The Chinese Rites Controversy
Faith, Empire, and the Battle for Ancestor Worship

About this book:

In 1706, the Kangxi Emperor and a papal legate stood face-to-face in Beijing’s Grand Hall, locked in a dispute that would decide the fate of Christianity in China for two centuries: Could a convert honor his ancestors without betraying his God? *The Chinese Rites Controversy* unfolds this collision as a gripping global drama—from Matteo Ricci’s daring immersion in Confucian culture to the Vatican’s thunderous bans, from the Sorbonne’s lecture halls to the underground chapels of Qing Fujian. Here are Jesuits mapping the heavens to win imperial favor, Dominicans smuggling denunciations to Rome, and an emperor who mastered Euclidean geometry while interrogating cardinals on the nature of the soul.

Yet this is far more than a tale of missionaries and mandarins. It is the first great crisis of cultural translation in the modern world, where the fault lines of today’s debates over inculturation, religious liberty, and cultural imperialism were first drawn. With access to imperial edicts, private Jesuit correspondence, and the secret archives of the Holy Office, this book reveals how a controversy over incense and spirit tablets shattered a missionary enterprise, toppled the Jesuit order, and forced the Catholic Church to confront the limits of its own universality—only to reverse course dramatically in 1939.

Meticulously researched and narratively propulsive, *The Chinese Rites Controversy* moves effortlessly between the intimate and the imperial, the theological and the geopolitical. For anyone who has wondered how faith survives the collision of civilizations—or whether a universal truth can speak in local dialects without losing its soul—this is the definitive account of the encounter that shaped modern East-West relations and still echoes in every debate over tradition and adaptation.