Literary scholar Huan Jin takes the epochal importance of the Taiping War (1850–1864) in modern Chinese history as her starting point in her first monograph, The Collapse of Heaven. If the war changed everything, the book premises, then we should map these changes not merely in the sense of before and after (the tenor of much prior research), but also within the event—an approach shared by a growing body of scholarship on wartime and postwar culture and society.Footnote ¹ To this end, Jin’s research questions include: Besides oft-stressed external factors, how did the evolving Taiping movement draw on texts and motifs already circulating in early nineteenth-century China? Were these influences similar to or different from those influencing the orthodox reaction to the movement? How did Chinese people respond to wartime experience in their writing of diaries, novels, anecdotes, and plays? And what were the ramifications of the war for literature and culture in the postwar era? To address these ambitious research questions, Jin deploys an array of scholarly tools—close reading, attention to historical context, theory, and bibliographic and material culture analysis—and addresses multiple genres: popular religious tracts, proclamations (xiwen), diaries, novels, serialized stories, and chuanqi plays. Clarified rather than muddied by this multidisciplinary approach, the product is both readable and insightful.

The book is divided into two halves. In the first three chapters, Heaven, Hell, and Earth represent analyses of Taiping doctrine (especially texts intended to recruit or mobilize followers); prevalent views of moral retribution and damnation in popular religious tracts; and the meaning-making practices used by survivors in memoirs and diaries, respectively. Jin’s revelations in this section are both exciting and plausible. For instance, in Chapter 1, she posits that the Taipings’ propaganda techniques took major inspiration from the “information war” waged by Protestant missionaries in their approach to south China (and the wider maritime world of Southeast Asia) in the early nineteenth century. In Chapter 2, Jin demonstrates that the supposedly orthodox text, Miraculous Proofs of the Sacred Edict, in fact drew far more from popular morality texts than the imperial Sacred Edict. Both Taiping and anti-Taiping texts therefore rely upon a dualistic heaven-and-hell motif that circumvents the power of the imperial system. For the diarist Shen Zi (the subject of Chapter 3), Jin points out that initial, vague diary entries created a framework for Shen Zi to flesh out and retool—a process distinct from the immediate and traumatic process of recollection.

The most prominent example of Jin’s bibliographic touch is Chapter 3 (previously published in Late Imperial China), a fascinating inquiry into the making and remaking of war survivor Shen Zi’s diary, but this careful book history approach is everywhere. For instance, the Taiping edicts discussed in Chapter 1 have been studied as texts, but not as objects. However, material matters here and, as throughout the book—but especially in the first half—Jin excels in gleaning insights from analyzing texts as material objects, whether that be the context of creation, of preservation, or of circulation. Here she might consider widening her material lens in examining how the Taipings sought to turn sacred texts from revered to commonplace, ubiquitous objects. New modes of paper production and print aided the high-volume strategies of evangelical Protestant movements in the United States and elsewhere; without ready access to these resources, could the Taipings have achieved mass circulation? Another flavor of the bibliographic approach is Jin’s preference for paratextual details and historical contexts, rather than internal literary clues, to identify authors and influences; an example is her identification of Pu Wenbin as author of the post-Taiping play Karmic Ties in a Dream in Chapter 5.

The second half of the book takes on forms of reckoning with the trauma of war in three literary and performance genres: novels, chuanqi plays, and short “tales of the strange.” In these chapters, the author’s primary subject matter includes fairly well-known works, such as Wei Xiuren’s Traces of Flowers and the Moon and serialized stories by Wang Tao. However, as in the first half, Jin’s approach to these materials is grounded in the conviction that these postwar stories must tell us something about the lessons the authors sought to derive from long years of civil war and reconstruction. This theme underlies Jin’s convincing argument in Chapter 4 that Wei Xiuren’s novel should be considered autobiographical and specifically preoccupied with wartime predicaments. It also underlies the specifics of her interpretation of stories in Chapter 6. For instance, Xuan Ding’s stories present the Taipings not as flat antagonists, but rather as a force that instigated a vast wave of moral levelling in Chinese society. Further, although she makes less of this than I expected, Jin tells us that author Xuan Ding prefaced a story with an autobiographical narrative including a breakdown and recovery reminiscent of Taiping leader Hong Xiuquan’s—and powered by one of the morality tracts analyzed in Chapter 2.

These three chapters, more than their antecedents, feature frequent discussion of influences and parallels, not in the authors’ immediate proximity, but in the literature and drama of the seventeenth century. The cultural resonance between the “late Ming” and “late Qing” were introduced in the 2005 conference volume Dynastic Crisis and Cultural Innovation: From the Late Ming to the Late Qing and Beyond. Footnote ² Here, Jin represents the seventeenth-century crisis as a close (but not exact) parallel for nineteenth-century authors and readers. At times, it was unclear to me when the historical authors themselves deliberately inserted allusions to seventeenth-century works, or when these comparisons were inferred by modern scholars. For instance, in Chapter 5, Jin convincingly describes Pu Wenbin’s Karmic Ties in a Dream as “a serious attempt to emulate The Peach Blossom Fan” (221), but I felt less sure about the associations between Xuan Ding’s stories and those of the early Qing.

I would like to conclude with a note of praise for the production value of the book. The book has Chinese characters for all its quotations, footnotes, and color images. These rare assets are remarkably helpful for readers as they follow the author’s arguments based in textual, bibliographic, and material analysis. They also make Jin’s mastery of her subject matter even more apparent. Let’s hope that the Harvard University Asia Center continues to produce high-quality books of this sort.