Mandarins and Martyrs: The Church and the Nguyen Dynasty in Early Nineteenth-Century Vietnam.By Jacob Ramsay. Stanford,Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2008. xii þ 213 pp. $50.00 cloth.

摘要

The early colonial history of French Indochina arguably startedwith the slowpushnby French Catholic missionaries sent to the Far East from the mid-seventeenthncentury onward. After Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes famously broke the path innthe 1620s, one missionary society, the Socie ´te ´ des Missions E ´ trange `res de Parisn(MEP), occupied the front line in this long-term penetration. This book tells thenstory of this penetration and the reactions by the Vietnamese rulers as itnunfolded in the first half of the nineteenth century.