In 1625, workers in Xi'an uncovered a large black tablet inscribed in Chinese and Syriac, the head of which featured low-relief sculptures of dragons flanking a central but obscured cross. Self-dated to 781, the inscription describes the arrival of the monk Aluoben and the imperial evaluation and toleration of Nestorian Christianity.
From its discovery, the stele formed the center of Western proto-scholarship on China, yet its every facet remained controversial. When and where was it really discovered? What does the inscription mean? Does it contain impossibly precocious references to purgatory and the three Magi? Is it orthodox Catholicism? Is it a simply a Jesuit deception, designed to assist their mission by demonstrating the antiquity of Christianity in China? One theory specified that the Syriac was authentic but not the Chinese. Another took “Aluoben,” transliterated as “Lopuen,” and rearranged the letters to reveal “Pol Ven,” or Polo Vénitien, or Marco Polo. This is not a history of diverse mistaken opinions converging inevitably toward truth, but one in which error compounds error in a scholarly back-and-forth until consensus emerges only in the 1850s. Familiar and lesser-known scholars make their appearances: Martini, Semedo, Boym, Kircher, Horn, Mentzel, Müller, d'Argens, Wall, Williamson, Holm, Palmer, Saeki, Havret. Michael Keevak adroitly balances the particularities of these complex debates with a broad-stroke treatment of trends in the Western intellectual, cultural, and political relationship with China. Its great value is as a readable journey through the early China scholarship, all the more readable for its focus on a single central object. This focus is well chosen, as Keevak makes clear its centrality to the developing field of Sinology.
He is less persuasive in his insistence on the stele's irrelevance in the larger Chinese context: a testament to what was “little more than a marginal creed in an ancient dynasty” (p. 29), “little more than an obscure piece of eighth-century limestone from a very brief moment” (p. 61), and “housed with some three thousand other steles of at least the same cultural importance” (p. 130). Recurring is a sense of surprise and indignation that these Europeans should have a special interest in a Christian monument, rather than appreciating Chinese culture for its own sake. Keevak suggests “that much of this material is only vaguely Christian” (p. 12), but scholars of religion (as opposed to theologians of particular traditions) would likely consider Christianity itself to be vague, with fuzzy boundaries. Certainly “the stele was always a reflection of European concerns rather than Chinese ones” (p. 31), but is that not true of anything a European looks at?
The stele's alleged irrelevance is key to Keevak's central theme of these scholars' errors, incompetence, and bias. In contrast to the current scholarly fashion for cross-cultural influence, Keevak prefers a story of “blindness not recognition, non-knowledge rather than comprehension” (p. 3), where proto-Sinology is, in effect, nine-tenths empty rather than one-tenth full. In the eighteenth century, Chinese language and culture “remained almost entirely unknown” (p. 63), and Keevak's estimation does not rise until the mid-nineteenth century. This is surely an exaggeration given the Jesuits' efforts, unless he has in mind some specific “real” China that remained so elusive.
Keevak uses snigger quotes to contrast European projections with “China as it ‘really was,’” but implicit is a too neat distinction between their (false) Eurocentric understanding and a (true) “modern” “ethnographic” understanding (pp. 8, 63). Taken literally, Keevak's analysis has an accusative air that almost ascribes an intentionality to the European approach: China and the stele were “screens onto which Western presuppositions and preoccupations could be conveniently projected” (p. 8). This was an “imposition of self-interested prejudice” (p. 21), and the stele serves the “function as a symbol of the West's truth and superiority” (p. 129). He scoffs at Western resentment of a nineteenth-century Chinese man modifying the stele by adding a new inscription, but the addition ruined parts of the Syriac. Today, even Sinophilic scholars in the West—or, indeed, Chinese scholars—may well regret that loss. This occasional anti-Europeanism is not unjustified, but a more open-minded and sympathetic approach to the subject perhaps could have yielded fresh insight.
Regardless, this is a real contribution to our understanding of early Sinology, useful to students for its clarity and to scholars for its revealing details. An epilogue brings Keevak's history into recent years to include in the tradition of misguided Western attitudes not only Martin Palmer's Jesus Sutras but also Keevak himself, who visits the stele and purchases a rubbing of it, despite “dozens” of others “far more important” (p. 139).
