The key to this book in some ways comes in the epilogue. In its final part, the author demonstrates just how relatively recent has been the full deployment of Chinese sources for the career of Ricci within China. The author himself, unusually among scholars based outside China, is of course able to access those sources, thus detailing Ricci's movements and encounters there. For a reader of this volume not so equipped, the cast, as it were, of native actors in the drama seems almost endless, but the author takes great care to try to place each new name within the civil structure of Ming society. The scholarly exchanges between Ricci and a variety of mandarins can thus be accurately reconstructed, allowing the author to imply at least that the earlier strictures of Gernet, about a ‘conflict of cultures’ (as presented in the English version of the French scholar's work) when Christian mission encountered Chinese tradition might rightly be revised. The author here demonstrates how patient and realistic Ricci himself was, assessing his own work in China as only the necessary preliminaries for subsequent conversions on any scale. Ricci's seminal decision to adopt an assimilative approach in China is confirmed, without disrespect to the related roles of Ruggieri and above all Valignano, and without dismissing the critical misgivings of Longobardo. Perhaps inevitably, the first three chapters of the book, taking Ricci from birth to transfer from Macao into China, would not seem to break new ground. Here one might possibly have gained by more critical examination of just how, in Italy and above all in Rome, the young Ricci acquired such extraordinary expertise, even by Jesuit standards, not only in mathematics but also in the practical skills needed to construct, regulate and maintain sophisticated equipment, for both terrestrial and celestial use.