the Church's list of saints. The implications of Clark's work extend beyond the subject of Christianity in China to the broader fields of cultural, social, economic, political, and religious history. This pioneering study follows the trails of Western missionaries and Chinese converts as they negotiate the religious and cultural chasms that existed between the West and China, and it demonstrates that these differences resulted in two very different outcomes. Whereas converts appear to have bridged the cultural divide, often to the point of self-sacrifice, political and cultural tensions on the macro level sometimes ended with forceful conflicts. This book contributes to a deeper understanding of cultural and religious interaction, and provides an account of an heretofore unstudied chapter in the history of Christianity on the global landscape.

This book features a collection of essays on China's modern Catholic Church by a scholar of China-West intellectual and religious exchange. The essays and reflections were mostly written in China while the author was traveling by train, or staying in villages or large cities near to Roman Catholic cathedrals or other important historical sites during research trips to the country. It is clear that Clark's understanding of Catholicism in China evolved from the first entry to the final ones in 2019. The essays included in this compendium were written in disparate contexts and in response to different events. As such, there is no obvious theme or order to the content. However, despite this, the book provides valuable insights for readers wishing to gain a better understanding of the complex topography of Catholic history in China, the contours of which have undergone stark transformations with each dynastic, political, and ecclesial transition. The information presented serves to highlight and explain the lives of Catholic people and the events that have punctuated one of the most significant dimensions of China's long history of friendship, conflict and exchange with the West.

As China struggled to redefine itself at the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism, religion, and material culture intertwined in revealing ways. This phenomenon is evident in the twin biographies of North China's leading Catholic bishop of the time, Alphonse Favier (1837-1905), and the Beitang cathedral, epicenter of the Roman Catholic mission in China through incarnations that began in 1701. After its relocation and reconstruction under Favier's supervision, the cathedral-and Favier-miraculously survived a two-month siege in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Featuring a French Gothic Revival design augmented by Chinese dragon-shaped gargoyles, marble balustrades in the style of Daoist and Buddhist temples, and other Chinese aesthetic flourishes, Beitang remains an icon of Sino-Western interaction. Anthony Clark draws on archival materials from the Vatican and collections in France, Italy, China, Poland, and the United States to trace the prominent role of French architecture in introducing Western culture and Catholicism to China. A principal device was the aesthetic imagined by the Gothic Revival movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the premier example of this in China being the Beitang cathedral. Bishop Favier's biography is a lens through which to examine Western missionaries' role in colonial endeavors and their complex relationship with the Chinese communities in which they lived and worked.

One of the most violent episodes of China's Boxer Uprising was the Taiyuan Massacre of 1900, in which rebels killed foreign missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians. This first sustained scholarly account of the uprising to focus on Shanxi Province illuminates the religious and cultural beliefs on both sides of the conflict and shows how they came to clash.

Although Franciscans were the first Catholics to settle in China, their stories have rarely been explored in accounts of Chinese Christianity. Anthony Clark remedies that exclusion and highlights the roles of Franciscan nuns and their counterparts among the Boxers--the Red Lantern girls--to argue that women's involvement was integral on both sides of the conflict. Drawing on rich archival records and intertwining religious history with political, cultural, and environmental factors, Clark provides a fresh perspective on a pivotal encounter between China and the West.

One of the most violent episodes of China's Boxer Uprising was the Taiyuan Massacre of 1900, in which rebels killed foreign missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians. This first sustained scholarly account of the uprising to focus on Shanxi Province illuminates the religious and cultural beliefs on both sides of the conflict and shows how they came to clash. Although Franciscans were the first Catholics to settle in China, their stories have rarely been explored in accounts of Chinese Christianity. Anthony Clark remedies that exclusion and highlights the roles of Franciscan nuns and their counterparts among the Boxers-the Red Lantern girls-to argue that women's involvement was integral on both sides of the conflict. Drawing on rich archival records and intertwining religious history with political, cultural, and environmental factors, Clark provides a fresh perspective on a pivotal encounter between China and the West.