Abstract
The Culture of War in China argues that ``an intense focus on military affairs was one of the Qing state's most distinctive features'', and it captures well some of the distinctive ways that this martial ethos was expressed. [...]Joanna Waley-Cohen challenges us to take Qing military culture seriously, and in doing so, she presents a view of early modern China that may better prepare us for a twenty-first century People's Republic that is also unified and confidently well-armed. Chapter 4, ``Science and the Protestant mission'', gives a balanced account of the work of the London Missionary Society missionaries Alexander Wyle 444 R E V I E W S and Alexander Williamson, and of John Fryer and Xu Shou in setting up the Shanghai Polytechnic and Reading Room and The Chinese Scientific and Industrial Magazine. The resulting narrative is thus much less vivid and exciting than the subject deserves. [...]with the exception of the Prize Essay contributions, there is given the emphasis of the sinocentric narrative) surprisingly little indication of what the Chinese themselves thought of all these new ideas, technologies and inventions, despite a wealth of relevant material in journals, memorials and correspondence. [...]it was Zeng Jize, not his father Zeng Guofan who had died some five years earlier), who presented John Fryer with an inscribed fan in 1877 p. 171).