In The Neighborhood, Nianshen Song takes readers to Xita (The West Stupa), a half-square-mile quarter in Shenyang, Northeast China, on a journey reminiscent of Patrick Keiller’s psychogeographic films such as London and Robinson in Space. In his own terms, Xita is a place of ‘little significance’ (p. 1), yet the four-centuries-long history of this place reveals ‘China’s stunning metamorphosis…from a multiethnic Eurasian empire into a postindustrial consumerist society’ (p. 7). This exploration of time through space, Song suggests, lets us see how China is a fluid entity that is not ‘confined by conventional boundaries of ethnicity, culture, nature, and state’ (p. 7).

Ambitious as it may sound, Song maintains this chronological clarity while addressing broad themes in modern Chinese history. Song organizes his six chapters according to themes. Following his conviction that ‘narrative is a more effective approach than abstract analysis’ (p. 54), he takes the reader through the dramatic transformations of Xita. The story begins with ‘The Stupa’ (ch. 1), which reconstructs Mukden’s Tibetan Buddhist network and the West Stupa’s consecration in 1644. Its hybrid architecture and non-identical Manchu, Chinese, Mongolian and Tibetan inscriptions reveal that royal patronage from the Qing court served a contingent strategy of alliance and imperial legitimation. ‘The Lama’ (ch. 2) then describes the daily lives of the clerics who staffed Xita’s temples. Song illustrates how Beijing supervised a religious bureaucracy of Lamas in temples that interacted with the local communities. Its decline after the end of Qing in 1912 showed Xita’s dependency on state sponsorship.

Chapter 3 shows how the arrival of the railway transformed Xita from a religious suburb into a zone of competing capitalist interests driven by nationalist responses to Russian and Japanese imperialism spearheaded by Marshal Zhang Zuolin. The chapter opens with the culmination of this conflict, a lucid description of the Huanggutun incident in 1928, where the Japanese Kwantung Army assassinated Zhang. The implications of Japanese imperialism in shaping the local landscape are further studied in Chapter 4, which turns from the construction of empire to its representation and imaginary. Drawing on the writings of Japanese scholars, writers, organized tourists, guidebooks and postcards, Song shows how the Stupa was remade as a Pan-Asian spectacle of the Japanese empire. The surrounding neighbourhood, however, remained a poor quarter of labourers, migrants, opium users and brothels.

The final two chapters adopt a micro-level perspective by drawing on life stories of local residents. ‘The Enclave’ (ch. 5) focuses on the Korean diaspora, tracing their cross-border lives during Japanese rule, Maoist China and reform. The entangled narratives of Che Renxi challenges a monolithic, essentialized notion of the state and demonstrates how the agency of individuals, through their actions of crossing the borders, actively shaped the meanings of being Chinese ‘Chaoxianzu’, and henceforth expands the concept of Chineseness. ‘The Model’ (ch. 6) uses Xita and neighbouring Tiexi (meaning west of railway) to trace Northeast China’s transition from socialist industrialization to market-oriented consumerism. Amid the market reform and deindustrialization, factories and workers of Tiexie were devastated, while Xita, with its Chaoxianzu diaspora, witnessed an influx of South Korean capital. Commerce and nightlife transformed Xita into a prosperous ‘little Seoul’. Song argues that Xita’s successive outlook as a socialist, commercial and ethnic-solidarity ‘model’ exposes uneven development and state-managed place-making.

One of the book’s most important contributions lies in what Song makes of Xita’s present-day insignificance. Across its 370-year history, the neighbourhood attracted intermittent political and economic attention from successive polities, driven by religious, capitalist and ethnic concerns. Its shifting political and economic significance challenges narratives of continuity that treat place-making as the expression of a single people and presume the neighbourhood to possess a fixed, essentialized identity. Xita took shape through the changing relations among Qing rulers, Mongolian and Tibetan Buddhist networks, Russian and Japanese imperial projects, Korean migrants, socialist institutions and local residents. These groups did not merely leave separate ethnic traces upon a given ‘Chinese’ space. Their interactions helped shape the institutions, spatial boundaries and ethnic categories through which China itself came to operate as a multiethnic polity. Song thus reveals a reciprocal relationship between locality and the state. Without denying the state’s central role, he shows how state formation was negotiated from below and made visible in the neighbourhood as a contingent, ongoing process.

Another contribution of The Neighborhood is methodological. The book ends with an ethnographic note about the author’s physical presence at a hotel in Xita and follows a food-delivery rider’s progress across a digital map of the neighbourhood. This situated ending allows the book to be read alongside Vyjayanthi Rao’s idea of the city as an archive. For Rao, the city-as-archive goes beyond a repository of material remains from which a preserved past can be recovered. It is an emergent formation in which continuing urban change makes visible the forces and relationships that have shaped urban space, even when their physical traces have disappeared. The original West Stupa shown in the Japanese postcards was gone and replaced by a ‘rather boring’ (p. 1) replica. Yet its disappearance raises the possibility of recovering the historical processes. Xita thus functions as an archive, as its changing form, even absence, of physical historical traces, allows the relations that produced both the urban space and the multiethnic polity around it to become historically legible.