The book is a collection of essays originally presented in a 2011 workshop on Chinese missionary linguistics that was organized in Rome. Missionary linguistics examines the language tools (grammars, exercise books, vocabularies) as developed by missionaries from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century in China. The volume is divided into three sections: Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. The papers are mainly based on archival materials, Russian archival sources are of special interest as they are little known among western scholars.