Based on an international workshop convened in Yangzhou in 2005, Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou provides a kaleidoscopic view of the city's history, culture and arts. It is a monumental volume marked by a fine production, especially in its colorful illustrations. The editors characterize the book's multi-disciplinary approach in the Introduction: “Far from a standard narrowly-defined academic project, the book is a collaborative enterprise that has resulted in a collection of essays each of which adds details and considerations that enrich the whole” (p. xxiii). Thus the volume seeks to promote the city's rich cultural heritage to a broader readership, especially through collaboration with locally-based scholars.

For example, the chapter by Fei Li, a Yangzhou-based storyteller-turned-researcher, is the translation of a Chinese essay that introduces Yangzhou's storytelling houses and business practices to general Chinese readers. This essay provides readers with an insider's observations and knowledge of details, and represents an interesting approach in the English-language scholarship of local Chinese history. Similarly, the chapter by Vibeke Børdahl is highly insightful in analysing the use of scripts by the storytellers and comparing the scripts with vernacular novels based on the storytellers' performances. This work seems to have resulted from her long-time collaboration with local storytellers.

As one of the initiators of this book project, Børdahl has published widely on the local culture of storytelling and folk-style entertainment. The current volume explicitly focuses on Yangzhou but is broader in scope than her earlier projects. It brings together contributions by scholars in history, urbanism, literature, cultural studies and art history.

The book's 18 chapters are grouped into four parts. The first part focuses on urban history and material culture. Lucie Olivová gives an overview of Yangzhou's urban history through the ages and calls our attention to the preservation of historical monuments in the present day. Another chapter on residential gardens, by Vena Hrdlickova, further enriches our understanding of the city's built environment. This part also contains two fascinating essays about the culture of social gathering and fashion. Tobie Meyer-Fong discusses how local communities recovered from the war devastations of the Taiping Rebellion and highlights the concept of gathering in contrast to that of shattering. Antonia Finnane's contribution details the city's fashion and material culture in the 18th and earlier 19th centuries and suggests that this late imperial consumerist lifestyle continued and revived in Shanghai after the mid-19th century. Malcolm McKinnon's contribution also explores connections between Yangzhou and Shanghai, though in a less focused way.

The second part begins with a chapter on the city's print business and book culture in the Qing era. J. S. Edgren shows that commercial publishing was not as important as official and private publishing, and this difference from publishing businesses in Jiangnan cities was probably tied to the city's unique geographical position between North China and Jiangnan. The next chapters focus on literary production based in the city. Li Hsiao-t'i examines an official-poet's friendship and everyday life during his five year residence in Yangzhou, while Roland Altenburger's analysis of the vernacular tales of a Yangzhou author shows that the narratives of the local history and culture served general (or imperial) moral didactic purposes rather than a regionalist cultural agenda (as in the contemporary reinvention and “sale” of a local culture). Margaret Wan's chapter examines the novel Qingfengzha set in a town near Yangzhou. She shows that it evolved from storytelling purely for local consumption and was hence quite different from novels written and published for a cross-region readership.

The last two parts discuss performance and visual arts. In addition to the two chapters on storytelling mentioned above, Colin Mackerras and Lindy Li Mark reveal Yangzhou's unique contribution of regional opera developments, and introduce readers to the lively world of the city's entertainment in past and present. By examining a rare collection of 19th-century songs, Stefan Kuzay reconstructs the pleasure quarter of late 19th-century Yangzhou, being quite comparable to that of Shanghai in the same period. The four chapters on the Yangzhou school of painting in the Qing period examine such fascinating topics as forgeries of the masterworks and depictions of frontier travels, which are shown to reflect a long-distance Eurasian trade route that starts at Yangzhou.

The history of late imperial Yangzhou, especially in the 18th century when it was a prosperous town of the salt trade, has recently attracted much scholarly attention. The city's cultural legacy in the local, regional, and imperial context can be explored to reshape the historiography of imperial and modern China. The contributors of this volume meet this challenge by drawing our attention to the city's everyday life and material culture as recorded in a rich array of fresh and little-studied materials. Their unpretentious empirical approaches open grounds for further analysis; some conclude their chapters by pointing out intriguing questions raised by the materials that call for further studies.

Indeed, the rich materials dealt with in the book could have been examined and brought together in more explicit theoretical frameworks and in more rigorous engagements with recent trends in historiography. Most chapters about literature and the arts are more concerned with issues in their respective disciplines. What holds them together is the same subject-matter of the city's cultural legacy rather than interdisciplinary engagement with each other. This is implied in the editors' brief Introduction (pp. xi–xiii), which would have better highlighted some themes common to the chapters rather than merely putting together their short summaries.