LAUSR

Chinese culture was not tenable. The implicit argument was that China was so diverse that it was impossible to categorically distinguish between the Chinese and the non-Chinese world” (110). This was not a majority view in seventeenth-century China. And many members of the Chinese elite of the generation which saw the conquest chose not to serve the new dynasty. (Confucian ethics mandated that a minister serve only one ruler.) But Zhu took, and passed, the first civil service exam offered by the Qing state in 1648 (35). Just as Manchu rule disquieted some of Zhu’s peers, threats from Europeans disquieted others. During Zhu’s lifetime, first the Spanish and then the Dutch had taken Taiwan; the Spanish held the Philippines and the Portuguese, Macao. The missionaries were not the only source of Chinese information about Europe; Sachsenmeier tells us that coolies and merchants were also sources of information on the outside world and points out that in port cities like Ningbo, intermarriage between merchants and literati was increasingly common in the seventeenth century (131). One can thus imagine that elite families heard travelers’ tales of southeast Asia and the various people they met there, both local and European, tales which might elicit fear. In his Responses to a Guest’s Questions, Zhu says that the Chinese need not fear these foreigners, not because they have no schemes but because they come from different countries—if there were to be a master plan, whose plan would it be? Thus, it is not European innocence but rather their disorder (and their distance) that would protect the Chinese from their violence. While both missionaries and Chinese Christians may have argued that values were culture free, culture of course intervened. During Zhu’s lifetime, the church did not permit Chinese to become priests. The highest rank a Chinese could attain was a coadjutor brother, and that rank was restricted to residents of Macau, which was at this time largely Lusophone and Christian. As Sachsenmeier puts it: “A genuinely multicultural clergy that did not share the same theological lingua franca seemed to these fathers like an erosion of the spiritual and intellectual fundaments of their religion” (151). That may be where the limits of accommodation lay. The book is written in an engaging fashion, and it provides enough background on seventeenth-century China that it should be accessible to nonspecialists. It offers a fresh and complicated look at the processes of accommodation and ideas about ethnicity and foreignness at a time in Chinese history when foreigners from Europe were perhaps among the least of China’s worries.