The realization that change in China during the 20th century may have altered the practice of religion, but has fallen very far short of eliminating it, has prompted a wealth of research in recent years. It is with very great pleasure that we may now welcome a synthesis of much of this new scholarship – both published and as yet unpublished – from a seasoned observer with an experience of historical research that frequently illuminates recent developments in the light of longer-term perspectives, as well as the author's own current projects. An introduction and conclusion lucidly round out three chapters that were originally three public lectures, so that the main text provides a succinct and clear summary of a great range of work that one may find scrupulously cited in the endnotes. The first of these lectures is based upon an accounting for the relative decline in the number of temples in China, though this is revealed as a very uneven process over time and space. The work of Poon Shuk-wah for instance, is drawn upon on p. 41 to suggest that while urban spaces may have been marked by a “cleansing” of “superstitious” sites, improved transport links enabled temples outside the urban periphery to flourish new ways, and this is indeed the pattern we may perceive in a book like Peter Goullart, The Monastery of Jade Mountain (John Murray, 1961), one of the few accounts by a non-Chinese participant in Chinese religious practice during the Republican period.

The second chapter addresses the burgeoning of new forms of religious publishing in the first half of the 20th century – other media such as radio are mentioned several times in passing but not extensively explored, though Francesca Tarocco, The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism (Routledge, 2007, pp. 128–30), is among those who have paid some attention to the Buddhist case, while Christian radio in the 1930s is the topic of the fifth chapter of Michael A. Krysko's, American Radio in China (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). One might hesitate to endorse without qualification the view expressed on p. 70 that before the 20th century “Even when commercial printers did choose to take on a religious project, they tended to do so only on a commission basis, not as a regular activity.”. A compilation even of the 17th century that was clearly published for profit, the Tanji congshu, and also the Shuo ling, an 18th-century collection, both include two or three works on religion, or at least warnings of karmic retribution, suggesting a certain market for religious writing, while 19th-century Christian religious tracts, even if they did not turn a profit, were deliberately marketed for money, according to John T. P. Lai, Negotiating Religious Gaps (Institut Monumenta Serica, 2012, pp. 146–47).

Possibly, then, the shift to new modes of publishing requires a bit more research into earlier antecedents before we understand it fully. Even so, the news on p. 126 that a Buddhist work of the early Qing that was never even given canonical status sold three million copies in Republican times is startling – it turns out it was still selling in Hong Kong in the 1960s, and of course is available today in modern baihua translation. But after sketching such spacious bibliographic vistas for future research the author considerately brings matters back to a more human scale. The last chapter, indeed, shifting the focus as it does to the practices of individual devotees, brings alive the Republican period in new and quite intimate ways. Several of its pages give an unprecedented account of the modern yet distinctly Buddhist activities of the artist Wang Yiting (1867–1938), whilst it also touches on the troubled spirituality of Chiang Kai-shek, amongst others. Any summary of this section – just as much as of its predecessors – cannot possibly do justice to the richness of the discussion so concisely presented. While it is true that the focus of much of the book is primarily on the individuals who made up the elite in China – precisely because the assumption generally has been that their secularisation was ahead of that of the masses – the outlook is even so not a narrow one, extending as it does at times beyond the Han Chinese to the margins of China. In an increasingly crowded market, this is a volume that stands out.