Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400-1900 (review)

Naquin's monumental book traces the relationship between the temples that defined Peking's public spaces and the people who lived within and beyond the Chinese capital's nested walls. Lacking the standard scripts of urban history-no unitary urban government, no riotous laboring poor, no coffeehouse culture, and no well-defined bourgeoisie-Naquin constructs from fragmentary records a history based on buildings. With a weak city government (overshadowed by the looming presence of the imperial court) and a large transient population (not only merchants but also civil service bureaucrats and aspiring scholars, coming and going to take examinations or offices), Peking's identity as urban space was defined by its auspicious place as the ritual center and examination hub of the empire, and by local "vistas" advertised in guidebooks and celebrated by travelers' poems and paintings.

Temples were landmarks in both of these dimensions, displaying (among other things) the patronage of imperial donors. Ephemeral institutions, sustained by "irregular and unpredictable" donations (65), temples were sites of potential danger, attracting mixed crowds of uncertain disposition. They housed clerics whose relationship to the Confucian order was problematic. Yet temples also served as classical book repositories and sheltered the bells, steles, paintings, and sculptures that preserved, in elegant calligraphy and exquisite craft, the legacy of the past. Temple gardens, where grand old trees, clear springs, and rare plants drew visitors generation after generation, afforded Peking's dust-ridden residents the delightful prospect of green space and fresh air. As public spaces for playing games, writing poems, burning incense, meeting friends, spending the night (or week or month), setting up a booth to sell wares, opening a soup kitchen to feed the poor, sacrificing to an ancestor, or praying for sons, Peking's temples have a remarkably benign history in Naquin's telling.

The city's history unfolds in two stages, beginning with its development from 1403 as the permanent capital of the Ming dynasty. It continues through the massive ruptures of the Qing conquest in 1644, during which most of the Han Chinese population of the Inner City was forcibly displaced by occupying Manchu Banner households, which resulted in a sweeping restructuring of the city's ethnic and social landscape. By tracing urban temple patronage, partly through an exhaustive analysis of the more than 1,500 stone inscriptions that she studied during fourteen years of research, Naquin shows how, through a combination of coercive repression and generous benefits, the Qing government maintained order in this crowded and heterogeneous city during the final centuries of dynastic rule, despite the absence of any citywide structures before 1902 (670).

Naquin argues that the very dispersed organization of city life, crosscut by overlapping neighborhood and occupational groups and religious associations, discouraged the development of collective identities or shared interests that urbanites might have expressed in public spaces. Instead, Peking's residents shared a culture of "inclusivity" that syncretized Manchu and Han Chinese lifestyles and muted ethnic difference or conflict.

Naquin's stress on the unique features that made Peking an exceptional city (the powerful imperial presence, the multitudes of civil servants and exam takers, the historic setting with its powerful tourist appeal, and the ethnically mixed population) contrasts with Rowe's approach to the history of Hankou, which, in his view, displayed hallmarks of early modern transformation like its counterparts in Europe.¹ A similar contrast may be drawn between studies of Peking that focus on policing and social control, and Naquin's portrait of docile urbanites.² But these are contrasts that the author herself declines to draw.