Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850 (review)

How does one write the biography of a city? Charles Baudelaire wrote of "le chaos des vivantes cités" as if the city were a collective organism, with its distinct personality, defined by location, population, economic relations, social structure, cultural life, and particular experiences of happiness and disaster.¹ Cities, like people, resemble one another, and are connected to one another in networks and hierarchical relationships. A good biography of a city, however, is more than the collective biography of its inhabitants. It should try to capture the ineffable spirit of how a city works out its destiny in historical time. But unlike humans, most cities never die; they grow or decline, but their historical past remains alive in their present and future. Antonia Finnane, in this remarkably rich and comprehensive account of the culturally famed southern Chinese city of Yangzhou, captures much of the uniqueness of Yangzhou by describing its local environment and historical experience.

Yangzhou achieved its greatest fame in two eras: the Sui-Tang period; and the early modern era, which stretched from the late Ming to the mid-Qing. By the eighteenth century it was one of the empire's wealthiest cities, famed for its luxurious artistic culture. Though small (about one hundred thousand inhabitants in the eighteenth century), it had a great impact on the empire's economy and culture. Yet, by the end of the nineteenth century, economic neglect and war had destroyed nearly all of its attractions, leaving its residents nursing nostalgic dreams. Finnane's account is an elegy for a vanished culture, only fragments of which survive today.

Other cities would generate their own biographies. Beijing and Shanghai, as major political and economic centers of the twentieth-century world, might have more forward-looking narratives. But Yang-zhou has much to tell us about the resilient culture of China before the nineteenth century. Finnane is also careful to signal alternative narratives about the city's experience, freeing us from a monochromatic view.

Yangzhou succeeded brilliantly despite unpropitious circumstances. As "an offspring of the empire, born of the conjunction of north and south," it was a wealthy city in a poor region (p. 11). Its growth refutes simplistic models of environmental determinism. Unlike the great cities south of the Yangzi River, like Suzhou and Hangzhou, Yangzhou, located north of the Yangzi and one hundred miles from the coast in Jiangbei, did not have a favorable hinterland. The rural area surrounding it suffered from frequent floods, famines, and disasters. Founded as a garrison town, the city lay across key routes connecting north and south China. Battles raged for control of this strategic region ever since the Warring States period. Unification of north and south under the Sui Tang rulers set the stage for Yangzhou's first great rise, when the Grand Canal defined its economic role as the collector of grain for shipment to the north. It lost its prominence under the Song and Yuan dynasties, but revived in the late Ming, as the salt production yards to the east made it an attractive location for merchants and officials. The foundation of its economy was the salt monopoly and the Grand Canal, both of which were "artificial infrastructures" (p. 27) closely tied to the fate of the late imperial states—and Yangzhou rose and fell in synchrony with them.

Beyond economic forces, one key event—the "ten-day massacre" of 1645—defined the city's image for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the Ming-Qing transition many places suffered atrocities inflicted by soldiers and bandits from all sides, but Yangzhou became the focal point for the collective outrage of nationalists against the Manchu regime because of the graphic account by Wang Xiuchu, who was in the city during the Manchu takeover. Finnane accepts the truth of Wang's account, but she skillfully indicates alternative interpretations of the city's chaos. The ten-day massacre was by no means a simple story of unified...