Between Heaven and Modernity Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895-1937 [Hardcover]

Combining social, political, and cultural history, this book examines the contestation over space, history, and power in the late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction of the ancient capital of Suzhou as a modern city. Located fifty miles west of Shanghai, Suzhou has been celebrated throughout Asia as a cynosure of Chinese urbanity and economic plenty for a thousand years. With the city's 1895 opening as a treaty port, businessmen and state officials began to draw on Western urban planning in order to bolster Chinese political and economic power against Japanese encroachment. As a result, both Suzhou as a whole and individual components of the cityscape developed new significance according to a calculus of commerce and nationalism. Japanese monks and travelers, Chinese officials, local people, and others competed to claim Suzhous streets, state institutions, historic monuments, and temples, and thereby to define the course of Suzhous and greater Chinas modernity.This book examines the contest between local people, state officials, and foreigners to lay claim to urban streets, state institutions, historic monuments, and temples in Suzhou, one of China's most ancient and culturally rich metropolises, as it was transformed into a modern city. The book is a wonderfully thoughtful piece. Rooted in archival research employing a wide variety of Chinese and Japanese sources, and informed by contemporary analyses of urban spaces and their impact on culture, it adds greatly to a growing, and fascinating, corpus of scholarship on urban change in China. Carroll's book covers a lot of ground in a very sophisticated way. The case study approach makes for a very engaging read, and also leaves plenty of room for other work on Suzhou's modern transition... The questions Carroll raises are important, the documentation he cites in answering them is rich, and his writing is generally clear and graceful. In this engrossing cultural history, Peter Carroll has taken on quite l£z