This project started with my Paris archival discovery of a few letters written by Chinese Catholic women from a small village in northeast China. Written in dark ink Chinese characters on yellow rice paper, the letters were addressed to Dominique Maurice Pourquié, a French Catholic missionary who worked in the Manchuria Mission from 1847 to 1870. The letters were from three of Pourquié’s Chinese female converts. Unfortunately for them, however, Pourquié had in fact died six months before their communications even arrived in Paris. The priest had passed away, but the letters were preserved. The interplay of religious experience, rhetorical skill, and gender relations demonstrated by the letters give us a chance to reconstruct the neglected voices of rural Chinese Catholic women and to explore Christianity in nineteenth-century rural China. The book manuscript I am currently working on examines not only the practices and sentiments of Chinese Catholic women towards their faith but also the models and norms that Christianity and Catholic missions in China offered to them.