Tobie Meyer-Fong

Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou

This book explores cultural change in a Chinese city following the Manchu conquest of 1644. The city of Yangzhou, at the intersection of the Grand Canal and the Yangzi river, is best known as the site of human and physical devastation during the conquest and as a vibrant commercial center during the eighteenth century. The book focuses on the period between the conquest and the citys commercial florescence-a moment in which Yangzhou was a center of literary culture that was consciously conceived as transregional and transdynastic. The book shows how Yangzhous elite used physical sites as markers in the reconstruction of the city, and as vehicles consolidating power and prestige. Gradually, however, the gestures and sites of the postconquest elite were appropriated by the citys increasingly powerful salt merchants and incorporated into a court-oriented culture centered at Beijing.

Between Birth and Death: Female Infanticide in Nineteenth-Century China by Michelle T. King (review)

Published by the Harvard-Yenching Institute HJAS 75.1 (2015): 213–222 view of the world.” A deeper understanding of Luochong lu and its relevance to, or ramifications for, the regional and world imagination of the time would require further research into the specific historical contexts of Japan and Korea, to say the least. For the purposes of Home and the World, however, this example shows that Ming imprints provided readers with a portable museum-like repository of information and imagination beyond their immediate experience, thereby allowing them to bring the regional and global vision “into the ambit of their own domestic sphere” (p. 16).