The study of Chinese religion is connected intimately with the overall history of Western fascination with Chinese tradition. In the most obvious sense, the important historical role of Christian missionaries in China testifies to a pronounced and not always strictly apologetic interest in the subject of non-Christian forms of belief and practice. The question of the nature and significance of Chinese religion has also had a special (and at times contradictory) prominence in the rise of Western secular scholarship. Thus the early awareness of and debate over the meaning of Chinese and Asian traditions—especially concerning the comparative similitude of "other" cultural manifestations of religion—can be associated with both missionary sentiment and the intellectual revolution in Western thought during the Enlightenment.

In the case of China, these developments took a unique turn. The eighteenth-century skeptical spirit toward "superstitious" and "idolatrous" forms of religion...