English-language studies of rural Catholicism in China are still quite rare. Henrietta Harrison's remarkable history of the Catholic village of Cave Gully (Dongergou) and its vicinity in central Shanxi is, therefore, an important contribution that offers new insights into how Christianity was lived and practiced in rural communities of central Shanxi over a period of some 300 years. Her delineation of the complexities and contradictions does not easily fit into the stereotypical generalizations of the missionary enterprise as the vanguard of imperialism and cultural aggression.

Perhaps one of the most noteworthy findings of this study concerns the significant shift in power relations between missionaries and local Catholics in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. While scholars are beginning to realize that the foreign missionary enterprise had to rely on native agency from the start, Harrison reveals the extent to which the dwindling number of Italian Franciscans in Shanxi had to rely on material support and protection of affluent Chinese Christian merchants during much of the troublesome eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries. However, from about the middle of the nineteenth century onward, the Europeans were able to reduce their dependency on local Catholics. With the upsurge of missionary zeal in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, more Italian friars were sent to the Shanxi mission. New forms of fundraising in Europe for the support of missionary endeavors enabled the foreign clergy to exert financial control in China. More importantly, the emerging treaty system produced a significant transfer of power from Chinese Christians to the Italian priests. According to Harrison, the former were now no longer able to control—or blackmail—the latter in Shanxi.

These new realities enabled the missionaries to impose hierarchical structures that subordinated indigenous priests and Catholic community leaders to assertive European domination. In central Shanxi, this shift provoked early tensions between Italian friars and Chinese priests. Most striking was the struggle between Bishop Gabriele Grioglio (1813–91) and the local priest Josephus Wang Tingrong over the equality between Chinese and Italian priests. Harrison attributes Wang's egalitarian sentiments and early national consciousness to his training in Naples, where he witnessed the political agitation of the 1848 revolutionary movements. It is, however, particularly noteworthy that the Chinese Catholic activists sought to resolve differences within the context of the global Catholic Church. Not only did Wang travel to Rome in the 1850s to seek redress on the basis of “examples of resistance to the new institutional controls” (p. 79) he had observed during his time in Naples, but also collective letters of complaint by Christians in several provinces had already been sent to the pope in the 1840s. Later in the book, Harrison returns to the theme of interaction between the faithful in the Christian communities of central Shanxi and the Italian heartland of global Catholicism during the difficult days after 1949.

In connection with the disastrous Boxer Uprising of 1900, earlier scholarship maintains that the relentless spread of the “foreign” religion was an important factor in the rise of anti-Christian agitation in the late 1890s. Yet Harrison has found that in Shanxi the Italian Franciscans had been reluctant to undertake direct evangelization and preferred static institutional work. Consequently, during the decades, the number of converts had remained relatively stable in this part of China. The situation was, of course, rather different in other localities, especially in what has been called the “Boxer heartland” along the Zhili and Shandong border. The missions on the North China Plain had indeed experienced a phenomenal increase in church members during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. This confirms what has been stressed in some recent studies, namely that Christianity was not a monolithic belief system but existed in distinct localized forms in different parts of China. What the various localities in northern China did have in common was the additional power the foreign priests derived from the inflated post-Boxer indemnity payments that Harrison notes in central Shanxi.

Harrison takes the reader deep into China's rural hinterland and tells a compelling story about life in a Catholic village. On the other hand, greater care could have been taken in the concluding generalizations about the missionary enterprise in other parts of the country. What evidence is there, for example, for the claim that the alleged murder or suicide of a Chinese official “was one of the flashpoints of the Boxer Uprising” (p. 204)? Still, this excellent history of Dongergou and neighboring Catholic villages is a meticulously researched work, rich in insightful detail based on a variety of Chinese sources and hitherto neglected Franciscan archival material. This important book gives readers a more realistic understanding of Catholicism as it was practiced, has survived, and continues to flourish in Shanxi's rural hinterland. In other words, Harrison has convincingly and elegantly traced the changing complexity of this religion of Dongergou's ancestors through three eventful centuries.