Scholars of Ming-Qing history and literature have paid increasing attention to material culture in relation to persons as both individuals and members of communities—literary, cultural, and ethnic. Addressing material culture, book culture, and writing practices, Yulian Wu's Luxurious Networks explores the role of a cluster of things—jade, stone, seals, and books—in the life of salt merchants in eighteenth-century China, and in turn the role of those merchants in High Qing society. The book touches on a series of important issues in the studies of Qing history, for example, the ethnic nature of Manchu rule, consumer culture, lineage, and female chastity. Using salt merchants as an entry point, Wu aims to reveal a new network between Manchu court and Han Chinese, to analyze the merchants’ role in High Qing consumer society, to challenge the conventional understanding of literati-merchant (shishang) relations, and to argue for the potential that things hold for historical studies.

Luxurious Networks focuses on an important and unique group of social actors—salt merchants who hailed from Huizhou, worked and lived in Jiangnan, and maintained close connections with the court and elites in Beijing. The three parts of the book in turn address those salt merchants’ relations with the Manchu court and their activities in Jiangnan and Huizhou. Part one (chapter 1) explains the rise of Huizhou salt merchants as a result of the Manchu government's salt policies, especially the appointment of the emperor's bondservants as salt officials and of selected Han Chinese as head merchants.

Whereas part one explains the institutional and economic reason for the rise of salt merchants, part two examines salt merchants’ role as the Manchu emperor's local agents as well as their engagement with things and books. Chapter 2 discusses how salt merchants in Jiangnan, especially Yangzhou, supplied the court with tributary goods (gongwu), court-commissioned objects (huoji), and rare books, thus creating a circuit of taste between the court and Jiangnan. Focusing on one salt merchant, Wang Qishu, chapter 3 studies the salt merchant's identity as a collector (shoucang jia) who collected precious objects and books for the Qianlong emperor, and published women's poems and his own seal collection.

In part three, the focus of the last two chapters shifts from Jiangnan to rural Huizhou. Studying lineage construction projects (genealogy publication, shrine building, and charitable land donation), chapter 4 reveals how salt merchants manipulated the social meanings of these projects to formulate ties with elites in Jiangnan and Beijing. Chapter 5 studies the construction of chastity arches in Huizhou in response to the Manchu state's efforts to inculcate Confucian morality and display imperial legitimacy. The book concludes by using “cultured and cosmopolitan men” (tongren) to recapitulate the role of High Qing salt merchants in the transregional network involving Manchu rulers and Han Chinese enabled by material objects. Throughout the book, Wu maintains a balance between discussing macro-level issues such as ethnic relations, salt-control mechanisms, and cross-regional networks, and micro-level practices by salt merchants, such as seal collection and arch building.

Luxurious Networks successfully fulfills the goals it proposes. Regarding Manchu-Han relations, it shows that the Manchu court and ethnic-specific policies gave rise to the political and cultural prowess of Chinese salt merchants in south China. Beyond that, it shows that the interactions between the Manchu court and local Chinese shaped consumer culture in Jiangnan and the material landscape in Huizhou. As a contribution beyond historical studies, the book deepens our understanding of the relationship between scholars and merchants. Rather than relying on texts about merchants produced by literati scholars, the study examines things through which merchants expressed themselves. Challenging the common explanation that merchants negotiated their elite identity by emulating scholars, Wu shows that salt merchants not only mediated the interaction between the Manchu rulers and Han Chinese, but also developed their unique identities as collectors, connoisseurs, community leaders, and “cultured and cosmopolitan men” beyond the scholar-merchant division.

A major strength of the book is the varied materials and methods it successfully integrates. All the chapters are based on extensive and thorough examination of historical (edicts, gazetteers, and genealogies), literary (novels), and material sources (stones and seals). Besides closely engaging debates in historical studies, Wu bases the book on close readings of texts and philological studies of book prints that are more commonly seen in literary studies (e.g., chap. 3 and pp. 181–82). He also carried out ethnographic work in today's rural Huizhou, whence the findings corroborate and strengthen discussions about issues in history (e.g., p. 184).

Wu's choice of focus on salt merchants invites further questions. One set of questions have to do with their representativeness as merchants: did the importance of the salt business distinguish them from other merchants in High Qing China? Did their shared origin of Huizhou separate them from other salt merchants? The other set of questions involves the ambiguous distinction between scholars and merchants. For example, some salt merchants wrote and published their works and even served as government officials. Meanwhile, literati scholars also frequently participated in producing lineage genealogies and chastity commemoration. To what extent were the salt merchants (especially those merchant-scholars) different from traditional (non-merchant) scholars? Those questions can, of course, be the subject of additional studies beyond this book.

In Luxurious Networks, a cohesive project, Wu neatly tells a story about a group of people navigating through ethnic, economic, and cultural relations by dealing with things. The material focus inspires further consideration of the boundary between things and words. This solid study not only contributes to existing scholarship on Qing history, but also helps literary scholars understand the role of merchants in book culture, opera patronage, and other types of cultural production. The successful integration of historical, philological, and literary methods sets a high standard for studying things and words in late imperial China.