Product Description

It was one of the great encounters of world history: highly educated European priests confronting Chinese culture for the first time in the modern era. This “journey to the East” is explored by Liam Brockey as he retraces the path of the Jesuit missionaries who sailed from Portugal to China, believing that, with little more than firm conviction and divine assistance, they could convert the Chinese to Christianity. Moving beyond the image of Jesuits as cultural emissaries, his book shows how these priests, in the first concerted European effort to engage with Chinese language and thought, translated Roman Catholicism into the Chinese cultural frame and eventually claimed two hundred thousand converts.

The first narrative history of the Jesuits’ mission from 1579 until the proscription of Christianity in China in 1724, this study is also the first to use extensive documentation of the enterprise found in Lisbon and Rome. The peril of travel in the premodern world, the danger of entering a foreign land alone and unarmed, and the challenge of understanding a radically different culture result in episodes of high drama set against such backdrops as the imperial court of Peking, the villages of Shanxi Province, and the bustling cities of the Yangzi Delta region. Further scenes show how the Jesuits claimed conversions and molded their Christian communities into outposts of Baroque Catholicism in the vastness of China. In the retelling, this story reaches across continents and centuries to reveal the deep political, cultural, scientific, linguistic, and religious complexities of a true early engagement between East and West.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #328616 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780674030367
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
Written with grace and clarity, Journey to the East will be greeted as one of the most important contributions to the field of Christianity in the last thirty years.
--Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Pennsylvania State University (20070628)

Brockey mines a wide range of manuscript and printed sources to give us a far richer picture than earlier studies of Jesuit interactions with ordinary Chinese. This book will be essential reading for every student of early modern China or of the 'first globalization' before 1800, and for everyone who likes to think about the convergences and contradictions of our own globalized lives.
--John E. Wills, Jr., University of Southern California (20071016)

This elegant book recreates one of the great dramas in the history of Christianity with deep erudition and keen intelligence. Brockey brings the Jesuit mission to China to vivid life, and sets it into its religious, political, and cultural contexts. He shows us how Jesuit missionaries were trained, what they did at court and in the field, and how much impact they had.
--Anthony Grafton, co-author of Christianity and the Transformation of the Book (20080101)

Journey to the East is fascinating and informative. The scholarship is meticulous, and by drawing on previously untapped Portuguese archives, the author offers new and valuable insights into the activities of the Jesuits in Ming China. I can easily imagine that Brockey's account will become the standard by which all other inquiries into this important mission are judged.
--Richard L. Kagan, Johns Hopkins University (20080801)

This is an admirable piece of scholarly research into one of the most challenging missionary endeavours ever undertaken...Brockey has drawn on archives in the Biblioteca da Ajuda in Lisbon and the Archivum Romanum Societatis Jesu in Rome to paint an extraordinarily detailed picture of a mission which started in 1579 with the summoning of Michele Ruggieri to China, and was dealt a mortal blow by the proscription of Christianity 145 years later...In this masterly survey, Brockey strips the China mission of any pious fancy. We are shown the political manoeuvring between priests and the imperial court, between different nationalities within the Society [of Jesus] itself and between the Society and Rome...This is no hagiography but an elegantly clear exposition of a tremendous missionary undertaking.
--Simon Scott Plummer (The Tablet )

[An] absorbing and strongly researched book...The nature and durability of this seventeenth-century expansion of the Jesuit mission in China are explored in the first half of Brockey's book and he brings many less-known missionaries into his story, broadening the canvas dramatically, and also giving serious attention to the problems the missionaries faced from hostile Chinese literati and senior officials...There will be few who do not find important new materials in the second half of Journey to the East, which draws on a rich range of original sources to deepen our sense of Chinese society and the attempted Jesuit impact upon it...Liam Brockey has written a challenging book. Even those of us who would still like to cling to the fact that many of these Jesuit pioneers in China were truly remarkable men, with enormous mental resources, have to realize that he has changed the ground rules of the debate. It is clear that the Chinese Catholics themselves were much more in charge of their own destinies than we had suspected. And with that knowledge in place, we can no longer tell the same old stories in the same old way.
--Jonathan Spence (New York Review of Books )

By any standard Journey to the East: The Jesuit Missions to China, 1579-1724 is an impressive work...Brockey manfully succeeds in painting a picture of the glories and pitfalls of the European Christian encounter with the enigmatic Chinese empire.
--Oliver Rafferty (Irish Times )

Brockey‘s great success with this authoritative study is showing how important the “assistance” of Chinese catechists and other lay helpers was for the ability of European Jesuits to carry out their extraordinary cross-cultural mission. It is a model for using European sources to spotlight the indigenous character of new Christian movements. (Christian Century )

Liam Brockey examines the proselytization strategies of the Jesuits in China during the years 1579–1724. Aiming to provide a corrective to previous histories that present the Jesuits' strategy as ‘top-down’ and elite-centered, Brockey reconstructs the history of the China mission ‘from the ground up’...[adding] another important layer to our understanding of the Jesuit mission.
--Melissa Dale (International Bulletin of Missionary Research )

Historians lamented the absence of a serious history of the Jesuit mission beyond the imperial city. Their prayers have now been answered in Liam Matthew Brockey's Journey to the East...An impressive accomplishment.
--Thomas M. McCoog, SJ (Times Literary Supplement )

A masterful study...New scholarship using Roman and Chinese sources leads to a much more complex story of Roman Catholicism in China during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With his deft analysis of a surprisingly underutilized source on the history of the Jesuit mission—Portuguese language letters and reports in ecclesiastical archives in Portugal and Rome— Brockey has constructed a new chronology and trajectory for the Jesuit mission itself, placing it in what he calls “a proper European context.” Intentionally or not, he also brings the Jesuits back into the increasingly complex history of Chinese religious life.
--Jerry Dennerline (Journal of Interdisciplinary History )

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.
--Timothy Brook (Catholic Historical Review )

About the Author
Liam Matthew Brockey is Assistant Professor of History, Princeton University.

Customer Reviews

Extremely well written history of an important period of Christian history
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.

Fascinating account of missionary journeys to the east
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.

good scholarship and interesting thesis
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.