provides an overview of the Chinese language and its many dialects and how they differ from other Asiatic languages (e.g., Japanese). The chapter then reviews the origins and evolution of the Chinese writing system. The chapter closes with an overview of the modern Chinese writing system and its conventions, including points of difference with other writing systems (e.g., alphabetic scripts like English) and examples of how words can be decomposed into characters, radicals, and strokes.

This chapter outlines the history of the development and spread of what became what we now know as the Sinitic (Chinese) languages and the effects that migrations, cultural contact, and national policies had on the development. This includes the initial migrations into Asia and then again from the Yellow River valley to the surrounding areas. These later migrations were generally into areas where other people already lived, and so there was mixing of the people and the cultures. This is one factor that created the different branches of Sinitic (“Chinese dialects”). The last section is on language coexistence in Modern China.

Chapter 3 argues that the classical rhetorical tradition was a powerful tool for both European and non-European Jesuit missionaries seeking to advance the cause of Iberianized Catholicism. To do so, it places the Jesuit spiritual conquest of the Americas within the context of the Society of Jesus’ parallel efforts in Asia. More precisely, it follows the career of a Japanese Jesuit, Hara Martinho (c. 1568–1629), from his early education in the Jesuit college at Arima in Japan, to his participation in the Tenshō Embassy to Rome and finally to the crowning achievement of his humanist career, the delivery of his Latin panegyric oration to his fellow Jesuit students at Goa. While no Jesuit sermons in Japanese survive, there are several surviving Chinese sermons, which reveal that the classical rhetorical tradition could influence public speaking in East Asian languages. When taken as a whole, the case of this Japanese Cicero shows that the classical rhetorical tradition in its Renaissance humanist garb was a valuable weapon for Jesuit missionaries seeking to expand the boundaries of Catholicism in a much more militaristic way than most recent scholarship suggests.