George Kam Wah Mak has taken on the admirable job of picking up where so many previous researchers into the history of the Chinese Bible have stopped by exploring how the great Chinese Bible, the Union Version, has influenced the development of the modern Chinese language. This mission is daunting because it is so difficult to prove, but at the same time it is a tantalising task. After all, the complete Mandarin Union Version Bible was published in 1919, the same year as the ‘May Fourth Movement’, which, among other things, called forth a literary revolution that would see literary classic Chinese replaced by vernacular Mandarin Chinese. Mak attempts to answer this question by looking in two directions: first, at the nineteenth-century sources used by the Union Version translators, especially in their previous attempts to translate into Mandarin (which, as Mak shows, had long been more popular than the many literary or dialectal versions); and at the question of whether and how the Union Version was used as a model for a national vernacular written language after its publication. Mak demonstrates that some of the grammatical constructs and terminological choices used by the Union Version translators had indeed been employed as early as the 1850s or 1870s, which is earlier than typically assumed. How was that possible when Christians made up only about 0.1 per cent of the entire population of China at the time? One reason, as Mak shows, is that the literati took note and adopted the text of the Union Version as an example of good Mandarin Chinese. Another is that the Chinese of the Union Version was used to teach the new form of written Chinese. While this has long been known anecdotally, Mak has actually been able to track down three Mandarin school primers that include fragments of the Union Version. This is just one of the areas where Mak's painstaking research has paid off. Despite all the hard work that Mak invested into this study, we still will not be able to quantify exactly how much influence was exerted by the Union Version translators. What is now certain, though, is that proportionally speaking there was significantly more influence than the tiny minority of Christian followers in the Republican era would suggest. It would have been helpful if more sources about the missionaries' ‘Chinese assistants’ and their backgrounds had been unearthed, and a little more critical treatment of the missionaries' writings about their aimed-for influence on the development of the modern Chinese language would also have been welcome, but overall this book provides the long-awaited next stepping stone in the history of the Union Version, leading us to a better understanding of the undoubtedly great and lasting influence of one of the great Bible translations in the history of Christianity.