Andrew Kaiser's study of the history of Protestantism in Shanxi is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Chinese Christianity. Instead of focusing on one missionary or even a whole mission agency, this localized study looks at the whole of mission history in Shanxi, a province at the center of many impactful events in the history of Chinese Christianity. Kaiser demonstrates a strong grasp of the writings of historical missionaries throughout the book, but adds to this an apparent understanding of the Protestant church in Shanxi today.

The first two chapters are the strongest in the book, as they provide a concise, yet thorough, overview of some of the major incidents in modern Shanxi history, namely the North China Famine of 1877 and the Boxer Uprising of 1900. The first chapter includes discussion of the missionary methods and different approaches to the famine taken by Timothy Richard and Hudson Taylor, two of the most influential missionaries in Chinese Christianity. Historians have tended to place Richard and Taylor at two ends of a spectrum, the former a liberal intellectual and the latter a conservative evangelical. In recognizing the rupture that formed between the two missionaries and their supporters in Shanxi, Kaiser suggests both figures were, nevertheless, quite similar in many respects. Both Richard and Taylor adopted Chinese dress, were deeply involved in humanitarian efforts, and encouraged an expansion of mission work in new, inland areas (24). Despite the efforts of Richard, Taylor, and other missionaries and Chinese evangelists, at the end of the nineteenth century, there were just over 1,500 Protestants in Shanxi. This number would drop before it expanded.

Chapter 2 recalls the horrors experienced by missionaries and Chinese Christians in Shanxi at the hands of the Boxers. While various Boxer groups started in rural areas of nearby Shandong, Kaiser focuses on the movement in Shanxi, which eventually lead to the death of 180 missionaries (men, women, and children), most of them Protestant, and nearly 2,400 Chinese Christians (99–100). As the narrative in this chapter suggests, the high death toll in Shanxi is largely attributed to the actions of Yuxian, the governor of Shanxi. The Boxer Uprising and its fallout is the pivotal event in the history of Protestantism in Shanxi. The readability of Kaiser's review of this much-researched event, as well as his exhaustive survey of missionary writings and relevant second-hand sources, would make portions of this chapter suitable readings for courses on Chinese history in general.

The riveting account of the head of Governor Yuxian's guard asking a missionary if God could forgive him for his role in the murder of Christians introduces the reader to the post-Boxer era beginning in chapter 3. Kaiser's point: “The martyrs of 1900 had not suffered in vain” (119). This third chapter begins the latter half of the book, and the reader may recognize a perceivable shift to more biographical vignettes of missionaries in this and the subsequent chapters. Such a focus runs the risk of overshadowing the Chinese side of the story of the church in Shanxi. This seems to be a byproduct of Kaiser's purpose in writing the book: “to help my fellow expatriate Christians in Shanxi better understand the historical context of their ministry world” (xiv). At times, this goal seems to burden the narrative by shifting the discussion away from the story of the church in Shanxi. For example, a portion of chapter 3 is devoted to the debate among missionaries of the merits and dangers of “love of middle-class comforts” (172) and the rising disillusionment some missionaries felt regarding their calling in the 1920s–1930s. This discussion, however, does not center on Shanxi, even if it is clearly relevant for Kaiser's target audience.

Chapter 4 recounts how the Shanxi church and missions fared under the challenges of Japanese occupation and the intermittent battles between the Nationalists and Communists. As in the preceding chapter, the information is mostly presented through individual biographies of major missionaries in Shanxi, such as Peter Torjesen, a Norwegian who first went to Shanxi in 1920. Torjesen was killed when a Japanese bomb was dropped on his home in the city of Hequ in 1939, but, as seen in the last chapter, his grandson, Finn S. Torjesen, resumed his family's legacy of mission work in the province in the 1990s when he was invited by the Shanxi government to establish Evergreen Family Friendship Service, “a Christian development organization” (239).

The story of the Shanxi Protestant church after the missionaries were forced out of China is the topic of the final chapter. The perceptive reader may notice a change in source material. With missionaries no longer present, their ubiquitous reports and letters home are not available to the historian. In this chapter, Kaiser relies on some reports in Chinese, but more on his own experience living in Shanxi and interacting with church and civic leaders for years. It is clear throughout the text, but especially in this final chapter, that the author is intimately familiar with the Shanxi landscape, a product of time in the province. Maps of the province and of Taiyuan, the capital city and focus of much of the discussion, would be helpful for readers not as knowledgeable of the geographic context.

As is the case with the other titles in this series, the prose of this book is not overly academic, but the scholarship is solid, if not theoretical. The book is not aimed at specialists, but could be paired with Henrietta Harrison's wonderful history of Catholicism in Shanxi for an overview of the province's Christian history (The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village [University of California Press, 2013]).