1Covering a time span of over a century, and traversing large swaths of territories from Ghana to Taiwan, Missionary Spaces: Imagining, Building, Contesting Christianities in Africa and China, 1830s-1960s analyses the encounter between Christian missionaries and the peoples they sought to convert by analysing the space-making practices missionaries deployed to advance Christianity in Africa and China. The volume’s title hints to three aspects entangled with architectural production (imagination, construction, and contestation) and all the chapters engage to some degree with these three themes, giving the book a welcome cohesion. This was no easy feat considering that the case studies span across over a century and include both macro analyses of how territories were divided between different missionary societies by foreign institutions based in Europe, and detailed examination of ecclesiastical architecture, Christian compounds, and educational institutes created by missionaries belonging to competing denominations.

2The ten chapters of the book describe how missionaries, who came from different countries, and who had divergent theological views and a defined identity forged while training within their societies, dealt with encountering the peoples of Africa and China. They analyse how mission spaces and buildings were first imagined, then built, and possibly re-adapted in the backdrop of a variety of socio-cultural and socio-political contexts in continuous evolution. The volume includes case studies from Ghana, Congo, Burundi, Kenya, Egypt, China, and Taiwan, and is divided in two sections including five chapters each. The first, “Imagined World / Adapted Strategies,” includes examples of the flexible spatial strategies some missionary societies adopted on their mission fields, demonstrating that the inability to adapt could lead to failure (Chapter 2). The second section, titled “Universal Projects/ Localised Architectures,” collects chapters that present how localised issues—such as gendered practices in China (Chapters 6 and 7), or interracial education in Burundi (Chapter 10)—were mediated in the design and construction of space.

3In a considerate introduction, Thomas Coomans presents the threads that recur throughout the chapters, explaining that while the book adopts a wide notion of Christianity, defining it as any place with a Christian presence, and not only those with a chapel and the regular services of a priest, much of the research builds upon physical and archival evidence (p. xv-xvi). This means that it is the perspective of missionaries that often prevails. While these sources, including illustrations, are of particular help in transporting the reader to the original settings of the missionary encounter, in some chapters the authors fail to address critically the thoughts and notions expressed by missionaries in their correspondence and reports. Missionaries had reached the shores of Africa and China already centuries before, but in the nineteenth century ever-growing imperialist appetites changed the situation. As they ventured into the field, the ideology of the “civilising mission” started to take shape, and missionaries became more and more convinced of their cultural and moral superiority, perceiving themselves more “developed” than the peoples they came into contact with (p. x-xi). A measure of this supposed superiority was directly linked to material conquest.

4Africa, originally split into a number of chiefdoms and kingdoms, was progressively falling under the control of foreign powers which imposed their administrative structures by establishing colonies and protectorates, while the ancient Chinese empire was forced to sign several unequal treaties. China ultimately maintained its independence, ceding control only of Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but it was also forced to create foreign concessions on the mainland. The political framework in which missionaries moved had important repercussions on how they organised their work and their mission spaces. In China, missionaries from different nations and denominations scrambled to establish themselves, with the French legation assuming the role of protector of the Catholic missions; while in Africa, foreign powers facilitated the work of their own national religious societies, ostracising competing Christian missions. In Chapter 4, Bram Cleys presents the case of Luluaborg (Kananga, DR Congo), where Belgian colonial authorities favoured the expansion of the Catholic Church while relegating presbyterian missionaries to the margins of the city. Both groups participated in the shaping of the colonial urban environment, but Catholic missionaries successfully claimed the city centre, leaving a clear mark of their presence and faith.

5However, lack of support from colonial authorities did not necessarily have a detrimental outcome. In Chapter 1 we learn about the trajectory followed by Catholic White Fathers in North-Western Ghana. For twenty years they requested to settle among the Dagara people, but the English colonial establishment withheld its approval with the excuse the area had been reserved for Anglicans. Once they were finally allowed to evangelise among the Dagara, the Catholic missionaries had to rely on the cooperation of the Dagara to build their mission, and adopted strategies diametrically opposed to those imposed by the English. They aligned their spatial practices to the Dagara’s cosmographic vision of space, and the Dagara, seeing Catholic teachings in cultural continuity with their tradition, converted in large numbers, eventually appropriating mission structures as centres of their socio-economic activities.

6In several instances, the chapters remark how the materialisation of Christianity remained associated with power, with large churches in Western styles being built in central locations within colonial cities and foreign concessions. The Catholic pro-Cathedral of Saint Clément and its campanile towered above central Luluaborg (Chapter 4). The church of Ismalia and the cathedral of Port Said were shaped to project the image of a French town on Muslim land thanks to the decisive influence of the Suez Canal Company (Chapter 8). The plans of the first Gothic Revival Cathedral of Asia, St John’s in Hong Kong, were discussed at length by the British Colonial Office, which also covered most of the costs for its realisation. In Canton (Guangzhou), French Bishop Guillemin received a generous donation from Napoleon III to build a Cathedral inspired to the architecture of the Basilica of St Clotilde in Paris on the site of former Governor General Ye Mingchen yamen, which had been destroyed by French and British gunboats during the Second Opium War (Chapter 3). Despite these and other examples, one of the main drawbacks of the volume is that the authors engage only marginally with the role missionaries played in Western imperial and colonial expansion