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Reviews 525 17.Ka-che Yip, "Science, Medicine, and Public Health in Twentieth Century China: Health and Society in China: Public Health Education for the Community, 1912-1937," Social Science ofMedicine 16 (1982): 1197-1205. 18.For an example ofa more critical approach to the missionary archive based on Dr. Peter Parker's medical reports from 1836-1852, see Mark Swislocki, "The Politics ofHealth in Nineteenth-Century China: The Extensions ofChristian Medical Authority in Guangzhou 18351851 " (Bachelor's Thesis, Division ofHistory and the Social Sciences, Reed College, May 1992). D. E. Mungello. The Forgotten Christians ofHangzhou. Honolulu: University ofHawai'i Press, 1994. xi, 248 pp. $36.00. Jacques Gernet and Erik Zürcher have argued confidently that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Christianity only minutely impinged upon Chinese history and thought, either because ofinsurmountable language and conceptual differences1 or because, unlike Buddhism, Christianity could not be assimilated into Chinese culture due to its closed, rigid, hierarchical structure; its reactionary, Counter-Reformation theology; and the feeling that in China the idea that a scholar could also be a priest was culturally untenable.2 In his very important book, Mungello does not seek to refute either Gernet or Zürcher, but raises two different, but not unrelated questions, "that Christianity was not and could not be assimilated into Chinese culture" and that "the widely held image ofthe Sinocentric Confucian literatus whose mind was closed to foreign influences" bore no truth (p. 2). Mungello comes as no stranger to working at the boundaries and interrelationships between Chinese and Western cultures. He has written Leibniz and Confucianism: The SearchforAccord (1977) and Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the Origins ofSinology (1985), and from its inception in 1979 he has served as the founder-editor of the Sino-Western Cultural Relations Journal, which concentrates on early modern Sino-Western history. Mungello has broken new scholarly ground in several areas. That he has chosen the seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Hangzhou Christian community explains the title ofhis book. Most studies have concentrated on the Christian communities ofBeijing and Shanghai, but Mungello went where his sources led him: first, to the former Jesuit library of Zikawei (Xujiahui) in Shanghai, t l where he located the manuscripts ofthird-generation Hangzhou Christian literatus Zhang Xingyao (1633-1715+), and second, to the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he located Zhang's other works, on microfilm. Two prominent Hangzhou ofHawai'i Press 526 China Review International: Vol. 2, No. 2, Fall 1995 missionaries, Jesuits Martino Martini (1614-1661) and Prospero Intorcetta (16251696 ), who served as the real founders ofthe Hangzhou Christian community, also receive extensive attention. In treating Martini, Intorcetta, and Zhang, Mungello offers a century-long look at the interaction between Confucianism and Christianity. He also adds to the body ofMing-Qing dynasty transition scholarship. Mungello's discovery ofprimary sources provides more detailed portraits of Martini and Intorcetta, but, most importantly, his command of Chinese-language manuscripts has rescued from obscurity the work of Zhang Xingyao, to whom Mungello devotes the greater part ofhis book. His study ranks with Nicholas Standaert's book on sixteenth-century Hangzhou Christian and literatus Yang Tingyun,3 one of the "three pillars ofthe early Christian church," the other two being Shanghai's Xu Guangqi and Li Zhizao, also of Hangzhou. Mungello has taken one more step to chip away at the locked-in-cement assertion that Christianity , because it is foreign, is not compatible with Chinese thought and culture. The Christian-foreign and Chinese culture dichotomy appears to be less and less tenable not only the longer Christianity survives in China, but also because Christianity continues to grow there in large numbers. The book's seven chapters provide the reader with a one-hundred-year retrospect ofHangzhou's Christian community. Places, persons, political movements, art, and philosophy constitute the progression ofhistory, and these Mungello adroitly links in his retrospect. Unlike the Buddhists and their European monastic counterparts who chose the mountains for their dwellings, the newly founded Jesuits chose the cities as places to execute their mission strategy because cities, being more populous, gave the missionaries an easier access to culture and learning. Famous for its natural beauty, scholarship, literature, philosophy, art, commerce, and historical...

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