After the Communist victory in 1949, the erstwhile capital, Nanjing, was allowed to slip quietly into obscurity. The Beijing government paid it little attention. When C.P. Fitzgerald visited it in 1956, he remarked on its general appearance of neglect. Tours organized by the official China Travel Agency as often as not bypassed it in favor of more revolutionary sites: Shaoshan, Changsha, Wuhan. All this lack of attention may have helped ensure a corresponding tendency for it to be overlooked by historians. The monographs that early defined the field of Chinese urban history in the west were mostly about other places: Shanghai, Beijing, and major treaty port cities such as Hankou, Tianjin, and Guangzhou. In 1983, Jonathan Lovell Withers II, a student of Jonathan Spence, completed a PhD on Nanjing as Taiping capital, but it was never published. It may be that the existence of this well-researched, engagingly written thesis kept some other researchers at bay.

Over the last ten years, research by a later generation of scholars has belatedly brought the urban history of Nanjing to print. With works by, severally, Si-yen Fei and Jun Fang on the Ming “Southern Capital,” Zwia Lipkin and Charles Musgrove on the Nationalist capital, and now Chuck Wooldridge on the Qing city, a substantial English-language history of this place is beginning to take shape.Footnote ¹ With the exception of Jun Fang's work, none of these are general histories: they are thematically centered on various particular problems—space, modernity, the political culture of a built environment. Wooldridge's work incidentally touches on these latter issues, but City of Virtues is primarily concerned with the qi 氣 (something between a miasma and a zeitgeist) that the author senses to have been operative in the making of city and society in Nanjing through several phases of its nineteenth-century existence.

What constituted this qi? The relevant keywords, which are included in the title and subtitIe of the book, are virtue and utopian. A quoted passage from the works of the locally influential Yao Nai 姚鼐 (1731–1815) makes it clear that by “virtue” Wooldridge means basically the three principles and the five constants, i.e. the familiar virtues of the Confucian tradition. These might not strictly apply to the Taiping era, but Wooldridge is at pains to stress the common ground between the Taipings and their enemies, especially their “shared vocabulary of truth and falsehood” (89). His argument is that in the eighteenth century, the Qianlong emperor was able to command the moral topology of Nanjing. In the course of his Southern Tours, of which there were six between 1751 and 1784, Qianlong imprinted the local environment with values grounded in the authority of himself as imperial dynast. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, agency in the deployment of virtue reverted to other social actors: local literati in the Jiaqing-Daoguang era, the Taiping rebels under Hong Xiuquan 洪秀全, and numerous exogenous functionaries under Zeng Guofan曾國藩. Although these various agents stood in differing relationships to the Qing empire, the picture of state and society that emerges from Wooldridge's study is one in which the person of the emperor, during the nineteenth century, ceased to be “the [sole] embodiment and arbiter of virtue” (54). Even the cult of loyalty that flourished after the Qing victory over the Taipings drew attention to the virtues of ordinary people rather than primarily to the emperor (142–43). Such virtues, argues Wooldridge, were captured in a ritualized built environment that gave spatial expression to a succession of utopian visions.

The meaning of “utopia” as used in this book is less than clear. It has been remarked of More's Utopia that it lacks the Augustinian notion of servitus, or absolute devotion to God. This suggests quite a nice analogy for part of what Wooldridge is describing, which is something akin to a shift on the part of local literati from servitus to cultus, the latter referring to land, people, customs, worship of ancestors, and all the “most cherished activities” of a society.Footnote ² Drawing on work by Phillip Kuhn and James Polachek, Wooldridge interprets literati activities in Nanjing in the early decades of the nineteenth century as directed at reconstituting the empire into one which the literati would play an active role in government. Likewise, he writes, Zeng Guofan, presiding over the construction of Nanjing in the 1860s, had a “vision of government based on the morally inspired activism of the literati…” (125). In using the term utopian to describe not only these literati visions but also millenarian uprisings and reformist agitation in the nineteenth century, he draws attention to what he views as a common goal of all these movements: the realization of an ideal world.

Other scholars have written about utopia in Chinese contexts, but this highly localised treatment is perhaps without precedent. It raises questions about how nineteenth-century movements differ from their twentieth-century counterparts with respect to their utopian quality—an issue on which Wooldridge touches, tantalizingly (178)—and also how they might be viewed from the perspective of the “utopian vision” of the classical age entertained by Dai Zhen 戴震 (1715–77), at the other end of the temporal spectrum.Footnote ³ It provokes reflection, too, on how specific to Nanjing were the patterns of engagement and disengagement with empire and place that Wooldridge describes. In Building Culture in Early Qing Yangzhou, Tobie Meyer-Fong traces Yangzhou's shift in orientation from Nanjing to Beijing, south to north, region to empire, in a treatment of the early Qing that is almost the mirror image of Wooldridge's treatment of the later part of the dynasty. In both cases, the Southern Tours of the Qianlong emperor appear to have been a turning point. In the eighteenth century, writes Meyer-Fong, “local sites became meaningful not through poetry and literary reference but through imperial appreciation.”Footnote ⁴ She was writing about Yangzhou, but the sentence could equally well have been written about the Nanjing described in Wooldridge's first chapter. Meyer-Fong's study did not go much beyond the end of the Qianlong reign, but the writings of the Yangzhou School in the first half of the nineteenth century, characterized as they are by an intense interest in local place, suggest that the turn away from a Beijing-centered cosmology described by Wooldridge of Nanjing was echoed in Yangzhou.Footnote ⁵ Were other cities, then, shaped or re-shaped by utopian visions in the nineteenth century?

Qing history is a thinly populated field in the Anglophone world, and the intellectual landscape even of the relatively familiar nineteenth century is still taking shape. To read Wooldridge's book is to participate with him in a search for historical meaning in this landscape. It is a peripatetic study: people come to Nanjing to bestow meanings on it, or they leave it, only to return with new possibilities and projects in mind. Following in the tracks of Wang Shiduo 汪士鐸 (1802–89), Zeng Guofan, Chen Zuolin 陳作霖 (1837–1920), and others, Wooldridge has identified a pattern of fluctuation between center and locality, empire and region, state and community in the horizons of literati worldviews in nineteenth-century Nanjing. The workaday city is not really his concern. The closest he comes to dealing with non-elites is the few pages devoted to the Taiping rebels. He does, however, draw attention to the inadequacies of literati writing to account for all the many facets of urban life in the late Qing. Chen Zuolin's detailed local histories described Nanjing “bridge by bridge, block by block” (170), but they omitted the Catholic Church, the missionary school, the Post Office, and a bible school, among other novel institutions. This is not uncharacteristic of local gazetteers in the late Qing, and is a reminder that what we have left to us in writing from that time is itself shaped by ideals.

Chen, the scion of a local literati family and survivor of the Taiping Rebellion, did not build much in Nanjing, but he made up for that by creating what might now be referred to as a virtual city: a city put together in print instead of bricks and mortar. In a finely observed account of this virtual city, Wooldridge shows that ordinary people were by no means invisible: Chen viewed them as foundational to the prosperity of Nanjing, and in themselves virtuous. Still, in Chen's view, they did not act alone but rather in response to the encouragement of the “morally inspired literati.” This passage, close to the end of the book, wonderfully captures the tension between the materiality of the historical city, produced by these ordinary people, and the city's qi, which was produced by the literati. Hinting as it does at the possibilities of a new way of writing history, it makes a fitting conclusion to this imaginative history of a place destined in the twentieth century to be the site of quite new visions.