Ever since the seminal publications by G. William Skinner (1925–2008) and Frederick W. Mote (1922–2005) in the 1970s, the urban history of late imperial China has been a thriving and productive field of research. While the pioneers in the field approached the Chinese city in history primarily in socio-economic terms, an established second line of cultural-historical inquiry focuses on cities as envisioned realms, as represented in literature, history and pictorial arts, and as places with a distinct urban culture of their own that set them off from the rural hinterland.
This volume, edited by Luca Gabbiani, includes both approaches, though the majority of the contributions emphasize cultural aspects, while the editor himself, in his introductory mapping of the field of Chinese urban history, clearly prioritizes economic, social and administrative issues. The volume's 12 contributions are arranged in pairs under six different subtopics: space, consumer culture, envisioning, religion, administration, and sociability, which convey of the broad thematic range covered by the contributors. The thoughtful arrangement facilitates dialogue among at least some of the contributions. Geographically there is a noted emphasis on the northern capital, Beijing (five articles), which is counterbalanced by “southern” accents in two articles specifically referring to Yangzhou, and one each to Nanjing and Guangzhou. The volume compiles papers originally presented at a conference held in 2008. The rather long timespan for preparing the volume for publication led to a situation in which several contributors had published monographs that include more mature versions of their articles. An obvious example is the first contribution, by Siyen Fei, whose sophisticated analysis of a polemical conceptualization of urban neighbourhoods in late Ming Nanjing closely corresponds to a chapter in her monograph Negotiating Urban Space (2010).
The project of “Connecting Urban Histories East and West”, as claimed by the editor's introduction, is pursued only rarely throughout the volume, most evidently and ambitiously in the article by Lillian M. Li, who compares the urban history of China not only to that of Europe but also to that of the Islamic world. She argues that, while in the West and the Middle East the competing big cities were being fundamentally re-conceptualized, this was not the case in China, with the singular exception of the new Ming-dynasty capital Beijing. Looking at pictorial visualizations of cities, she finds for China nothing comparable to European cities’ self-celebrations. She concludes by reconfirming Mote's influential Weberian argument regarding the Chinese “urban-rural continuum” and the relative indistinctiveness of the premodern Chinese city. This, though, undercuts recent attempts at advancing to new definitions of Chinese urbanity, such as in Fei's aforementioned book.
Implicitly also contradicting Li's conclusion, Wu Jen-shu's article on forms and channels of advertisement for branded products argues that consumption was among the distinctive characteristics of Chinese urbanity. Peripherally concerned with urbanity, Joanna Waley-Cohen, in her eminently readable essay, focuses on luxury food consumption. She describes how the Qianlong emperor himself competed with the gastronomic connoisseurship of Jiangnan elites. Yangzhou, as a notorious place of conspicuous consumption and relentless pleasure seeking, comes into view here. Wai-yee Li, in an essay about representations of the Yangzhou massacre of 1645, interweaves personal memoir, novelistic re-imagination and literati poetry to a nuanced argument about remembrance and forgetting, and about gendered historical judgement that suggestively construed the city's ravage as the retribution for local women's allegedly loose morals. Lucie Olivová, in her article on The Pleasure Boats of Yangzhou (1795), likely the richest source on this city's cultural history, offers a spatial analysis of the book's organization along imaginary routes. She finds that only a small proportion of the itineraries related to the walled inner city, whereas the outskirts were profusely covered – from this she concludes that this book meant to capture Yangzhou's “cultural space”, implying a distinct spatial conception of “city”.
Lai Hui-Min's contribution offers a detailed study of temple fairs in three major Lama-Buddhist temples of Beijing, highlighting the Qing capital's strong Central Asiatic orientation. Ju Xi, in a richly documented article based on stele inscriptions, deals with religious associations in Beijing involved in the pork trade. It would seem somewhat surprising, though, that temples for major deities served as venues for guild gatherings of pork butchers, a ritually very “impure” (while definitely very important) profession. The association from pork butchering to public executions of criminals being somewhat undue, Jérôme Bourgon, in his meticulously documented article, approaches Beijing's topology from the point of view of penal history. He reconstructs the route on which convicts were taken to the execution site at Caishikou, also considering the rituals related to the performance, the executioners, and the crowd of urbanite spectators. He makes a case for the reintegration of these suppressed layers of memory into Chinese urban history.
Opium smoking and gambling, also often considered to be among the darker sides of early modern Chinese city life, are the subject of Xavier Paulès’ article. Mindful to avoid any stereotypes, he takes a “revisionist” approach to these phenomena and regards the institutions dedicated to the pursuit of these activities, such as the halls specialized in the game of fantan in Guangzhou, first of all as “places of sociability”. Luca Gabbiani, looking at the “municipal turn” in Beijing's administration during the Qing empire's final decade, finds both revolutionary change and continuity. Finally, Christian Lamouroux presents results from a field study on the commercial culture of one quarter of Beijing, from the 1920s to the 1950s, that he studies based on shop owners’ professional licences preserved in the archives. Looking at just one street, he demonstrates how smoothly business interactions and social relations went hand-in-hand.
While this volume is carefully edited and thoughtfully arranged, its overall conceptual framework ultimately remains somewhat unconvincing. It is recommended primarily for the consistently high quality of its individual contributions, which, however, in several cases overlap with contributors’ publications elsewhere.
