The story of the Öngüt people is an unusual sidebar in the history of late medieval China. They first appear as the Shatuo, a small Turkic-speaking following resettled in northern China in the late Tang. Stationed in Shanxi, they mingled with Sogdians who had lived as herders in nearby Ordos, around the Yellow River's great bend. After the fall of the Tang, these Turco-Sogdian Shatuo eventually established three of the petty Five Dynasties between the Tang and the Song. With the end of these dynasties, they did not disappear, however. Instead, they converted to Christianity while serving the Kitan Liao and Jurchen Jin dynasties as wardens on the Mongolian frontier. Perhaps for this reason, they came to be called the Öngüt, from the Turkic öng, or “front(ier).” In 1204, the Öngüt princes went over to the rising Mongols, being rewarded with power and privilege in the ensuing Mongol Yuan dynasty as an imperial in-law family. During this time, the Öngüt left behind some of the most visible archeological remains in Inner Mongolia. After the expulsion of the Mongols from China, the Öngüt are last seen around 1490 as the family of Mandukhai, the empress who, with her child-groom Dayan Khan, reestablished the supremacy of Chinggis (Genghis) Khan's line in Mongolia.

The story of this people, who made a considerable success out of violating all of our ethnic, linguistic, religious, and political categories for medieval Chinese frontier history, forms the background for Tjalling H. F. Halbertsma's likewise eccentric, but quite intriquing, book. Early Christian Remains of Inner Mongolia is by turns a survey of medieval East–West relations, a history of archeology in frontier China, a catalogue of Öngüt remains, a study of how Han and Mongol residents appropriate relics of the past, and a documentation of the frenzied wave of looting that is now clearing out the final remains of Öngüt Christian culture.

Halbertsma first tells the story of Christianity in China and the European travelers during the Mongol empire who recorded information about the Öngüt. In part II, he surveys how foreign explorers, missionaries, and geographers first noticed the traces of Öngüt city walls and Christian tombstones, and then gives a good survey of Chinese archeological findings from the 1950s to the 1980s. In part III, he attempts an exhaustive listing of all known cities, sculpture, and tombstones associated with medieval Christianity in Inner Mongolia. Part IV examines how Mongol herders, Han settlers, grave robbers, missionaries, and tourist-trade businessmen have variously used and abused these remains.

Although all the remains discussed, with the possible exception of some gravestones at Shizhuziliang, stem from the Yuan-era Öngüt, Halbertsma conceptualizes them primarily as Christian remains, rather than as Öngüt remains. This decision gives his book a different focus than Gai Shanlin's Yinshan Wanggu (Höhhot: Nei Menggu renmin chubanshe, 1991), the main Chinese treatment of the topic, and draws him into a number of perhaps extraneous discussions of Tang-era Christianity, Mongol religious policy, and European missions in the Mongol empire. Halbertsma, of course, has the right to frame his topic as he wishes, but his treatment of Christianity seems less insightful than his examination of the Öngüt archeological remains.

One of the best features of the book is its very thorough bibliography of European, American, and Chinese-language writings, including extremely obscure items first published in Flemish or Dutch. (However, important works about the Öngüt as Öngüts, such as E. G. Pulleyblank's 1952 study of the Sogdians of Inner Mongolia and their eventual merger with the Shatuo, are not included.) The volume is expensive, but the price includes 122 excellent color plates. These include not just the typical artifact photos, but also photos of looters at work, stone turtles shattered by careless tourist-site managers, and Öngüt gravestones being used by local farmers and herders as door posts or foundation stones. Rare black-and-white drawings of remains no longer extant are also included.

Given such a variety of topics, Halbertsma would have to be a veritable genius to cover all topics with equal perspicuity. I found the history of Öngüt archeology, the catalogue of the Öngüt Christian remains, and Halbertsma's observations on how these remains have been appropriated to be the most original parts of the work. Less successful is the discussion of Christianity in China and the Mongol empire, where the usual catchwords of Mongol “pragmatism,” “syncretism,” and “tolerance” are trotted out as if Devin DeWeese had never written his Islamization and Native Religion in the Golden Horde (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). Still, Early Christian Remains of the Inner Mongolia is a valuable study of the Öngüt Christian remains in Inner Mongolia, a lasting record of many now destroyed monuments, and, despite the author's impartial academic tone, a shocking look at the carnage unleashed by museums and private collectors' avid hunger for unprovenanced artifacts.