controversy lasted over a century, with repeated rulings, both curial and local, some flatly contradictory, with the ‘Europeans’ gradually prevailing. In both India and China, the Jesuits put up a stiff resistance: and they were backed by the Chinese court. But in 1742, Benedict XIV, in the bull Ex quo singulari, finally ruled decisively against any permission to relax the strict European rites, and condemned their Asian substitutes: . . . We condemn and detest their practice as superstitious. . . we revoke, annul. abrogate and wish to be deprived of all force and effect, all and each of those permissions, and say and announce that they must be considered for ever to be annulled, null, invalid and without any force or power.' These injunctions, repeated against ‘Malabarian’ rites two years later, effectively ended any hopes that a specific form of Asian Christianity might develop, as a prelude to a Christian conquest of the continent. Indeed, by 1742, those hopes had perished anyway. The great chance for Christianity came in the sixteenth century, when its impact was new and tremendous, when the Christians themselves were stil astonished by the boundless opportunities which seemed open to them, and when they possessed, in the Jesuits, an instrument of extraordinary adaptability and youthful vigor. Moreover, in the late sixteenth century, when the Jesuits reached the Far East, there was coming into existence for the first time as a united state and culture the perfect agent - perhaps the only one - for the Asianization of Christianity and so for the Christianization of Asia. This was Japan. The country already had twenty million inhabitants and a reputation throughout the area for bellicosity and imperial ambitions. It had only one language, albeit a complicated and primitive one, and was in the process of transforming itself from a vast number of fragmented lordships into a national state under military rule. It had two religions, in violent conflict: Shintoism, indigenous, crude and sinister, and Buddhism, imported and corrupt. Christianity had, perhaps, a unique opportunity to offer itself to Japan as the national creed of the new, unified state. And in the Japanese people it had a race astonishingly gifted in receiving and mutating ideas. Francis Xavier was excited by reports of Japanese intelligence two years before he managed to get there, in 1549. He could not speak more than a few words of the language (the ‘Apostle of the Indies' was a poor linguist), but he had with him three Japanese who had been taught Portuguese at Goa, and so he was able to preach and converse. He assumed, wrongly, that Buddhism was the key to Japan, and that therefore it might be necessary to convert China first. In fact the more successful war-lords who were coming to power were often violently anti-Buddhist - and consequently open to Christianity if, as was possible, it could expose the essentially primitive nature of Shinto. But Xavier noted of a Buddhist abbot: 'In many talks which | had with him, | found him doubtful and unable to decide whether our soul is immortal or whether it dies with the body; sometimes he told me yes, and sometimes no, and | fear the other wise men are all alike.’ Xavier perceived that the Japanese had no answer to the question Christians had always been able to face fully and confidently: what happened to us after death? So he was full of hope: 'The people whom we have met so far are the best we have yet discovered anywhere, and it seems to me that we shalt never find another heathen race to equal the Japanese. ' In the late 1560s, the Jesuits arrived in strength, to insert themselves into the fissures opened by a religious-civil war, at a time when the war-lord Nobunaga, an agnostic who was willing to let them preach, was emerging as the chief force. Moreover, they had in AJessandro Valignano, their Vicar-Genera] in the Orient, perhaps the greatest of the missionary statesmen. He came to Japan first in 1579. aged forty, a Neapolitan noble, over six feet tall, immensely energetic, with clear, challenging ideas. Like St Paul, he saw missionary work as an opportunity for spiritual adventure; like Xavier, he found the Japanese exciting. His views on race were a curious mixture of prejudice and enlightenment. From his own experience he thought the Indians ‘base and bestial people’. There could be no question of making them Jesuits because ‘all the dusky races are very stupid and vicious, and the basest spirit, and likewise because the Portuguese treat them with the greatest contempt.' He did not like the Portuguese or the Spanish either: but he had, to his 103