Jessie Lutz, a distinguished historian of the Christian missions in China, has produced a fine biography of the remarkable Karl Gützlaff, born into a master tailor's family in 1803 and lucky enough to have had the Prussian king pay for his education at the Berlin Mission Institute. After more training in Rotterdam, where he studied Malay, Gützlaff was sent to the Dutch East Indies. He spent most of the rest of his life in Asia where he acquired spoken fluency in Thai, Mandarin, Cantonese and Hakka and competence in classical Chinese. After a sojourn in Thailand he reached China where he was to spend the next twenty years. In need of funds as an independent missionary, in the 1830s he worked as an interpreter on the Lord Amherst, a British ship prospecting the China coast for the East India Company. Later he worked on fast opium-smuggling boats which were attempting to expand the opium trade northwards from Canton. Even his fellow missionaries were uneasy at the extent of his involvement. Not only a man of action, Gützlaff contributed to a Chinese translation of the Bible and many Christian tracts. He also published pamphlets about China in English, German and Dutch. He recognised that foreign missionaries had difficulty in communicating with Chinese and started to train Chinese assistants as evangelists. Lutz provides fascinating detail of the paradoxes of this pious evangelist thoroughly caught up in imperialist expansion and opium-smuggling. In the end he remains for her, and for us, a puzzle.