Nanlai Cao's case study examines the establishment of a popular role in society for the Protestant Church in south-east China's thriving coastal city of Wenzhou. Conducted between 2004 and 2006, nineteen months of fieldwork comprise the evidentiary basis for this ethnographic monograph. Cao's concise volume is a discerning contribution to scholarship on the evolving relationship between State and Church in the People's Republic of China. In particular, it advances our understanding of the pragmatic means by which ‘boss Christians’ are harnessing Wenzhou's rampant economic growth to enable their faith to make the transition from the margins to the mainstream of contemporary urban society. Advancing the plurality of disciplines in this field, Cao's ethnographic anthropology is a welcome addition to the burgeoning discourse on Christian religious practice in China. His work follows Daniel Bays's pioneering scholarship on the indigenisation of Christianity, and stands alongside recent publications on Church-State relations such as Yoshiko Ashiwa and David Wank's edited collection, Making religion, making the state: the politics of religion in modern China (Stanford 2009). Divided into seven chapters, Cao introduces his subject with an examination of the powerful symbiosis between Christianity and capitalism in the prefecture-level city of Wenzhou. Chapter ii studies the city's entrepreneurial class, particularly the practical outcomes of the ‘boss Christian’ leadership's perception of itself as blessed by God and state. In this and subsequent chapters, interviews with seventy individuals provide practitioners' accounts of how ‘locals produce, consume and interpret Christian values’ (p. 11). Chapter iii explores the manners, morals and modern worldview of Wenzhou's Christian capitalists. ‘Christianity appeals to Wenzhou's private entrepreneurs’, observes Cao, ‘partly because it helps to project a moral ideal and assert a unique regional identity differentiating Wenzhou from both China's vast inland, which is dominated by an agricultural-based economy, and Chinese metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai, dominated by reformist state-led development … Wenzhou bosses are using global Christianity in an attempt to transcend a decadent state moral order captured by prevalent cadre corruption' (pp. 168–9). The conflicting roles of boss Christians as Wenzhou businessmen, citizens of the People's Republic of China, and new rich are cogently examined in the fourth chapter. Cao's focus on the practical dimension of Christianity is appropriate to local pride in ‘doing rather than thinking’ (p. 75), and builds upon Adam Chau's Miraculous responses: doing popular religion in contemporary China (Stanford 2006). Chapters v and vi illuminate the gendered domination of Wenzhou's Christian capitalists over non-elite local women and migrant workers. The religious experience for non-elite Chinese women in the Protestant Church is discomfortingly different from that of the boss Christian males who comprise its leadership. Readers seeking a theological or historiographical account of Wenzhou Christians’ construction of ‘China's Jerusalem’ might be slightly disappointed with Cao's firmly anthropological methodology (p. 165). This reviewer's parti pris favouring of empirical historiography caused disappointment when faced with an intriguing but unverifiable reference to a ‘top-secret document regarding Wenzhou Christianity’ prepared by the local police department (p. 48 n. 9). However, these minor insufficiencies are omissions. Cao clearly identifies his methodological approach in the volume's introduction. This is an original and thoroughly commendable study. Anyone interested in the practical elements of urban Christianity or Church–State relations in contemporary China should read it.