This book explores how Catholic missionaries, merchants and adventurers brought their faith to the strategically and commercially crucial region of Southeast Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It examines why some Southeast Asians adopted Christianity—and even died for their new faith—while others resisted all incentives, menaces, and cajolement to reject their original spiritual beliefs and practices. This monograph is the first to make a detailed exploration of early Catholicism in three regions of Southeast Asia (what are now Thailand, Vietnam and Melaka, Malaysia) and to provide a connective history of the spread of global Christianity to this crossroads of the world.