Book excerpt: Ernst Boerschmann was the most influential foreign architectural researcher in China in the first half of the twentieth century. This book concerns his three-year research expedition through the Chinese Empire (1906–1909). He was the first Westerner to systematically document China’s religious architecture, returning from his travels with thousands of photographs, sketches, and architectural surveys. His six major publications leading up to 1931, described here alongside the reactions they caused, were milestones on the path to formal study of Chinese architectural history, long before Chinese academics themselves began to take interest in the subject in the 1930s.