Published Books - China’s History of Exchange with the West (Sinology)
After his first book, Ban Gu’s History of Early China, was published in 2008, Clark’s subsequent publications have revolved around the history of China-West intellectual and religious exchange. Based on extensive research in Chinese and European archives, these later works set out to better explain the historical vicissitudes that defined the complex relationship between China and Western Europe from the late Ming until the Republican Era.
A Chinese Jesuit Catechism: Guilio Aleni’s Four Character Classic 四字經文
This book is the first scholarly study of the famous Jesuit Chinese children’s primer, the Four Character Classic, written by Giulio Aleni (1582–1649) while living in Fujian, China. This book also includes translations of both Wang Yinglin’s (1551–1602) hallowed Confucian Three Character Classic and Aleni’s Chinese catechism that was published during the Qing (1644–1911). This careful reading of the Four Character Classic provides new insights into an area of the Jesuit mission in early modern China that has so far been given little attention, the education of children. This book underscores how Aleni’s published work functions as a good example of the Jesuit use of normative Chinese print culture to serve the catechetical exigencies of the Catholic mission in East Asia, particularly his meticulous imitation of Confucian children’s primers to promote decidedly Christian content. [Palgrave Macmillan Press]
China’s Catholics in an Era of Transformation: Observations of an “Outsider”
This book features a collection of essays on China’s modern Catholic Church by Anthony Clark, a scholar of China-West intellectual and religious exchange. The essays and reflections were mostly written in China while the author was traveling by train, or staying in villages or large cities near to Roman Catholic cathedrals or other important historical sites during research trips to the country. It is clear that Clark’s understanding of Catholicism in China evolved from the first entry to the final ones in 2019. The essays included in this compendium were written in disparate contexts and in response to different events. As such, there is no deliberate theme or order to the content. However, the book provides valuable insights for readers wishing to gain a better understanding of the complex topography of Catholic history in China, the contours of which have undergone stark transformations with each dynastic, political, and ecclesial transition. The information presented serves to highlight and explain the lives of Catholic people and the events that have punctuated one of the most significant dimensions of China’s long history of friendship, conflict and exchange with the West. [Palgrave Macmillan Press]
China Gothic: The Bishop of Beijing and His Cathedral
As China struggled to redefine itself at the turn of the twentieth century, nationalism, religion, and material culture intertwined in revealing ways. This phenomenon is evident in the twin biographies of North China's leading Catholic bishop of the time, Alphonse Favier (1837–1905), and the Beitang cathedral, epicenter of the Roman Catholic mission in China through incarnations that began in 1701. After its relocation and reconstruction under Favier's supervision, the cathedral―and Favier―miraculously survived a two-month siege in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion. Featuring a French Gothic Revival design augmented by Chinese dragon–shaped gargoyles, marble balustrades in the style of Daoist and Buddhist temples, and other Chinese aesthetic flourishes, Beitang remains an icon of Sino-Western interaction. Anthony Clark draws on archival materials from the Vatican and collections in France, Italy, China, Poland, and the United States to trace the prominent role of French architecture in introducing Western culture and Catholicism to China. A principal device was the aesthetic imagined by the Gothic Revival movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the premier example of this in China being the Beitang cathedral. Bishop Favier's biography is a lens through which to examine Western missionaries' role in colonial endeavors and their complex relationship with the Chinese communities in which they lived and worked. [University of Washington Press]
Catholicism and Buddhism: The Contrasting Lives and Teachings of Jesus and Buddha
The recent tide of books comparing Christianity and Buddhism has centered mostly on similarities. The Dalai Lama, for example, provided his opinions on Christianity in a popular book, The Good Heart: A Buddhist Perspective on the Teachings of Jesus (1996). Other writers have equally sought to describe these two traditions as "two paths to the same place." Finding these approaches overly simplified, Anthony Clark confronts the distinctions between Buddhism and Catholic Christianity, acknowledging areas of confluence, but also discerning areas of difference. In this book, which was written to answer student questions received while teaching his courses on Buddhism, Clark provides a Catholic view of Buddhism that avoids obfuscations. This is Clark’s only popular work and seeks to answer questions based upon official teachings rather than to represent his own particular views on the topic. [Cascade Press/Wipf & Stock]
Heaven in Conflict: Franciscans and the Boxer Uprising in Shanxi
One of the most violent episodes of China’s Boxer Uprising was the Taiyuan Massacre of 1900, in which rebels killed foreign missionaries and thousands of Chinese Christians. This first sustained scholarly account of the uprising to focus on Shanxi Province illuminates the religious and cultural beliefs on both sides of the conflict and shows how they came to clash. Although Franciscans were the first Catholics to settle in China, their stories have rarely been explored in accounts of Chinese Christianity. Anthony Clark remedies that exclusion and highlights the roles of Franciscan nuns and their counterparts among the Boxers—the Red Lantern girls—to argue that women’s involvement was integral on both sides of the conflict. Drawing on rich archival records and intertwining religious history with political, cultural, and environmental factors, Clark provides a fresh perspective on a pivotal encounter between China and the West. [University of Washington Press]
中華天主教殉道簡史 [A Concise History of Catholic Martyrdom in China]
This work is a shortened version of Anthony Clark’s earlier book, China’s: Catholic Martyrdom during the Qing, 1644-1911, and was collaboratively written in Chinese with Zhang Meina. Clark shows that Christianity in China began and grew under similar circumstances to those during the Roman Empire, with the notable exception that Catholic missionaries were not successful at producing a "Chinese Constantine." One of the principal results of Catholic martyrdom in China was the increased indigenization of Christianity. During the reconstruction of mission churches, hospitals, and orphanages after the hostilities of the Boxer Uprising (1898–1900), the Roman Catholic tradition of venerating martyrs was attached to the reinvigoration of Christian communities. Not only did Catholic architecture accommodate to Chinese sensibilities, but causes for sainthood were also begun at the Vatican to add Chinese names to the Church's list of saints. The implications of Clark's work extend beyond the subject of Christianity in China to the broader fields of cultural, social, economic, political, and religious history. This pioneering study follows the trails of Western missionaries and Chinese converts as they negotiate the religious and cultural chasms that existed between the West and China, and it demonstrates that these differences resulted in two very different outcomes. This book contributes to a deeper understanding of cultural and religious interaction, and provides an account of an heretofore unstudied chapter in the history of Christianity on the global landscape. [Ciyouhui chubanshe 慈幼會出版社]
China’s Christianity: From Missionary to Indigenous Church
Among the assumptions interrogated in this volume, edited by Anthony E. Clark, is if Christianity should most accurately be identified as "Chinese" when it displays vestiges of Chinese cultural aesthetics, or whether Chinese Christianity is more indigenous when it is allowed to form its own theological framework. In other words, can theological uniqueness also function as a legitimate Chinese Christian cultural expression in the formation of its own ecclesial identity? Also central to what is explored in this book is how missionary influences, consciously or unconsciously, introduced seeds of independence into the cultural ethos of China's Christian community. Chinese girls who pushed "the limits of proper behavior," for example, added to the larger sense of confidence as China's Christians began to resist the model of Christianity they had inherited from foreign missionaries. [Brill Press]
A Voluntary Exile: Chinese Christianity and Cultural Confluence since 1552
Western missionaries in China were challenged by something they could not have encountered in their native culture; most Westerners were Christian, and competitions in their own countries were principally denominational. Once they entered China they unwittingly became spiritual merchants who marketed Christianity as only one religion among the long-established purveyors of other religions, such as the masters of Buddhist and Daoist rites. A Voluntary Exile explores the convergence of cultures. This collection of new and insightful research considers themes of religious encounter and accommodation in China from 1552 to the present, and confronts how both Western Europeans and indigenous Chinese mitigated the cultural and religious antagonisms that resulted from cultural misunderstanding. The studies in this work identify areas where missionary accommodation in China has succeeded and failed, and offers new insights into what contributed to cultural conflict and confluence. Each essay responds in some way to the “accommodationist” approach of Western missionaries and Christianity, focusing on new areas of inquiry. The voices in this work derive from divergent scholarly methodologies based on new research, and provide the reader a unique encounter with a variety of disciplinary views. This unique volume reaches across oceans, cultures, political systems, and religious traditions to provide important new research on the complexities of cultural encounters between China and the West. [Lehigh University Press]
Beating Devils and Burning Their Books: Views of China, Japan, and the West
Beating Devils and Burning Their Books considers several topics germane to today’s social and intellectual climate. Is religio-cultural conflict innate in religious belief? Is “difference” necessarily an antecedent of conflict? And on a purely expository level, how have governments, intellectuals, and religious devotees represented Asia or the West, and how did they distort those images in order to present diminutive representations of “the Other”? Following works such as Edward Said’s Orientalism and John Dower’s War Without Mercy, this important volume seeks to continue needed dialogue regarding how China, Japan, and the West have historically viewed and represented each other. A marvelous collection of insightful analysis on topics ranging from the Chinese picturesque in 19th-century Britain, to the twisted spirituality of Brad Warner’s Hardcore Zen, to the representation of missionaries in China as baby-eaters and beasts, Beating Devils and Burning their Books illustrates the tendency to exaggerate radical difference―both positive and negative―that is part of the complex interaction that makes up cultural exchange. [University of Michigan Press/Association for Asian Studies]
China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom during the Qing (1644-1911)
While previous works on the history of Christianity in China have largely centered on the scientific and philosophical areas of Catholic missions in the Middle Kingdom, China's Saints recounts the history of Christian martyrdom, precipitated as it was by cultural antagonisms and misunderstanding. Anthony Clark shows that Christianity in China began and grew under similar circumstances to those during the Roman Empire, with the notable exception that Catholic missionaries were not successful at producing a "Chinese Constantine." One of the principal results of Catholic martyrdom in China was the increased indigenization of Christianity. During the reconstruction of mission churches, hospitals, and orphanages after the hostilities of the Boxer Uprising (1898–1900), the Roman Catholic tradition of venerating martyrs was attached to the reinvigoration of Christian communities. Not only did Catholic architecture accommodate to Chinese sensibilities, but causes for sainthood were also begun at the Vatican to add Chinese names to the Church's list of saints. The implications of Clark's work extend beyond the subject of Christianity in China to the broader fields of cultural, social, economic, political, and religious history. This pioneering study follows the trails of Western missionaries and Chinese converts as they negotiate the religious and cultural chasms that existed between the West and China, and it demonstrates that these differences resulted in two very different outcomes. Whereas converts appear to have bridged the cultural divide, often to the point of self-sacrifice, political and cultural tensions on the macro level sometimes ended with forceful conflicts. This book contributes to a deeper understanding of cultural and religious interaction, and provides an account of an heretofore unstudied chapter in the history of Christianity on the global landscape. [Lehigh University Press]
Ban Gu’s History of Early China
In this first book-length critical study of Ban Gu and his works, Clark provides both biographical and historical information about Ban Gu and his political context, while also reflecting on how that context formed his portrayal of history. Clark's book argues that the precarious position court scholars and ministers occupied motivated Ban Gu to restructure long-hallowed Confucian political ideas into an entirely new notion of Heaven's Mandate (tianming). Unlike the earlier model, which held that Heaven assigned or removed its sanction based upon moral merits, Ban's new Mandate model held that the ruling dynastic family's Mandate was permanently bestowed, and thus irrevocable, regardless of the ruler's good or bad behavior. This book offers new insight to previous scholarly assumptions regarding the ancient Chinese idea of Heaven's Mandate, while also providing historical information about Ban Gu and his family during the Han dynasty. [Cambria Press]