The Chinese City in Space and Time: The Development of Urban Form in Suzhou (review)

A city of such venerable history as Suzhou has now received the attention it justly deserves. Yinrong Xu has given us a learned exegesis on the origins, the transformations—both spatial and functional—and the social and cultural contexts of an imperial administrative capital spanning two and a half millennia. Importantly, the discussion here of a long and continuous history that raises more general questions about the nature of Chinese urbanism takes this book beyond being a biography of just one city. It provides us with insights into the distinctiveness of the Chinese urban experience, a substantial synthesis of the major scholarly works on Chinese cities, and an excellent foundation for comparative approaches to urban history generally.

This having been said, however, Xu is by no means constructing an "ideal type"—an image of the Chinese city devoid of its particular historical circumstances or the complex, often baffling social, economic, or political changes that shaped its physical form and functioning. As part of the hierarchical reticulation of Chinese administrative cities generally, a city was embedded in a local as well as a state system that, as modern scholarship appreciates, was neither as static nor as eternal as previously understood. The particular strengths of Xu's analysis are centered on three chapters (4, 5, and 6) outlining, respectively, the physical structure of the city, its walls and gates, and the uses of urban space. These chapters reflect his training as an architectural historian, yet he does not encumber the reader with the lingua franca of his discipline. Xu avers that one of his primary intentions was to encourage further research into Chinese city building from "an architectural point of view" since the dearth of studies belies "its importance in the history of world civilization" (p. 237).

The book begins with a general introduction to the historical background of the rise of Suzhou, the particular events that led to the formation of the Chinese state, and, by extension, the formalization of administration as embodied in the building and rebuilding of its urban locations. As scholars have long understood, walled cities or capitals functioned primarily as administrative centers of their particular regions, provinces, prefectures, and districts, giving coherence to the nascent imperial state from the second century. From the mid-Tang period in the eighth century, the growth of commerce, population, and cultural interactions beyond the Great Wall encouraged city growth—and the growth of records that allow a more thorough investigation into the urban milieu.

Suzhou's construction in the late sixth century B.C. and its "cosmology"—the symbolism and values that shaped its physical form—are discussed in chapter 2. Xu draws on the works of Arthur Wright, Paul Wheatley, Frederick Mote, and Rhoads Murphey, to name a few of the eminent scholars who have profoundly guided our views on the meanings expressed in structures, layouts, and orientations of traditional city building based on their deep understanding of Chinese historical texts. The chapter also addresses the problems of reconciling literal descriptions in the historical sources—reflecting a two-thousand-year evolution of ideas and meanings expressed in the construction of cities by the Eastern Han—with the more recent archaeological record, a problem addressed by Nancy Steinhardt in her work on Chang'an and Beijing.

One of the most distinctive aspects of Chinese urbanism compared to the West, according to Frederick Mote, is the existence of an "urban-rural continuum"—an argument further explored here by Xu. This is reflected in the fact that administrative centers (walled cities) on any level (although it may be argued that the imperial capital might be exceptional) never developed a separate "urban" government or corporate identity or, for that matter, a society or culture separate from the surrounding countryside. Xu details how this was true of Suzhou, which primarily functioned as a prefecture-level capital from the...