Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats: The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes (review)

Cities of Aristocrats and Bureaucrats: The Development of Medieval Chinese Cityscapes. By CHYE KIANG HENG. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999 . Pp. xviii + 240 . $48 (cloth).

The study of "cityscapes" is part of the interdisciplinary genre known among interested scholars as "urban morphology," "urban morphogenesis," or "urban form," an area of inquiry with a strong historical emphasis. Originating in geography but subsequently attracting the attention of architects and city planners, the study of urban form focuses on the visible elements of the urban environment such as buildings, streets, gardens, monuments, walls, parks, and other types of open spaces. To document the origins and evolutions of a city's landscape elements is an essential first step toward more meaningful analyses of the relationship between form and function and between urban change and socioeconomic developments in a society. Some scholars see urban landscape elements as organisms that are constantly changing in response to the changing dynamics of a society while at the same time shaping societal change, but there are also others who prefer to "read" the urban landscape as text and subjectively interpret its meanings. In these approaches, urban form is examined at different levels of spatial resolution ranging from the micro-level gaze at and description of the structural or decorative details of a building to the macro-level analysis of a city-society relationship, taking the city as a functional node in space. In any study, mere description without fresh analytical insights, or without revealing important new facts, will not go very far in a disciplinary pyramid of knowledge which is formed by the accumulation and description of facts at the base, explanations and interpretations of facts in the middle, and theory formulation at the apex.

The book under review is not concerned with such approaches. It is largely a descriptive account of the changes in the cityscape in China during the Tang (618 -907 ) and Song (960 -1279 ) dynasties. The author, on the faculty of the School of Architecture at the National University of Singapore, has used a wide variety of primary and secondary sources of information, including historical documents, archaeological data, maps, poems, and paintings, to illustrate how the urban scene changed dramatically from the late T'ang to the Song periods. The findings, however, are hardly new. Sinologists, historians and historical geographers such as Kato and Hiraoka (in Japanese with Chinese translations), and Twitchett, Hartwell, Shiba/Elvin, and Ma (in English) have long documented the nature of the shift in urban structure and urbanism during this transitional period. Briefly, existing literature has made it quite clear that urban commercial and service activities were spatially confined to the walled urban ward (fang) system during the pre-Song era during which they were rigidly controlled by the local authorities with strict limitations on the hours of business. After the late T'ang, such activities were widely dispersed in the cities where they were operated without temporal or spatial limitations. Also widely known is the fact that the shift coincided with the decline of the T'ang empire and the increase in the commercialization of economic production during the Song and that the urban ambiance in Song cities was distinctly freer and oriented toward the ordinary city residents. The resultant patterns of urban structure and business activities remained basically unchanged until the mid-nineteenth century after the arrival of Western traders.

The author, however, deserves credit for having brought a fairly large amount of research materials relevant to the topic into one volume. The bibliography and notes are useful to students. However, historians and social scientists who are interested in gaining fresh insights or new interpretations on the relationship between urban development and national or regional change in Chinese history will not find anything new in this volume. As a geographer, I deem such relationships extremely important. Architectural historians will find virtually nothing on...