Litian Swen urges the reader to move past the cultural-conflicts paradigm, prominent in the field of Christianity in China studies during the 1980s and 1990s, and instead reassess the bond between Jesuit missionaries working for the Qing emperors as one example of the Manchu master–slave relationship. Swen starts his study with Ludovico Buglio and Gabriel de Magelhaens's encounter with the Manchus during the 1640s and he then examines this relationship through three parts in which he tracks the Jesuits’ identity as booi aha (9) or “household slaves” from the beginning of Qing rulership to the intertwined events of the Kangxi emperor's negotiations with the Pope and the Qianlong emperor's prohibition of Christianity in China in 1724. Analyzing the unequal relationship between Western missionaries and Manchu masters through the prism of New Qing History, Swen questions the sequential connection between the Chinese Rites Controversy and the prohibition, and he replaces it with a careful untangling and examination of the Jesuit missionaries’ position in the imperial household and their “family-style connection” (7) with different Manchu emperors. Swen argues that it was this master–slave relationship that dictated the “rise and the decline of the Christian mission during the Kangxi and Yongzheng reigns.”

First, Swen explains the nature of the master–slave relationship further as it was understood by seventeenth century Manchu rulers, rooted for centuries in nomad traditions. To avoid knee-jerk reactions from readers mostly familiar with the history of Atlantic-oriented slavery, Swen explains that while slavery was hereditary, free status could be obtained in many ways. He also claims that slavery “did not [necessarily] suggest a lower social status” (8). Overall, a strong sense of lineage in the Manchu master–slave relationship made this connection a powerful relationship, with the potential of creating a deep trust, and with non-Manchus seeking or maintaining this relationship across generations, if deemed mutually helpful. It is clear that not all Jesuits entered their relationship with the Manchu as slaves; Johan Adam Schall von Bell, for example, was retained as a Chinese-style Confucian minister, serving a Qing emperor, and, as Swen acknowledges, it was possible for some Jesuits to have a slave–master relationship while others at the same time served as ministers. Swen carefully lays out how the household slave status of certain Jesuits allowed for the Kangxi emperor to receive some legates within the format of the imperial household, while the lack of this relationship with the Yongzheng emperor completely shifted the format, rituals, and source material documenting the contacts between the Jesuits and the Manchus.

In part one, Swen describes how some Jesuits entered into this type of relationship with the Manchus. Knowledge of Western weaponry in combination with experiencing the battlefield firsthand and living with Manchu soldiers for a prolonged time allowed Buglio and Magalhaens to enter as slaves of Haoge at first, while the important relationship with the Tong clan set them up for building a long-lasting master–slave relationship with the Kangxi emperor during the 1650s and 1660s (49). As they became more entangled with court politics (via Schall's Chinese divination skills, for example), the Jesuits adjusted their course to become Kangxi's family slaves (97), which resulted in material support (100) and the backing of a master who sought to avoid bureaucratic process and instead protected his family slaves directly (106).

In part two, Swen analyzes Kangxi's changing attitudes toward both papal legates and the fourteen-year period in between. Swen argues that the progress of the Tournon-Kangxi exchange was determined by Tournon's eventual understanding of the master–slave relationship between the Beijing Jesuits and their masters (110). Swen highlights that the rites controversy was not on Kangxi's mind (122) until the final, impromptu, farewell audience, during which Tournon and Kangxi for the first time discussed the cultural compatibility of Chinese Confucian rites and Christianity (123). It was only after Tournon left, Swen argues, that the Kangxi emperor “started to look seriously into the Chinese Rites Controversy” (130), which was followed by a disastrous visit by Maigrot (131). Swen holds that Kangxi's actions, instating the necessity of certificates and sending multiple Jesuit ambassadors to Europe himself, came from an “interest and concern for the Beijing missionaries” (145) as their master. Unlike previous scholarship such as Rowbotham, Standaert, or Po-Chia Hsia, Swen argues that the eventual prohibition by the Yongzheng emperor was “not a continuation of, but an abdication from Kangxi's policies” (145). Kangxi sent ambassadors, followed up on any news about them, installed new communication channels to receive trustworthy news from Europeans arriving in China, and was unusually patient (echoing Spence's earlier assessment) in these affairs, so states Swen (151). The main reason Kangxi stepped into this debate, according to Swen, was the master–slave relationship. Finally, Kangxi's words of prohibition, after fourteen years of negotiating patiently, should “not be taken at face value,” but were rather a “clever negotiation tactic” (165).

In part three, Swen addresses the 1724 prohibition. His starting position is that the Jesuits and the Yongzheng emperor did not have a master–slave relationship at all. As such the Yongzheng emperor evicted them from the Imperial Household Department (170), and Swen's tone in explaining what it meant for the Jesuits to lose the chance of serving a master as household slaves is one that perfectly illustrates the emotional connection and privilege of being someone's booi in Qing China. Add to that that the Yongzheng emperor was “one of the most accomplished Buddhist practitioners in the Qing dynasty,” and it becomes clear that the prohibition was unavoidable and that the two simply could not ever “form a close and trusting relationship” (170). Swen warns that earlier scholarly explanations of the prohibition “downplay” Yongzheng's role (and his spiritual authority as a Buddhist) and they fail to acknowledge that it was his “personal wish” that caused the prohibition to happen when it did (180).

Finally, in a brief postscript Swen reminds the reader of the importance of coincidences and urges us to take into account Kangxi's interests and Yongzheng's “embrace of Buddhism”; those two individual tastes, in combination with the Manchu master–slave relationship, made for a mercurial path of Jesuit success during the early modern period.