This latest offering from Anthony Clark, following on the heels of Henrietta Harrison's excellent The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales (University of California Press, 2013), is a welcome addition to what one hopes will become a growing scholarly discussion on the development of Christianity in Shanxi. Thanks to these two scholars, many stories previously buried within disparate Catholic archives around the world are now readily available to anyone interested in knowing more about the historical interactions between religion and culture in China – specifically in the central plains of Shanxi.

Heaven in Conflict builds upon the author's earlier China's Saints: Catholic Martyrdom during the Qing (Lehigh University Press, 2013), but with a much narrower focus. In a welcome departure from the more popular interest in the Jesuit mission to China, the author has elected to examine the Franciscan mission, explicitly including the women of the Missionaries of Mary who came along in support of that endeavour. While the ground covered is hardly new – much has been written on both the Boxer summer and the earlier North China Famine of 1877–79 – this is still the first book to look specifically at the Franciscan experience in late 19th-century Shanxi. The author delivers his account in an easy, empathetic style, reflecting the autobiographical nature of the more unique archival material he has explored.

The book is short and primarily devoted to narrative, with the first chapter providing an introduction to the dramatis personae of the Shanxi Franciscan mission throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries. Chapters two and three introduce the author's most unique contribution, as he examines the Chinese Boxers and Western missionaries in parallel, as participants in a contest that both sides viewed as a spiritual battle. While the author acknowledges that there were different understandings of victory at play – the Boxers sought to kill their enemies, while the Franciscans sought to be killed by their enemies – his attempt to position the different parties more as equals on opposite sides of a shared conflict helps the reader to move beyond simplistic understandings of the actors as Chinese savages and/or Western barbarians.

In chapter four the author extends his parallel reading to include the women involved in the Shanxi Boxer conflicts – both the Red Lanterns and the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. Personal letters from the martyred foreign women in Taiyuan bring the events to life, with the author deftly outlining the complex cultural position of these foreign women seeking to serve their God in Shanxi. Chapter five looks at the paradigmatic events of July 1900, examining the course of events in Taiyuan that led to the deaths of the Franciscan missionaries as well as many local Catholics. Shanxi governor Yuxian is deeply implicated in this account, and the ensuing violence and deaths are once again viewed as components of a spiritual battle. The final chapter explores the aftermath, with the execution of Yuxian and subsequent restoration and expansion of mission properties – as well as the popular Catholic reverence for the many Shanxi martyrs – all viewed by contemporary participants as indicators of “victory” for the Christian cause in the spiritual battle.

Not surprisingly, Heaven in Conflict relies heavily on Catholic source material, and the author's use of personal letters and the various collections of martyr records prepared for potential canonization lends a level of intimacy to his account of the Franciscans in Taiyuan. Good use is also made of materials from Shanxi, with content from locally produced monographs and the diocesan archives supplying details that greatly enrich the narrative. Given this choice of source material, there were a few instances where greater interaction with Protestant archives and the larger scholarly discourse on the Boxer phenomenon may have lent a more critical bent to this account – some readers will come away from the author's discussion of both Governor Yuxian and the indemnity question wanting more. The author's primary intent, however, is not to say something new about the Boxers themselves, but rather to illuminate the heretofore little understood experience of the Franciscan missionaries in Shanxi at the time of the Boxers. In this respect, Heaven in Conflict is a welcome and readable success.