The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from Chinese Catholic Village . By Henrietta Harrison. Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. xvii + 276 pp. $65.00 cloth; $26.95 paper.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from Chinese Catholic Village . By Henrietta Harrison . Asia: Local Studies/Global Themes. Berkeley : University of California Press , 2013. xvii + 276 pp. $65.00 cloth; $26.95 paper.Book Reviews and NotesStories passed down for three hundred years by Christian villagers in the isolated mountains of China's Shanxi Province provide the foundation for Henrietta Harrison's The Missionary's Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village , a history of Catholic presence among the people of this North China region. Using oral history combined with archival research in Rome and China, Harrison situates the history of Chinese Catholic life within the larger contexts of Catholic history and global Christianity. She also analyzes the effects upon Shanxi's Chinese Catholics of events unfolding in China from the seventeenth century to the present day. She further establishes that an indigenous Chinese Catholicism developed in Cave Gully, the remote village central to her book.The work progresses in a chronological survey of Catholic presence in the hill villages of Shanxi, starting with accounts of the introduction of Christianity by village merchants who converted as traders to places such as Beijing, then returned to the villages, where they introduced their families to their new faith. Waves of Catholic missionaries followed, beginning in the seventeenth century. Harrison chronicles important events that shaped the Catholicism of Cave Gully and surrounding villages, including the late eighteenth century government persecutions of Christians that led some European missionaries to seek refuge in Shanxi's isolated villages, the Boxer Uprising of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and the arrival of Vatican II influence in the 1990s.As each chapter begins, a story introduces the events or themes about which the chapter will focus. The individual stories, told in the forms of Chinese folktales, such as those of heroes undergoing many trials, inspire Harrison's interpretations of Catholic life among the Christians of Cave Gully. The villagers' story of the heroic priest Wang Tingrong, who presented himself in Rome in the nineteenth century to complain to the pope about the Catholic missionaries' subordination of Chinese priests, provided the context for Harrison's analysis of the relationships between the Chinese priests, some of whom were educated in Italy, and the European missionaries, who presumed ecclesiastical superiority as bishops and often thwarted the traditional activities of Chinese priests, such as Wang Tingrong.Harrison convincingly argues for the synthesis of southern European Catholicism with Chinese religions. The Catholics of Shanxi developed a Christian ethic resting upon the Ten Commandments and readily associated their values with the ethical values emphasized in Confucianism, especially honoring one's parents (filial piety). The practice of listing one's sins according to one's violation of a specific commandment was similar to the Daoist practice of moral accounting in ledgers of merits and demerits. The colorful vestments, ritual language, and the separation of the priest from the worshippers in Catholic life bore similarities to Daoist and Buddhist religious life.While the stories reveal the Chinese character of Catholicism in Shanxi's mountain villages, they also disclose the effects upon these villages of events, such as the Boxer Uprising. …