The correct and complete title of this book is the one on the front cover of this edited volume by Catherine Marin, a senior lecturer at the Catholic Institute of Paris. Marin is a specialist on modern missionary history and an active member of the Groupe de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur Écriture Missionnaires, an interdisciplinary research group on missionary writings. The correspondence of missionaries on their experiences in East and Southeast Asia, and the specific rhetoric of the missionary letters contained in Marin's volume, provides any reader who is interested in church history in Asia with a fascinating, largely original, well-commented-upon and annotated anthology of missionary letters, mostly composed right after their arrival at the mission.

The corpus of correspondences illustrates four representative moments of the mission's history: the landing in eighteenth-century Asia of four young French missionaries from the Missions Étrangères de Paris (Foreign Missions of Paris) who would take charge of already well-organized and established Christian communities; the return of Jesuits to China from 1841 in the context of intense international turmoil; French missionaries' desperate attempts at entering Japan through Okinawa in the years preceding Japan's opening; and the entry of missionaries from Mary's Oblates Congregation into Laos during the second half of the twentieth century in the midst of political revolution.

Marin's chapter “Reaching the Other Shore: From the West to the Far East” is based on a selection of twelve letters written by young Frenchmen who decided to leave their families forever and devote themselves to the mission, which required that they embark on formidable travels across oceans and journey deep into an unknown and hostile world whose language and customs were unknown to them. At the time, Europeans, most being merchants in Macao and Canton, were still relatively rare in the Far East, and missionaries were the only Europeans who traveled beyond Macao and attempted to enter such countries forbidden to all foreigners as Tonkin, Cochin China, and China. They were welcome in the kingdom of Siam, but they were not allowed to preach.

Bernadette Truchet selects fourteen letters out of a collection of 655 letters known as Lettres de la Nouvelle Mission en Chine (Letters of the New Mission in China) in her chapter “A Longed-For Return: Jesuits in China, 1841–1843.” The Jesuit Order had been suppressed in 1773 and the last Jesuit in charge in China had died in 1813. The new missionaries' letters mostly consist of reports on the setting of the China mission and various details on the country, not leaving much space for personal feelings, except for extolling God's glory. They mainly aim at transmitting as much information as possible to their superiors and to the whole Jesuit community, hoping to inspire others to follow in their footsteps to further the apostolic task in progress. However, the political context is quite a new one, as China now faces European powers who are trying to occupy its coasts. They stress the importance of new apostolic works such as schools, seminaries, and health clinics and hospitals to strengthen the organization of the local Christian communities.

Patrick Beillevaire's chapter, “The French Foreign Missions of Paris and the Resurgence of the Christian Issue in Nineteenth Century Japan,” relates the sad adventure of Théodore Forcade, who landed in Okinawa and erroneously believed the Ryûkyû Islands to be an ideal gateway to Japan. Unfortunately, the local authorities kept a close watch on him and prevented him from preaching, as the islands were de facto dependencies of the Satsuma domain, which Forcade did not know. Once Japan was opened to the West, another missionary, Bernard-Thadée Petitjean, was lucky enough to encounter Japanese crypto-Christians in Urakami, a district of Nagasaki, and hoped for the rebirth of Christian life in Japan; this did not happen because of the renewal of persecutions.

Roland Jacques, in “Laos: The Shock of Independence Movements,” presents letters written by young missionaries—Vincent L'Hénoret, Jean Wauthier, Louis Leroy, and all members of Mary's Oblates Congregation—who went to Laos in the 1950s to evangelize Laos mountain people. The political context was quite a new one, as the country, although theoretically united and independent, was rife with contending ideological movements that degenerated into violent struggles among guerrillas. Still, the three missionaries decided to remain among the Christian communities in spite of the growing danger; they were, of course, duly killed.

The four papers are all very informative of the history of French missions in East and Southeast Asia, especially the strict distinction that missionaries unexpectedly established between the mission and colonization. Marin's and Truchet's chapters are all the more interesting, as they take into account the rhetoric of the missionary letters. Although there are specificities in the framing of each of four selections of letters because missionaries faced very different situations, from well-established to highly tenuous missions and different national contexts and historical periods, all the letters share a common rhetoric and other features: professional data, a deep sense of religious mission, hope for God's help, an interest in the foreign country, and personal feelings. A comparison between Protestant and Catholic missionaries' letters would have been particularly interesting.