Between 1664 and 1669, the Catholic mission in China survived the most serious crisis in its history after the establishment of the Jesuit mission in the 1580s under Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. Four Jesuits in Beijing were interrogated and condemned; all Catholic missionaries in the provinces were summoned to the imperial capital and subsequently exiled to Guangzhou, in a move to expel them eventually. The most senior Jesuit under duress in Beijing was the German Adam Schall von Bell, Director of the Bureau of Astronomy and Mandarin of the First Rank. The venerable Schall had in effect worked at the bureau during the previous Ming dynasty and became a favorite of the young Qing Emperor Shunzhi, who honored him as a grandfatherly figure. Unfortunately for Schall, Shunzhi died in 1661. The regents to the child emperor Kangxi were much less favorably disposed toward these Westerners and they used the petitions against the Jesuits filed by Yang Guangxian, a self-styled orthodox Confucian scholar and minor Qing official, to topple the Jesuit courtier. This is a well-known story, as is the fortunate end: the initial condemnation of the Jesuits, their subsequent pardon, and the final restoration to grace when the young emperor Kangxi assumed personal rule, with the triumph of European astronomy over the traditional Sino-Muslim astronomers. The Catholic mission was saved and reached a new apogee before its eventual demise after 1705 due to the Chinese Rites Controversy.

The protocols of these interrogations—of the four Jesuits and the mandarins at the Bureau of Astronomy under the charge of Schall (several of them Christian converts)—constitute the main content of this volume. In the capable hands of Martin Gimm, a well-known German Sinologist and specialist in Manchu writings, and his research associates, the extensive secret protocols in the First Historical Archive in Beijing are being prepared for publication. This is indeed a huge undertaking, with the planned transcription of the Manchu texts in Roman alphabet and a full German translation. The sheer publication cost and time needed for that project (which hopefully may yet be achieved) have inspired an interim solution, namely the volume under review, in which Document 1 of the 24 parts of the secret protocols is rendered in full in German translation with an extensive critical apparatus identifying the persons mentioned in the text and the context of the interrogations. The translation of the protocols in Document i (253–355) represents the most significant contribution of this volume. For Documents ii to xxiv, Gimm has only given a list of the persons mentioned in the text (356–63). Together, these translations and brief summaries form Part C. Equally useful is Part B (180–252), which offers a formalistic analysis of the secret protocols and identifies all the persons (judges, witnesses, and accused) mentioned in the protocols. Less original is Part A (17–179), essentially a biography of Schall with details added from the protocols. For specialists, it is advisable to plunge straight into the translations of the protocols in Part C in order to benefit from Gimm’s considerable erudition to identify the many personae dramatis in this chapter of Jesuit missionary history.

There were three thematic clusters in these protocols. First were questions concerning the unorthodox teachings of Christianity, focused on a work, Tianxue Chuangai (An overview of the learning of heaven), composed by Li Zubo, a Han Chinese official at the Bureau of Astronomy and a Christian convert, at the request of Schall, in order to defend Christianity against the accusations of Yang Guangxian. The second cluster concerns the different calendrical calculations between the Gregorian, Western calendar and the traditional Sino-Muslim calendar. The third cluster, politically the most damaging, deals with geomancy, specifically the supposedly unpropitious time and date recommended by the bureau for the burial of a princeling of the imperial line, resulting in the premature deaths of his young parents a short time thereafter. Readers of this journal would most likely be interested in the first thematic cluster, with questions by the mostly Manchu officials focusing on the incompatibility of the biblical stories with Chinese historical writings. However, from the perspective of the Qing court, it was the last issue, geomantic prognostications, that truly mattered, at least judging by the length of the protocols devoted to this theme. This fact reflected both the shamanistic beliefs of the Manchus and the strength of Chinese geomancy as practices that had a potential profound impact on politics.

Except for illustrations of the Manchu texts of the secret protocols, the majority of illustrations reproduce the well-known portraits of Schall, the Beijing Observatory, and astronomical instruments. A long bibliography and briefer index complete this erudite book, which would perhaps one day be superseded if time and finance allow Gimm to publish a critical edition of the entire secret protocols concerning the Jesuit astronomers and their Chinese associates. Perhaps one last word is in order. Whereas Western science triumphed in the end and the four Jesuits suffered temporary imprisonment, their Chinese Christian colleagues (including Li Jubo and his brother) were not as lucky. They were executed. Such was the price for their faith in an episode in which too often we only remember the main Jesuit actors.