“More books about missionary schools?”, the unassuming reader may be tempted to ask. This question is indeed addressed by the editors themselves, justifying their historical quest into an otherwise well illuminated aspect of China's more recent history. The answer lies in methodological pursuit, rather than new factual insight. The volume, itself the product of a conference convened in 2003 at Wesleyan University (Connecticut, USA) with the support of the Henry Luce Foundation, epitomizes a shift away from a period of semi-critical introspection by Western observers after 1949, often by former teaching staff of the missionary institutions. During the 1970s and 80s, China's missionary colleges became the subject of detailed historical research, analysing their origins, composition and socio-political significance, but again almost exclusively by Western (and predominantly American) authors. The present volume represents a third stage of historical interest in mission-led education during the late Qing and Chinese Republic, emphasizing the “cross-cultural” aspects of such colleges, as well as highlighting the growing importance of Chinese historians in this field. Though still in the minority even in this conference volume, their emergence represents a clear shift in interpretation in (mainland) China, away from equating any missionary involvement with imperialist encroachment.

The volume is structured into five thematic parts, reflecting the origins (part two), academic life (part three), as well as the colleges' relationship with the Kuomintang and American institutions (part four). This main body is preceded by a single-chapter part one (Terrill Lautz, “The SVM and transformation of the Protestant mission to China”), which sheds light on the motivations for establishing religious educational institutions in the non-Western parts of the world, and concluded by a separate section (part five) consisting of two papers analysing the American educational mission to Japan (Takahashi Yuko, on the founding of Tsuda College) and Turkey (Ted Widmer, “Cyrus Hamlin in Turkey”). The editorial “mission statement” of the volume is expounded in a preface emphasizing “cross-cultural” analysis, as well as in the post-face, setting out the state of the academic discourse. The bibliography compiled by the editors provides the most useful insight into recent additions to the relevant literature, both by Western as well as Chinese scholars. The editors' most striking conclusion must be that Chinese historians now lead the field and that it is the Western research which needs to catch up. The perceived flagging of interest from the West, in particular America, may seem perplexing; on the other hand, several of the Chinese scholars mentioned in the volume have first-hand experience with American universities, where religious (usually Christian) devotion plays a far more important role than at campuses in other parts of the world – China included.

The three main parts represent the core of the editors' pursuit, namely an attempt to reinterpret existing knowledge into issues such as the universities' architectural planning (Jeffrey Cody, “American geometries and the architecture of Christian campuses in China”), their syllabi (Ryan Dunch, “Science, religion, and the classics in Christian higher education to 1920”), the continuity of Qing female education with missionary all-girls schools (Ellen Widmer, on the Seven Sisters movement), language issues (Edward Xu/Xu Yihua, on St John's University), women's education (Helen Schneider, on home economics under Ava Milam at Yenching University), legal studies (Alison Conner, “Anglo-American law at Soochow University”), the differences between late Qing China's and pre-WW1 US educational standards (Wang Dong, on the Sino-American university career of Charles K. Edmunds), republican nationalism (Susan Rigdon, “National Salvation”), the colleges' intended role in China's post-war reconstruction (Liu Jiafeng, “Same bed, different dreams”) and a rather remarkable article on the founding of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, by Paul Daniel and Tung Peichi (Waite).

As comprehensive as the scope of the above articles may seem, the aspects to which they refer can merely be touched upon in edited conference papers. For instance, the role of the American University as an international educational standard (rather than clones of US establishments) in the wider world is only alluded to. One hundred years on, American and European schools and universities are still perceived as stalwarts of academic honesty and achievement, in virtually all continents. Regardless of the veracity of this presumption, their sheer international authority has produced changes to the academic process in countries such as China, which are slowly lifting their key academic institutions into the same league as their time-honoured (and politically independent) Western peers. An attempt to chart the secular university movement in modern China would have complemented this otherwise excellent study. In the final analysis, however, the volume created by Daniel Bays and Ellen Widmer deserves a maximum of praise, not least because it will stimulate an interest in the continuing legacy of China's Christian colleges, well beyond the walls of the campuses which owe their existence to missionary enterprise of times gone by.