ABSTRACT
In December 1561, less than two decades after the arrival of the first Catholic missionaries in East Asia and only fifty years after the first Portuguese imperial settlement there, the Jesuit missionary Luis Frois received an astonishing report from a Portuguese nobleman who had been imprisoned by Ming Chinese authorities, an account so remarkable that he related its contents verbatim in a letter to his compatriot Gonzalez Vaz. The Chinese were not just cornering the Asian market in Christian images at home, either; Chinese artisans outside of Ming territory were just as active. An impressive number of ivory images of Christ survive today that were manufactured by native Chinese and sangley craftsmen between the 16th and 18th centuries, especially in collections in Iberia and Latin America, attesting to a long and prosperous trade in Sino-Christian devotional imagery.
