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  • Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou and Southern Song China, 1127–1279 ed. by Joseph S. C. Lam et al.
  • Xiaolin Duan
Joseph S. C. Lam, Shuen-fu Lin, Christian de Pee, and Martin Powers, editors. Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou and Southern Song China, 1127–1279. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2017. Pp. xxv + 352. $60 (cloth). ISBN 978-9629967864.

Joseph S. C. Lam, Shuen-fu Lin, Christian de Pee, and Martin Powers, editors. Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou and Southern Song China, 1127–1279. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2017. Pp. xxv + 352. $60 (cloth). ISBN 978-9629967864.

This edited volume was first initiated during an interdisciplinary conference entitled "When Shall West Lake be Without Song or Dance?" held at the University of Michigan in October 2011. I was invited as a graduate student to attend the workshop. Six years later, this edited volume came out of the riveting discussions, becoming a thought-provoking and systematic study of Hangzhou and Southern Song culture through the innovative perspective of sensation.

The introduction, written by Joseph S. C. Lam, Shuen-fu Lin, Christian de Pee, and Martin Powers, lays out the major theme of the book, an extended definition and examination of Hangzhou's urban culture. Chosen as the temporary capital after the Jurchen invasion, Southern Song Hangzhou [End Page 483] represented urban space mingling with the natural landscape, a significant stage of the Middle-Period urban revolution. The introduction places the development of Hangzhou in the context of the Middle-Period (800–1400) transformation starting from the late Tang. That development has long been the focus of historians and urban scholars: a series of structural changes inaugurated a new stage in the lifecycle of Chinese civilization, reshaping how people interpreted urban life and interacted with the surrounding environment.

In discussing the development of urban culture, this edited volume reads sources as "expressions of individual experience and political conviction" (xiv). It seeks to reestablish the historical connections "between writing and meaningful action, between text and world, between the sources and their own words, between the pages and senses" (xiv). In other words, this book not only explores the historical space in which urban culture developed but also gives equal attention to how literature and historical development mutually fueled each other. Each essay unfolds the Southern Song as a period in which new genres were invented to accommodate and further energize the commercial cityscape, with circulating discourses on consumption and the sensory space for various types of entertainment.

To accommodate both the material changes occurring in cities and the accompanying evolution of genres, the editors discuss two types of research methodologies. They point out that the materialist approach in studying cities has been effective in depicting the general splendor of the city and the dynasty, but it is less successful than a sensory approach in conveying individual experience (xvii). Such emphasis on a sensory approach gives the book the title Senses of the City. Most of the contributions to this volume concentrate on individual texts, or individual people, or one genre, and they seek to "recover the authentic, substantive, historical urban space" (xviii). The contributions in the book are organized by different senses.

The first two essays cover the Southern Song soundscape and call for scholarly attention to the aspect of hearing in urban documents. Beverly Bossler's chapter reviews the significance of dance and musical performance in Song dynasty social life, in which court fashion and urban entertainment influenced each other. But this also resulted in an increasing moral concern about such performances, which led to a greater reluctance to acknowledge such performers in later documents (13). The recovery of Southern Song musical culture, therefore, not only reconstructs the central role of music and [End Page 484] dance in literati identity, but also reveals the misreading of this time period brought on by Neo-Confucian ideology's later dominance.

Joseph Lam's essay focuses on Zhang Xiaoxiang's 張孝祥 (1132–1169) musical world to reconstruct a "microcosm of the complex and dynamic musical culture in early Southern Song China" (25). Lam uses a wide range of concepts from musical analysis, including sound culture/soundscape...

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