Merchants' Daughters is an extension of Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China, published in 1995. In foregrounding certain historical processes and cultural constructs in South China, Merchants' Daughters stands out by asking what this regional culture has meant to Chinese women from the late Qing period to the present. The “South China gang,” a multi-disciplinary team led by Helen F. Siu, has endeavoured to go beyond the lineage paradigm: in other words, to transcend the Confucian imagination, which has unreasonably dominated the study of merchant cultures on the Pearl River Delta. Refusing to treat women and gender as static, essentialized cultural categories, this volume of extensive historical and ethnographical research successfully illuminates a complex picture of the agency, ambiguities and negotiations of Chinese women over the past two centuries.

The eleven chapters are organized around three distinctive historical periods during the region's transformation: state making during the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Republican period in China and colonial Hong Kong, and finally the era extending from the immediate post-war period to the present. This volume argues that these historical junctures have significantly affected both the predicaments that women face and women's identity-related strategies, and may have provided “unusual spaces” for women's actions in the region. Central to this anthology is not only the dismantling of the women-as-victim scripts but also what Siu called “the historization of gender consciousness” and “subtler appreciation” of the diverse characteristics of women's everyday-life roles.

Part one, which consists of four chapters, is entitled “Cultural spaces between state-making and kinship,” and centres on women's stories in the Ming and Qing dynasties, a period that Siu argues was characterized by the interplay of two forces: state-making, and the cultural transformation of the “indigenous population.” Liu Zhiwei's chapter “Women's images reconstructed” compares the circulation of different historical accounts of the worship of two female ancestors in Panyu. She illustrates how local elites and the state appropriated a female-centred cultural tradition drawing on zishunu and buluojia practices to promote Confucian moral teachings. In his chapter entitled “Images of mothers,” David Faure's meticulous readings of biographies written by prominent literates in memory of their mothers enrich our understanding of the submerged managerial roles of women in the household. He argues that “the motherly images progressed from those of intimate caretakers in the earlier period to competent household managers and educated tutors” (p. 12). Studying historical bridal laments and muyushu, which have become guidebooks for local performance, May-bo Ching's chapter “What alternative do you have, Sixth Aunt?” argues that local practices were marginalized and that women's experiences were “simplified,” “purified,” and “repackaged for a market of printed matter that entertains both male and female readers.” More importantly, she points out that researchers should be cautious of “women's voices” in a written tradition where men were in a more advantageous position, in contrast to oral traditions. In the final chapter “Women's work and women's food in lineage land,” Wing-hoi Chan draws on women's oral accounts and British colonial records to illustrate that women in rural Hong Kong relied heavily on sweet-potato cultivation and pig farming, as well as on a maintenance and proactive use of non-patrilineal kinship ties, as important factors in the local economy – a topic that past studies have largely neglected.

Taking on the notion of women's agency, the second part of the volume focuses on women's history in emigrant, colonial and mercantile societies. The chapter on “Women in the Chaoshan emigrant communities, 1850–1950” by Chi-cheung Choi illustrates how women's “stepping out” (taking over the role of managerial tasks, making a living) shaped the formation of a new generation of women entrepreneurs in the absence of male members of households. The other two chapters in this section focus on colonial encounters in Hong Kong and Macau. In the chapter “Abandoned into prosperity,” Carl Smith traces the careers of some Dan fisherwomen who cohabited with foreign traders and officers and were left with property in Macau and Hong Kong. Josephine Lai-Kuen Wong's chapter “The Eurasian way of being a Chinese woman” tells the story of Lady Clara Hotung, who was able to negotiate a visible presence in mainstream Hong Kong in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The final section is entitled “Work and activism in a gendered age” and consists of four chapters, each one telling the story of women who actively engaged in modernized cities to create an “unusual space.” Helen Siu's chapter “Women of influence” focuses on women legislators and civil servants in Hong Kong, whilst the chapter “Half the sky” by Yan Lijun, Yang Meijian and Taotao Zhang, draws on the experiences of two women: one who worked as an educator and another who worked in the military service in Mainland China. Choi Po King's chapter uses oral histories to illustrate the everyday-life experiences of working daughters from the 1960s to the 1990s. These are in contrast with Siu's introductory chapter, a succinct and informative account of women's representation in the context of rapid modernization and globalization. Apart from presenting “women as wielders of power and consumers of commodities,” the media has portrayed women in strikingly contrasting ways. For example, the media has represented the female “new immigrants” from Fujian and Guangdong who marry older Hong Kong working men as desperately poor, as welfare recipients, or as victims of abusive husbands. The book concludes with Pheng Cheah's chapter, which addresses the fantasies and realities of sex workers who travel from Mainland China to Hong Kong to make a living.

This is an ambitious volume building on the interdisciplinary team's efforts to depict the actual diversity characterizing women's history, gender negotiations and relationships in South China. Reconstructing the culture and history of the Pearl River Delta mercantile society from women's perspectives is provocative and insightful. This book, which draws on diverse archival work and oral histories, will be of great interest not only to anthropologists and historians, but also to those engaged in gender and women studies.