Sachsenmaier, Dominic. Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds.

• Author: Lin, Mao

Sachsenmaier, Dominic. Global Entanglements of a Man Who Never Traveled: A Seventeenth-Century Chinese Christian and His Conflicted Worlds. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.

Zhu Zongyuan, also known by his Christian name, Cosmas, was born around 1616 into a low-level literati family in the southern Chinese port city of Ningbo, and he never traveled outside of his home province of Zhejiang. Historians know little about Zhu's life, as he left "no personal data, no letters, diaries, or autobiographical notes" (168). Nevertheless, Zhu stood at the crossroads of two worlds: the Chinese world under the Ming-Qing transition with Confucianism becoming highly factionalized, and the world of a globalizing Catholic Church with an intensified presence in China. Yet Zhu was a prominent figure of neither world. As a Confucian scholar, Zhu passed the provincial level of the Chinese state examination for the rank of juren, but he did not pursue a career in the government. Thus, Zhu was not among the national elite of Chinese scholar-officials, although he was recognized as a local elite and "enjoyed good connections with the new governing apparatus in the region" (37). As a Christian, Zhu was not in the same league as the upper Chinese Christian elite members such as Xu Guangqi, Yang Tingyun, or Li Zhizao, the "three pillars of early Chinese Christianity." Most of Zhu's writings on Christianity were not original, as he was mainly elaborating on points made by authors before him. But Zhu was still a prominent figure in his local...