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Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724

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Brockey does an very good job of mining important sources - the Portugese Jesuit archives, as well as the Jesuit archives in Rome - to bring forth a comprehensive overview of the evangelizing of the Middle Kingdom in the 17th century.

Not only does Brockey show erudition and scholarly handling of his subject, he has also written a work that is very accessible to the inquisitive lay reader.

Readers can easily use this book as an excellent springboard into other scholarly works on Chinese Christianity during the period. It would be interesting to see how the well documented sense of communal action, termed "hui", that Brockey describes in his book could or could not be traced through subsequent Chinese history and may have been co-opted by the Communists in the final overthrow of the Chinese monarchy.

The author has made history real through detailed examples of the how the Jesuits traveled, lived, learned Chinese, converted literti and peasants to Christianity, and eventually died on foreign shores far from the college halls of Evora, Portugal. Brockey has given academia a unique window into the lives of the men who made the mission to China a success for Rome - even if for only a short time.

Well written, and in meticulous detail, "Journey to the East" tells the story of Jesuits, and others, who tried to convert the Chinese.

It was the time of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, a reformation which ripped Christian Europe into pieces. The Catholic church responded to the huge losses of people in Europe by converting millions in South America and starting conversions in the east.

Japan, originally, seemed fertile ground. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese converted readily...and then the persecutions began. Priests and converts were crucified, beheaded, and tortured.

The Jesuits turned their gaze upon the vast millions in China. The Jesuits who came to China "were very diverse in terms of national origin...some from Lombardy...and Croatia" (p 9). Jesuits stressed education, which would prove to be of immense value in China.

The Jesuits soon learned to wear the clothes of the literati. Wearing the clothing of the religious turned out to be a grave mistake. Buddhist clergy "had reached the nadir" (p 43) in popularity, but the Jesuits found crowds willing to listen to them explain maps, clocks, and geometry. Then, of course, they would discuss religion.

There would be many setbacks. At times, there were persecutions. Some were martyrs, some, "were to be shackled inside wooden cages" (p 68) to be shipped back to the west like captured wild animals.

Considering the tiny number of priests who went to China, the number of Chinese who converted is amazing. There were "only twenty-four European priests and three Chinese coadjutors" (p 123) at one time, but by 1662 "they could count twenty residences spread across ten provinces (p 123-4). Each residence station ministered to as many as 50,000 converts.

There was no lack of vocations among native Chinese, but teaching them Latin proved to be a huge stumbling block.

The book details the Jesuit mission to China, from 1579 to 1724. Full of absorbing stories and rich with information about Chinese culture, it should be of interest to both scholars and anyone curious about the era.

This very interesting and readable book of Catholic missionary history was obviously a labor of love. The author was going through the archives of Jesuit missionaries in Lisbon and the Society of Jesus in Rome (and other Italian archives), building the grand narrative of the Jesuit mission in China and digging for hundreds of first-hand details from missionary letters. Then he was writing this book keeping his focus on the subject for years, looking out from his mother's-in-law patio over the rooftops of Lisbon.
The result of his considerable effort is a book that is well researched, systematic yet alive with all sorts of interesting detail from the life of Jesuit missionaries in China. The book is also beautifully printed with a very readable typeface on good paper.
The author has placed the history of the Jesuit mission in China in its wider context of the history of the Portuguese seaborne empire, the history of European-Chinese relations, and the history of Western missions in Asia. It was an ambitious research project, but the book is not too academic in its narrative style.
The explanation for the author's success is that he adopted an internal perspective, that is, he looked at the history of Jesuits in China from their own perspective, as recorded in their dispatches back to Europe. And yet, the author has been able to weave the details into a larger, systematic picture of the Jesuit missionary strategy and practice.
In the first part of the book, the author's central finding (he calls it "argument") is that the nature of the Jesuit mission in China was in the Jesuit Society's own image. This was reflected in the fact that the Jesuit Society exported its own organizational templates to build its mission church and lay activities in China.
The second part of the book analyzes various elements that combined to form the Jesuit mission and its communities of lay Chinese disciples. The author asks a very important question: How were the Jesuits able to imbue successive generations of their missionaries with the skills necessary for creating and sustaining a European-led mission church in a cultural context vastly different from Europe? He then describes the elements of Jesuit spirituality and pastoral techniques, a subject that has been analyzed by other historians as well.
But the author brings its most original intellectual effort to fruition in the last part of the book, in which he examines the interaction of Jesuit missionaries with their Chinese disciples. Of particular interest are his findings and conclusions about the intercultural transmission of early modern Catholic piety into the late imperial Chinese context.
He describes how Jesuits were actively proselytizing while moving about in urban and rural areas, using their rhetorical and theatrical skills to produce ritual gestures aimed to impress. Yes, Chinese did respond to this educational technique that were able to build Christian communities and foster group cohesion, regular devotions and regular sacraments. In other words, the missionaries clothed the Gospel and the Christian lifestyle in the Chinese cultural semantics - and succeeded.
The result were mixed European-Chinese confraternities of various types. It was this organizational solution and the spiritual demands on the confraternity members that made Jesuit devotional communities different from their Chinese counterparts of Confucian and Buddhist spirituality. The description of a Marian community in Peking, instituted in 1609, clearly reveals its twin European-Chinese sources of inspiration.
The book reads as a fascinating string of Jesuit first-hand reports about the difficulties of travel to and in China, cultural adaptation, proselytizing, devotional training, and community building. For example, Jesuit Michele Ruggieri complained that the Chinese had no alphabet "but as many letters as there are words." When he inquired how the Chinese themselves learned to read, he learned that, as he wrote, "even the natives spent fifteen years of their lives" in order to understand written texts.
At the end of his book, the author says that Jesuits were virtually the only Christian missionaries in China for almost a century and a half covered by this book. And after the Jesuits were forced to leave China, they left behind their churches, bones of Martino Martini and other Jesuit brothers who died in the mission field for Christ, and perhaps a spiritual legacy.
This book reminds me of the following Bible passage: "You will do well to send them on their way in a manner worthy of God. It was for the sake of the Name that they went out, receiving no help from the pagans." (The Bible, 3 John 1:6-7 NIV)

This book deserves a wide audience; as reviewers have noted, it combines very impressive scholarship with an engaging style. The Jesuit mission in late Ming and early Qing China is an absorbing story, and Brockey has rendered the old narrative obsolete. Heroism, spirituality, historical drama, political intrigue--it's all here. Simply a lovely read.

This is a worthy book from which I learned a lot. I am a lay reader who was intrigued by the missionary challenges faced by the Jesuits. The author gives what is probably a full as portrait as is possible. His understated scholarly, fact-driven approach was just the right catnip that led me to contemplate on my own time some more religious questions. The portrait of imperial China presented is a fascinating world little known in modern popular Western minds. Seeing how this sophisticated alien society interacts with some of the most well-trained minds of Europe on matters of substance is rich. As a small criticism, relative to other popular histories aimed to some extent at the general reader, I found my mind wandering as I plowed through the narrative. Recommended.

The story of the Jesuits' mission to China was long the thing of Jesuit historians, with the result that it was portrayed in heroic terms, with a few dedicated men facing the hopeless odds of a vast territory, an impenetrable language, and an unpredictable administration. Brockey's book, which is also the latest and most up-to-date history on the subject, aims to debunk that. Covering the Jesuit mission from its start in 1579 to the moment at which Christianity was at last banned by the Chinese emperor in 1724, Journey to the East indeed provides a comprehensive overview based on a wealth of mostly European, but also some Chinese, archive material. It is easy and absorbing to read. Obfuscation, comedy, and the mishaps of cultural misunderstand featuring prominently - the greatest being the Chinese Rites affair, in which the Pope through sheer obstinacy, and rival religious orders through jealousy of the Jesuits, managed to get Christianity proscribed in China. The book, finally, is divided into two halves: one narrative, chronological section and a thematic section on conversion strategies.

Brockey's desire to explain goes perhaps too far in seeking to downplay the risks and obstacles overcome by the first Jesuits, and how gifted they were. Not only did Ricci and his first followers learn Mandarin Chinese in a few years, but they wrote books in it and were able to hold scientific and philosophical discussions with high Mandarins: these had to be exceptional men. Brockey might thus have differentiated more between the mission's first and later phases. The Jesuits' conversion strategy may also have changed over time, first targeting the Mandarin elite and indeed the imperial court, and later aiming for mass conversions; the author downplays that change. Finally, the first section is the more interesting, and perhaps more space could have been dedicated to it relatively. Nevertheless, these are minor quibbles, and Journey to the East is well worth reading.