Scholars, and the general public as well, have shown continuing interest in the intensive missionary efforts of the seventeenth-century Jesuits in China. 1 Few in the West, however, are familiar with the remarkable efforts undertaken nearly contemporaneously by Alexandre de Rhodes among the people of China's southern neighbor, Vietnam. De Rhodes, a Jesuit from Avignon, France, understood well the power of ideas; and, as an individual who was intellectually ahead of his times, he skillfully used an array of new ideas in persuading the Vietnamese people to accept the religious message that he brought them.
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Barbara Widenor Maggs (2000) studied this question.