Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579–1724 (review)

The celebration of the Jesuit mission to China started early. Barely five years after the death of the mission's first diarist in 1610, Nicolas Trigault published Matteo Ricci's diaries. The book was soon circulating in six languages and was being avidly read by the fervent young men who flocked to the Jesuit call to evangelize the world. Ricci is the hero of Trigault's nicely crafted volume: a man of action who takes initiative in difficult moments, interacts cleverly with Chinese of all backgrounds, and overcomes the obstacles placed between him and his destination, Beijing. That he failed in his ultimate goal to become the confessor to the Wanli emperor was not included in this story, nor would it tarnish his heroic status. George Dunne's widely read Generation of Giants (1962) continued in this celebratory vein. Interestingly, Dunne opens his foreword with the hope that "this book qualifies as a scholarly work" (p. [vii]), as though there might be room for doubt. The book is indeed scholarly, but it is hugely partisan as well. Dunne's purpose was to celebrate the mission as "a splendid page in the history of the cultural relations of East and West" (p. 14) and, in so doing, to celebrate the "giants" who built it.

Whether we should see the mission as a splendid page in that history, or as a more modest insert in a different history altogether, has only recently been asked. Much has changed, not least of which is that China historians have entered the ranks of the mission's chroniclers, reversing the gaze and showing what the mission meant from the Chinese side. Additionally, Jesuit historians have learned to historicize their subjects and recognize setbacks as something historically more interesting than tests in an allegory of faith. Standing down-stream from these scholarly traditions and hostage to neither, Liam Brockey has taken on the massive task of writing a comprehensive history of the Jesuit mission to China. It is a masterwork, unlikely to be superseded for years to come.

Brockey is sensitive to the efforts and achievements of individual Jesuits without feeling a compulsion to write hagiography. He wants to understand who the Jesuits were as persons (not just as missionaries), why they wanted to convert the Chinese (rather than assume this to be a reasonable or a sensible thing to do), and how their methods stemmed from practices and attitudes they developed while training in Europe (rather than arising from Ricci's brilliant cosmopolitanism). Brockey underscores this last idea in his conclusion, where he argues that the means Jesuits used in China—learning language, deploying rhetoric, performing magical operations on the natural world, printing teaching materials, encouraging sodalities, and employing native catechists—were commensurate with devices they employed elsewhere. There were differences, and the ultimate failure of the mission may be attributed to them, although Brockey speculates that the reason for the Jesuits' failure may have been the fact that Europeans could not invade and settle the country, as they did in most of the Jesuits' other mission fields.

Brockey's field of research is Portuguese overseas expansion, not China. This book's full and balanced account is thus an achievement even more impressive to those of us who are China historians. The study of the Jesuit mission still has much to learn from Chinese sources, and the field can be expected eventually to grow beyond Journey to the East, but until that happens—and it will take many years, I suspect—this book will be the authoritative work.