About the protagonist of this book “we have no personal data, no letters, no diaries, or autobiographical notes,” writes Dominic Sachsenmaier (167–168). Cosmas Zhu Zongyuan (ca. 1616–1660), “a man who never traveled,” would thus seem a rather unlikely subject for an entire monograph in a series on international and global history. Yet, even if we cannot know the feelings and private thoughts of this Chinese Christian, Sachsenmaier's richly contextualized narrative captures much more than an individual life. We get to explore a series of interlocking “conflicted worlds”: the Chinese coastal city of Ningbo, the tormented Ming-Qing dynastic transition, the debates within Confucianism, the history of the Catholic Church and the Society of Jesus as “globalizing” institutions, and, more broadly, the experiences of global religious expansion and intercultural encounters.
Sachsenmaier situates Zhu's local trajectory within a global perspective. Zhu's connection with missionaries brought him in contact with Europe, a situation which was “somewhat unusual for Chinese society at this time” (1). Born to a gentry family in the Ming maritime hub of Ningbo, he passed the provincial examinations under the Qing in 1648 when he had already been Christian for a decade. In Sachsenmaier's assessment, Zhu “was not driven by the objective of unfolding exotic curiosities of a distant world for his readers” but rather he “pursued the ultimate goal of demonstrating that Christianity was worth the attention of his fellow scholars and other members of Chinese society” (3). No cosmopolitan, he firmly believed in the centrality of China and the Confucian worldview. Yet he also felt that the moral crisis of his time, proven by the fall of the Ming, could be overcome only by combining the best of his own civilization with Christianity's ethical and religious solutions.
In a historiographical section (11–19), Sachsenmaier expounds his approach, informed by advances in the history of Sino-Western relations and Christianity in China since the 1980s, both in European languages and in Chinese. A focus on Chinese actors and sources has greatly enriched our understanding of Christian life among literati and rural folks. The field of Jesuit studies, moreover, has shown how the Jesuits not only adapted to extra-European environments, but also brought to their missions “carryovers from their own native lands” (16) in their attitudes to social contacts and religious activities. Most importantly, this book marries the global approach to the microhistorical and biographical ones. In German theoretical fashion, Sachsenmaier recently worked on mapping conceptual innovations in global history, and has here applied his insights, highlighting “the intellectual challenges emerging from the encounter between a local life and a translocal faith,” and between “the globalizing Catholic Church and the late Ming state and society” (18). Five main chapters cover the local context of Zhu's life, his Confucian identity and the contradictions with his new Christian faith, and how in his writings he came to terms with the foreign origins of that faith, by idealizing Europe as a remote Confucian utopia and his Jesuit masters as Confucian sages.
The conflict alluded to in the title keeps us turning the pages. We can only posit such personal tension out of four philosophical and religious texts Zhu authored: the manuscript Treatise on the Destruction of Superstition (1635–1640; published in 1680 as Removing doubts about Christianity); the book Responses to the Questions of a Guest (1643); the manuscript examination essay The Rites for the Veneration of Heaven and of the Gods of Earth and Harvest Serve to Venerate the Lord on High (1647); and his crowning achievement, the book A summary of World Salvation (1650).
These titles reveal developments in Zhu's intellectual and religious life. First, he discovered a new faith and rejected Chinese ideas and practices which he deemed “superstitious.” Then, he learned the tenets of Christianity, expressed in dialogic form in Responses to a guest's questions. Subsequently, he attempted to reconcile Confucian and Christian rites. Finally, he presented his personal interpretation of Christianity as the necessary ingredient to save China and the world. This progression emerged out of Zhu's struggle to bring together Confucianism and Christianity, the state hierarchy and the Catholic church, and, finally, what was considered “Chinese” and “barbarian.”
Sachsenmaier reproduced and analyzed Zhu's texts in his first monograph, Die Aufnahme europäischer Inhalte in die chinesiche Kultur durch Zhu Zongyuan (ca. 1616–1660) [The Reception of European Knowledge in Chinese Culture through Zhu Zongyuan] (Steyler Verlag, 2001). Readers interested in the sinological and archival dimensions of Zhu's writings should still consult that German-language volume for philological explanations, as occasionally Global Entanglements—possibly in an effort to simplify—contains inconsistencies. An example: The year of Cosmas Zhu's baptism (1638) is recorded in a 1644 Portuguese history of the China mission written by António de Gouvea, SJ, the original manuscript of which was recently edited and published by Horácio P. Araújo: Ásia Extrema, 4 vols. (Fundaçao Oriente, 1995–2018). On page 33 of Global Entanglements, Sachsenmaier mentions the manuscript itself as his source, but in the relevant note, instead of the manuscript, he cites volume 3 of the Araújo edition (2005) without including a page number. In fact, the actual source of his information is neither of these. According to page 73 of his first monograph, Die Aufnahme, he has used the French translation of a section of Gouvea's work which focuses on Ningbo published in the missionary journal Petit Messager de Ning-po in 1925. Moreover, if he were to use the Araújo edition, he would have found such information not in volume 3, but in volume 4 (2018), which contains all events related to the period from 1629 to 1644. This may seem like a technicality, but it makes it difficult to trace the originals. And the lack of archival provenance for most of the primary sources cited in bibliography compounds this issue. A way to remedy these omissions for those interested in further research is to consult Nicolas Standaert, ed., Handbook of Christianity in China, vol. 1, 635–1800 (Brill, 2001) and the excellent online Chinese Christian Texts (CCT) Database (https://www.arts.kuleuven.be/sinologie/english/cct).
In sum, Global Entanglements is a welcome addition to the English-language literature on Christianity in China and a refreshing and valuable historiographic intervention in the field of global history. It is a highly readable, well-informed glimpse of the “conflicted worlds” of one man through whose life we get to appreciate the connections between early modern China and the broader globe, across the oceans of space and time. Hopefully, through a future paperback edition, the story of “a man who never traveled” will serve as an illuminating case study in the classroom and among the general public alike.
