Florence C. Hsia . Sojourners in a Strange Land: Jesuits and Their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . 2009 . Pp. xv, 273. $45.00.

Abstract

The vast majority of sources examined by the author in this study are in French archives and were originally written or printed in French. Therefore, this reviewer wonders why the title of the book is not more explicit: the subtitle “French Jesuits and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China” would seem more appropriate and would better identify the field of research. In the first fifty pages, the author discusses the founding fathers of the Jesuit Mission in China—Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and his two most famous successors, Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666) and Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688). She primarily describes how the figure of the missionary‐scientist in China came to be and the role that such missionaries played in the Chinese imperial bureaucracy, particularly as presidents of the Astronomical Bureau starting in 1639. This presentation of the general context of the seventeenth century mission is of interest, of course, but is not the most original part of the book.