This new book on drama and the Qing imperial court by Ye Xiaoqing (1952–2010) should be of wide interest, if only because of the tremendous resources that the Qing court invested in theatrical performances (48,671 taels of silver in one three-year period alone [p. 21]), whether for its own enjoyment or to impress “barbarians” (including Lord Macartney [1737–1806]; pp. 2, 87–92); the three-tiered stages involved in some of those theatrical productions; or the numerous attempts by the court to influence theater outside the palace (including a brief eighteenth-century national drama censorship campaign that failed rather miserably in comparison to the famous, concurrent “Literary Inquisition” that focused on belles lettres [pp. 182–97]). Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas presents itself as the first book on this topic to make extensive use of archival records, particularly those of the Palace Museum and the First Historical Archives in Beijing.

Besides the preface, introduction, and back matter, the book is composed of five chapters and a conclusion with these topical titles: “Imperial Institutions for Ceremonial and Private Performances,” “Drama, Occasion, and Audience,” “Performers in the Palace,” “Cultural and Political Control,” “Peking Opera and the Court,” and “Conclusion: Peking Opera and a New Political Focus.” The first three chapters are closely based on three articles that Ye published between 2003 and 2005 (pp. 43, 106, and 168). A fourth article published in 1996, on a court case involving the Jingju (Peking opera) actor Yang Yuelou (1840–90), is mentioned in Ye's preface (p. xiii) as the starting point in her research for this book, and informs the part of this book that covers him (pp. 154–64). All four of these articles were very solid accomplishments that both filled in gaps and corrected mistakes in the existing scholarship at the time, and surely gave their readers high expectations for this book, whose appearance was delayed by Ye's death.

As was the case with its precursor articles, Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas presents a fairly detailed and well-rounded introduction to the various theatrical activities in which the Qing court engaged. Although the book is not organized around any thesis or claim (the final paragraph does not even mention the Qing court [p. 267]), it does manage to tell a number of “stories” that unfold over time. As anyone familiar with the dynasty's fortunes might expect, the amount of money available for huge theatrical productions declined rather steeply after the highpoint of the Qianlong reign (1735–95), even if the last decades of the dynasty were presided over by the Empress Dowager Cixi (1835–1908), an opera fanatic if there ever was one. Another narrative is the diminution over time of what is presented as an extreme sensitivity toward issues of ethnicity under the Qianlong emperor, and the consequent emergence of a situation that one subheading characterizes as “Late Qing—Ethnicity of no significance” (p. 207). The idea that ethnicity was no longer of any significance in the late Qing is, of course, problematic. One could also point out that recent scholarship argues that the kind of diminution that Ye refers to actually started in the Qianlong reign itself, when the emperor ordered that the Chinese who helped found the Manchu dynasty should be considered as “disloyal officials” (erchen), and when plays about loyal Chinese generals, such as Yue Fei (1103–40), came to be considered useful despite the fact that Yue had fought against people the Qing claimed as ancestors.

Ye relies heavily on certain kinds of archival documents and does not make much use of the thousands of different kinds of playscripts, visual materials, and objects connected to palace theater that have been preserved in a variety of places. Thus while Ascendant Peace in the Four Seas is a good introduction in English to the topics it covers, it will soon be superseded as scholars employ a wider variety of increasingly available historical materials from different repositories, triangulating them to highlight key developments in stronger relief than Ye does (this kind of work is already beginning to appear in recent PRC doctoral theses). We can also expect future work to be more critical in approach and to invest more in analysis than Ye's book does. (A tendency to underplay analysis was something that reviewers of her first book also noted.) Although Daniel Kane's prefatory note claims that the book was “essentially completed” before Ye's death (p. xv), I think it is certain that the book would have been published in much better shape if she had been given more time to work on it. Some of the chapters feel quite rushed in terms of their structure, format, and coherence, and there are some glaring mistakes, such as the idea that all four of the Anhui troupes made it to Beijing in 1790, repeated three times (pp. 221, 241, and 259). There are no cross-references between the chapters, even though several topics are covered (with quite a bit of overlap) in multiple sections of the book. The index, which was not compiled by Ye, simply lists page numbers without subentries. There are many reasons to mourn Ye's untimely death, but one is surely that it prevented her from seeing this book all the way through the publication process.