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 Catholic community, as he maintained close contact with the Jesuits in China. The Jesuit fathers apparently also relied on Zhu to carry out some religious services in the area, as the missionaries were spread thin in China.

Dominic Sachsenmaier's effort to "rescue" this otherwise obscure figure from history, however, yields fresh insights about the spread of Christianity in China and the history of early globalization. Combining microhistorical and macrohistorical perspectives, Sachsenmaier shows how Zhu Zongyuan "pursued the ultimate goal of demonstrating that Christianity was worth the attention of his fellow scholars and other members of Chinese society" (3). By examining Zhu's writings in their local and global contexts, Sachsenmaier's book reveals the complicated dynamics of the encounters between the Catholic Church and the Chinese state during the seventeenth century. The book's first chapter examines the local...