In 1997, Eric Reinders was awarded a doctorate on the topic of “Buddhist Rituals of Obeisance and the Contestation of the Monk's Body in Medieval China.” Any regret that might be felt in the decidedly restricted field of Anglophone studies of Buddhist China at the subsequent loss of his talents to that area of research must be outweighed by an awareness that he has chosen to move on to open up research in an area hitherto largely untouched by any scholarship at all in any language. For despite the longstanding efforts that have been put into the writing of mission history, the study of the cultural significance of the Anglophone missionary in China is a much more recent phenomenon, even though John King Fairbank pointed out the value of missionary writings in his presidential address to the American Historical Association as long ago as 1968, and now even novelists like Sid Smith (in his 2003 Picador work A House by the River) are beginning to explore the issue of cross-cultural understanding through the Chinese missionary experience.

For despite the subtitle, the focus of this study is very much on missionary reactions to their physical translocation to China during the 19th and 20th centuries rather than to any reflective analysis that they subsequently produced concerning the beliefs and practices that they encountered. From the immediacy of their encounters with alarming visual cues to Chinese religion (construed as ‘idolatry’), to the equally alien sounds of the Chinese language, and on to the vexed question of body posture in worship (something that Reinders, with his acute but tacit sense of the importance of history on the Chinese side, takes back on the European side to Reformation debates), and even to the olfactory assault that the missionaries experienced on arrival – all are given their due place.