Bao Weimin’s 包偉民 Songdai chengshi yanjiu 宋代城市研究 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2014) is one of the most significant monographs published by a Chinese scholar on Song-dynasty urban history within the past two decades. In a subfield to which sinophone scholars have usually contributed articles with a tight focus on a single facet of urban life or a single city, and often both, Bao’s book comprised a broad, comprehensive, and longue-durée study of the Song Empire’s cities, packed into 400-plus densely argued pages drawing upon a multitude of primary sources. Bao conceptualized Song cities as both administrative centers and market nodes, moving beyond the capitals of Kaifeng and Hangzhou—which were atypical in the scale of their urban footprints and population density, not to mention intensity of state intervention—to evaluate a much wider array of regional, prefectural, and county-level urban places across the empire. As Professor Bao’s second full-length monograph, Songdai chengshi yanjiu builds upon the conceptual and empirical foundations of his first, Songdai difang caizheng shi yanjiu 宋代地方財政史研究 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2001), an ambitious large-scale study of the Song state’s highly centralized regional and local fiscal system. In one of the most influential analyses of Song political economy ever published, Bao demonstrated the intensification of revenue extraction from local economies as well as the central government’s increasing reliance on commercial taxation and monopolies and diminishing returns from traditional land taxes. Further, Songdai difang caizheng shi yanjiu provides the necessary subject-matter knowledge of administrative structures and fiscal systems that would greatly benefit readers of Songdai chengshi yanjiu.

The Chinese text of Songdai chengshi yanjiu consisted of eight chapters, which now comprise two volumes in Wang Zhitian’s English translation, published in the new China Perspectives series from Routledge. Volume I, Urban Governance, consists of three lengthy interlocking sections with further internal subdivisions. The sections examine (1) the hierarchy, scale, and layout of middle-period Chinese cities; (2) Song imperial institutions for administering urban residents; and (3) the regulation and taxation of city markets and commercial enterprises. Volume II, Urban Developments, consists of five shorter chapters on more discrete topics: (1) urban taxation systems, (2) municipal construction projects, (3) urban demographic perceptions of members of the Song scholar-official elite, (4) urban culture, and (5) economic and administrative bottlenecks in urban growth. I encourage readers to approach the translation of Bao’s book by first reading the conclusion at the end of Volume II, in order to grasp the larger outlines of his argument. It would be unfair and churlish to evaluate a Chinese monograph, produced within a different epistemic environment, according to Euro-American evidentiary rules. We historians trained in North America and Europe generally gripe that in sinophone sinology, explanatory frameworks consisting of high-level reified abstractions can become disconnected from the accumulation of decontextualized primary-source quotations, which are interpreted literally and positivistically. Instead of subjecting Bao’s original book to standards it was never intended to uphold, I will devote my review to sketching its major findings and contributions as a guide for readers of this translation, who might be overwhelmed by its scope and density or frustrated by its English presentation.

Bao devotes much of the study’s introduction to summarizing the state of the field of Song urban history by tracing the achievements of a multigenerational lineage of the twentieth-century Japanese scholars of Chinese economic history who first conceptualized the medieval urban revolution as one aspect of the commercial revolution during the Tang-Song transition. The origin point is the endlessly cited 1931 study by Katō Shigeshi 加藤繁 (1800–1946) on the breakdown of the Tang system of walled residential wards and highly regulated markets (fangshi 坊市), and the emergence of an open street-market (jieshi 街市) system in the Northern Song, in which commercial exchanges were conducted more freely across cities’ intra- and extra-mural zones, in shops and stalls that could open directly onto streets that were no longer bound by walls.Footnote ¹ Katō’s interpretation has become accepted as the conventional wisdom of our field, with minor alterations, propagating through textbooks and surveys of Song history on both sides of the Pacific. Yet, Bao is quite correct to caution that in the subsequent Japanese and Chinese historiography of Tang-Song cities, “the complex process of historical evolution had been oversimplified and conceptualized within a normative consensus derived from Katō’s theory” (p. 28). Beyond the work of mid-twentieth-century Japanese scholars with which most anglophone scholars will already be familiar, Bao’s survey situates his monograph in more recent scholarship from the past 40 years from China, and to a lesser extent Taiwan. Since most recent anglophone scholarship on Tang-Song cities has been centered on their cultural, discursive, and literary representations,Footnote ² Bao’s introduction invites readers to engage with Chinese scholarship, which has been largely materialist and social-scientific in its conceptual foundations, and has generally been more descriptive and enumerative than analytical or conceptual.

Bao voices his criticism of “the tendency for some scholars to struggle in deriving concepts from historical facts” when they “rigidly apply established paradigms from previous scholars” (p. I.18), singling out Han Guanghui 韓光輝 for his “institutional cities” (jianzhi chengshi 建制城市) theory and Mark Elvin’s misrepresentation of the “medieval urban revolution” as the final burst of economic expansion before the “high-level equilibrium trap” closed off the possibility of transformative growth.Footnote ³ Well-versed in Western sinology and historiography, Bao also is aware of the “unavoidable challenge” that Chinese researchers face “in effectively bridging the gap between imported concepts and domestic historical facts” (p. I.23). He cautions that the concepts of “secularization” or “civic culture” derived from early-modern Western European historical experience are ill-suited to explaining middle-period Chinese urban history, unless their original meanings are expanded beyond recognition. Finally, Bao accepts the severe limitations of the primary source base: the qualitative, subjective, and descriptive writings of literati “frequently do not suffice for socio-scientific analysis,” but provide only an uncertain and unrepresentative basis for analysis of demographics and similar quantitative topics (p. I.25).

Part I, “The Scale, Type, and Characteristic of the Cities,” begins with a survey of the emergence of ancient Chinese cities as fortresses (cheng 城) and markets (shi 市). Next, by closely examining the distribution pattern of prefectural and county seats as administrative cities in the Song territorial administration across the empire’s five unevenly developed macro-regions, Bao finds that after the “crucial juncture” of late Northern Song, the number of county seats did not keep up with population growth, leading to a decline in the degree of local governance and state penetration (p. I.55). Further, Bao reconstructs a five-tier status hierarchy of administrative cities, based on their relative economic and fiscal importance from the central government’s perspective: capital cities; regional centers (quyu zhongxin cheng 區域中心城) like Chengdu, Suzhou, and Guangzhou; capitals of routes (luzhi chengshi 路治城市); general prefectural cities(yiban zhoujun chengshi 般州軍城市); and finally, county seats (xianyi 縣邑) (p. I.69). From archeological studies and textual evidence, Bao confirms that in many tiers of this hierarchy, organic commercial growth spilled beyond city walls, which were defensive structures still containing substantial non-urbanized areas, so that the demarcation between urban and rural territories became increasingly ambiguous. Finally, drawing upon numerous urban plans in inscriptions and published books, Bao charts the emergence of open street-market systems and administrative cores within the inner city walls (zicheng 子城) of capitals and major prefectural cities .

Situated in a re-reading of the secondary literature and supplemented with abundant original research, Bao’s findings in Part II, “Urban Administrative System,” represent a comprehensive critique and empirical reformulation of Katō’s 1931 study. Bao posits broader trans-dynastic continuities rather than disjunctures, ambiguities rather than certainties. First, while wards served as the cellular administrative units for tax collection under the Tang, Bao asserts that because many prefectural and county seats lacked outer walls, it would have been “highly improbable for the ward-walls to remain completely intact;” the famous walled residential wards were probably largely limited to Chang’an and “certain prefectural cities” like Yangzhou and Jiankang (p. I.130). While the walled residential wards in these larger cities came down during the ninth and tenth centuries, the ward (fang) “remained the fundamental territorial unit within the urban areas of the Song Dynasties” (p. I.131), and ward heads (fangzheng 坊正) were responsible for collecting taxes and maintaining population registers of urban dwellers (shimin 市民). Furthermore, wards and their plaque-bearing archways (fang’e 坊額) remained essential for wayfinding within the urban grid, and the names of “lanes” (xiang 巷) became progressively more important as location markers in the Southern Song. Bao also exhaustively charts the development of new systems of urban governance in the Song that coexisted with the ward system: “compartments” (xiang 廂) as larger urban zones for maintaining public order between the county government and the wards, and “corners” (yu 隅) as organizational units for fire-fighting brigades.

In Part III, “The City Markets,” Bao examines the state management and regulation of commercial activities, approaching Katō’s interpretation that the Tang government strictly regulated urban space from another angle: “the separation of wards and markets” (fangshi fenli 坊市分離), “government-established markets” (shichang guanshe 市場官設), and “official regulation” (guansi jianguan 官司監管) (p. I.211).Footnote ⁴ As in Part II, Bao doubts that the state ever exercised this level of control beyond Chang’an, and he maintains that these institutional arrangements, focused on “standardizing operations, regulating public security, and collecting taxes,” were not “primarily intended to ‘control’ the market,” but to supply the capital’s administrative and military needs (p. I.225). Since Katō’s hypothesis about the liberated commercial environment of the Song, marked by streetside shops and specialized business clusters (hang 行), was largely limited to Kaifeng and Hangzhou, Bao extends the sphere of his analysis outwards and downwards, to include prefectural and county-level cities. Here he finds that the historical evidence largely substantiates that while merchants could situate their shops anywhere on the grid, distinct market clusters persisted from the Tang into the Song, so that “the integration of the market with the streets was not fully realized”: the transition from fangshi to jieshi was gradual, especially outside Kaifeng and Hangzhou (p. I.242). Further, Bao demonstrates that the Song state still taxed commerce through market-access taxes (menshui 門稅), toll taxes (guoshui 過稅), and trade-place taxes (zhushui 住稅), and that bureaucrats were extensively involved in maintaining order within markets: they formally permitted their establishment, and asserted the state’s own economic interests, especially in mid-sized and small cities. Here again, Bao proposes broader and deeper continuities across the Tang-Song transition, rather than the abrupt disjuncture that Katō postulated.

Leading off Volume II with Part I, “Urban Tax System,” Bao continues to address the state’s reach into cities through its taxation system, responding to the same mix of twentieth-century Japanese and Chinese secondary scholarship, and working through a fragmentary and ambiguous documentary record. He finds that the Song state extracted revenue from urbanites through a system that adapted to the intensification and expansion of commercial development, by levying urban land taxes (dishui 地稅) and residential taxes (zhaishui 宅稅), and enrolling them in corvee service or levying exemption fees upon them. Further, by the Southern Song, state authorities were adapting to the urban commercial boom by assessing the wealth of households more holistically according to their property and business tax burdens, rather than simply according to their real estate holdings. He concludes that in its versatility and adaptability, “the dynasty’s remarkable capacity to extract taxes and corvee from society surpassed that of any other dynasties” [sic] (p. II.32).

The remainder of Volume II consists of shorter chapters that are less essential contributions to the historiography. “Municipal Construction,” Part 2, examines state-funded and -organized projects to reconstruct schools and government offices, to build and rebuild structures of fireproof brick and tile, and to pave roads and streets. Part 3, awkwardly translated as “Demographic Imagery,” examines the subjective impressions that Song literati formed about the population numbers of capital cities, regional centers, and prefectural and county seats, which they frequently overestimated, preferring large rounded numbers that were multiples of 10,000. In Part 4, “Urban Culture,” Bao offers an impressionistic picture, drawn mostly from anecdotal accounts, of cultural distinctions between members of the elite and commoners on one hand, and between urbanites and rural dwellers on the other; he concludes that despite the era’s sweeping economic transformations, “traditional practices continued to dominate” as cities remained centers of elite culture (p. II.120). Finally, in Part 5, “The Development Bottleneck,” Bao crunches numbers to estimate cities’ population density in the Kaifeng and Hangzhou capital region. He concludes that it was “not excessively high,” and assesses three examples of the negative impact of the concentration of urbanites: shortages of wood for building and fuel, and state efforts to manage sewerage and control fires (p. II.160).

Unfortunately, the English translation is inconsistent and opaque, and deforms the original Chinese text. Readers will not be able to appreciate the high quality and significance of Bao’s research. The translator, the editors, and the publisher have done the author no favors. A pervasive pattern of glaring oversights makes the text hard to read and actively frustrates even committed readers with existing knowledge of the subfield. As I proceeded through the translation, I began to question the value of this publication project, especially at a total list price of US$400 for two slim hardcover volumes. Who is the intended audience? Bao’s monograph assumes PhD-level technical knowledge of Song administrative, economic, and political history. Any such reader would know enough classical Chinese and modern Mandarin to both productively engage with the original Chinese edition and make sense of the embedded quotations from Song primary sources, rather than relying on English translations of questionable quality and fidelity.

In Wang’s translation, key terms are inaccurately and inconsistently rendered into English. For instance, the four-character phrase tianyuan difang 天圓地方, “round sky and square earth,” is rendered as “doom sky over square earth” (p. I.10). The phrase shi daoli, shi guanzhan 識道里, 視觀瞻 appears as both “public navigation and the manifestation of distinct scenery” and “intended for public recognition and the creation of distinct scenery” within the same paragraph on p. I.136. Chinese equivalents for key terms are infrequently and inconsistently supplied, despite a glossary of translated terms appended to Volume II. For example, the term “sub-cities” is first mentioned on p. I.91, but no Chinese equivalent is provided until the glossary explains that this is the English counterpart of zicheng 子城 (p. II.186), which generally denotes the area within an inner-city wall. The term “ward architrave” first appears on p. I.137 as a translation of fang’e 坊額 (see p. 117 of Bao 2014); while this term does not appear in the glossary, it is alternatively translated as “ward plaque” on the previous and subsequent two pages. As an amazing and risible example of the lack of editorial oversight, the Chinese phrase cichu ying charu kongge 此處應插入空格 (“A space should be inserted here”), an artifact of page-proofing, appears in the middle of an English sentence at least twice (pp. I.83, I.134). This extensive combination of careless errors indicates an overall failure of editorial quality control, for which the press should be ashamed.

For long stretches, the English text reads like what I suspect is a lightly edited machine translation. Frequently, I wondered whether it had been fully proofread by a competent copy editor, and I doubted that the translation had been vetted by anyone with subject-matter knowledge. Whether they come from haste or negligence, the editorial errors accumulate to such an extent that they considerably undermine the project’s scholarly contribution. The chapter and sub-section titles are especially clumsy and non-idiomatic; for example: “Ward system in the Tang dynasty,” “Compartment office,” and “Market in broad definition.” To list just a few of the careless mistakes from Volume I: abbreviated titles of primary sources appear in seemingly random order, so that “SJ” for Shiji appears before “HS” for Hanshu (p. I.xvi); Katō Shigeshi also appears as “Katō Shigeru” (p. I.9), each of these doppelgangers has his own index entry, and Katō also manifests later as “Shigumi Kato” (p. I.121); the names of some (but not all) Japanese scholars appear in reverse order, so that for example a book by “Yoshinobu Shiba” and an article by “Yoshiyuki Suto” (sic.) are both listed under the letter Y, not S, in the bibliography (pp. I.293, I.303); and many works of secondary scholarship listed in the footnotes do not appear in the bibliography at the end of either volume. One might ignore errors in the notes and bibliography, but they are so extensive that they undermine the value of the main text.

To highlight a particularly infelicitous English translation of a primary source, from juan 1 of Jiatai Kuaji zhi 嘉泰會稽志, an early 1200s gazetteer of Yuezhou 越州 (p. I.198):

A more accurate translation would be:

Or take a translation of a stele on the re-establishment of Jiangyin jun from 1161:

I would suggest a clearer translation:

These are just two examples that suggest substandard translation software, combined with a lack of informed human oversight from the series editors and the publisher’s production staff. If the reader cannot rely on accurate, consistent, or even coherent translations, and needs to regularly check these against the original Chinese text, the English version is not especially useful.