This collection of Bishop George Smith's missionary writings, carefully transcribed and edited by Gillian Bickley, complements other materials by or about Smith that are variously available in libraries, formal archives or online. As such it forms a valuable window into both the life of an itinerating missionary bishop and into mid nineteenth-century East and South Asia, which makes ‘accessible between two covers a group of materials’ (p. 9) that will enrich existing scholarship. Smith was variously a Church of England priest, Church Missionary Society missionary and secretary, and then first bishop of Victoria (Hong Kong) between 1849 and 1865. Like other missionary bishops of the period, Smith not only managed his own diocese but journeyed further afield in a variety of roles, observing and reporting as he went. Here Bickley focuses solely on his missionary trips, curating his observations from five such trips (1852 to 1858), that then appeared in the pages of the Church Missionary Intelligencer: three to a combination of Shanghai, Ningpo and Hangchow, one to India and Ceylon, and one to a combination of India, Ceylon, Indonesia and Singapore. Each journey is given a short introduction, and all are contextualised by a useful introductory essay. In so doing Bickley sets Smith's journey narratives against a larger canvas. She suggests that ‘we gain insights into the Taipings, consular and diplomatic relations and negotiations with China, Anglican and missionary politics and some of the people – in high places and low – involved in all these fields’ (p. 12). Those insights are close-up views, gritty and engaging in their detail. At the same time, both in Bickley's introductory material and in Smith's narratives, the significance of that context is not always clear. In this case Smith's journeys happened amidst the horrors and turmoil of the long-running Taiping civil war, the imperial machinations of the Second Opium War and the grudging access to China's interior through the various treaties of the mid-nineteenth century. Likewise, his travels to India, and resulting observations, occurred before the game-changing events of the 1857 Rebellion. The combined strength of this collection, however, lies in Bickley's ability to largely let Smith speak; and in doing so there is much here that will be valuable to specialist readers in religious studies, world Christianity, mission history and imperial, intellectual or cultural history among others. The narratives also underscore the dangers of categorical interpretations of historical lives; Smith emerges as both a flawed man of his time and as an original and empathetic thinker. The collection has been edited in such a way as to make clear, too, the differences between what missionaries wrote and how that writing was redacted by home-base editors with an eye to constituency or constrained by prevailing theological paradigms. While there are a few quibbles (for example, the map and explanatory apparatus might have been better placed at the front of the collection and the endnotes might have worked more effectively as footnotes), this is a valuable collection that is at once refreshing and provocative and a valuable scholarly resource.