The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625–1916 by Michael Keevak (review)

100 Journal of Chinese Religions by similar stories. The seeking and delivery of “divine justice” is after all as much a discursive fact as a social fact. A minor comment to end this review: the footnotes are on the same pages as the texts they address, which makes for much more convenient reading. I wonder who first invented the dreadfully inconvenient endnotes, where all notes to all chapters are relegated to the end of the book, which requires a more scholarly reader to constantly flip back and forth between the text and the notes? ADAM YUET CHAU, University of Cambridge The Story of a Stele: China’s Nestorian Monument and Its Reception in the West, 1625-1916 MICHAEL KEEVAK. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. xii, 195 pages. ISBN 978-962-209-895-4. HK$295.00, US$39.50 hardcover. In 1625, workmen near Xi’an 西安 uncovered a large stele dating from 781, which had apparently been buried there late in the Tang dynasty, remaining unknown and undiscovered for centuries. The stele recorded the history of the propagation in Tang China of the thenunknown Jingjiao 景教 religion, later understood as a branch of Nestorian Christianity. This slim volume traces the history of European fascination with this object, arguing that the “Nestorian Monument” assumed a place in European ideas of China that was far out of proportion to its actual importance as a curious record of a minor aspect of Tang cultural history. Furthermore, the author claims, the monument “served as a kind of prism onto which [Europeans] could project their own self-image and this is what they were looking at, not China” (p. 3). The first claim, that the stele loomed larger in European minds than was warranted by its importance in Chinese history, is persuasive, but the second claim that the stone became a prism for a pervasive and wilful miscomprehension of China is overstated. The Story of a Stele is divided into four chapters, treating the discovery and first accounts of the stone, the treatment of the stone by Athanasius Kircher and his detractors and successors, the role of the stone in Enlightenment-era discussions of China, and the renewed interest in it during the treaty era. A short epilogue discusses Martin Palmer’s recent treatment of Tang Nestorianism as “Daoist Christianity,” and the author’s own trip to view the monument and other Nestorian sites near Xi’an in 2006. The book is beautifully produced, with forty-six images, all well-chosen and well-printed. Book Reviews 101 Although as a non-sinologist he focuses of necessity on works in European languages, Michael Keevak, who is Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages at National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan, has traced exhaustively the works and editions dealing with the monument (the notes, bibliography and index account for more than a quarter of the book’s length), and he has packed his account with interesting detail. For instance, he shows how Kircher’s use of the stele text as an introduction to the Chinese language in turn influenced (and misled) Andreas Muller and Christian Mentzel, two of the pioneer students of the Chinese language in the seventeenth century (pp. 50-55). He devotes considerable attention to the European preoccupation with the cross that appears above the text, which is in fact a very minor feature of the monument, and argues that the significance of the cross on the monument was exaggerated because it enabled the object to be domesticated and assimilated into a Western narrative of Christian expansion (pp. 89-102). Keevak traces the centuries-long polemics around whether the stele was a Jesuit forgery, and the bizarre attempt of Frits Holm in the early twentieth century to rescue the monument from supposed Chinese neglect, which resulted in a full-scale copy being made and shipped first to the Metropolitan Museum and then to the Vatican (pp. 110-125). As Keevak shows, the European preoccupation with the stele stemmed in large measure from excitement that it appeared to confirm a hitherto-unknown Christian presence in the Chinese empire, including imperial patronage of it, many centuries before the arrival of the Jesuits in the sixteenth century...