Legends of the Building of Old Peking draws together themes from across various areas of Hok-lam Chan's prolific body of work. Here he examines a corpus of stories of Peking lore (distinguished from modern Beijing) gathered by folklorists and scholars in the twentieth century to trace their historical, religious, and fictional roots. Chan begins with a thoroughgoing summary of astrological, geomantic, and classical Chinese theories of urban planning that shaped the construction of Peking. The four main chapters are divided into two parts: the design of the city to resemble the divine warrior Nezha (or Nazha), and Mongol/Chinese legends of siting the city and its perimeters by bowshot. Most of Chan's study focuses on three stages in Peking's myth making. First is the Mongol Yuan, when Dadu was built under the direction of Liu Binzhong (1216–74), the Buddhist/Daoist advisor to Qubilai Qaghan. By the fourteenth century, supernatural powers were attributed to Liu in the belief that he magically laid out the city in the shape of the body of Nezha, with the eleven gates as his three heads (south), his six arms (east/west), and his feet (north). An important Buddhist and Daoist deity in scriptural texts and in popular literature, Nezha later figured prominently in the Ming novel Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi) and other works. Nezha often fought the watery Dragon King, a narrative inspired, according to Chan, by the chronic flooding and drought that plagued Peking.

Second, Chan recounts the cast of romanticized early Ming dynasty figures that emerged in stories from the fifteenth century onward, eclipsing the place of Nezha and Liu Binzhong. Ming and Qing stories evolved around Liu Ji (Liu Bowen, 1311–75), the famous advisor to the Ming founder and architect of the capital at Nanjing. Liu was invested with magical and clairvoyant powers and figured prominently in the seventeenth-century novel Romance of the Heroes (Yinglie zhuan) and other works. Chan also traces the development of Ming and Qing legends about the Yongle emperor (r. 1403–24), the builder of Peking, and fantastical stories about his 1402 usurpation of the throne from his nephew, his alleged Mongol parentage, and the magical prowess of his advisor Yao Guangxiao (1335–1418). Also figuring in these Ming stories are the treasure hoards of Shen Wansan, an early Ming Suzhou businessman whose fortune helped build imperial Nanjing.

Third, Chan explores stories from the end of the nineteenth century through the twentieth century, as these narratives reemerged and coalesced in modern forms reflecting shifting social and political exigencies. In late Qing stories, Liu Ji heroically led Han uprisings against Mongol overlords, echoing the racialized anti-Manchu rhetoric. In Republican times, richly developed Peking narratives flourished as entertainment in the expanding public spaces, fueled by the search for a new urban identity. Nezha's body was remapped upon the city, appearing even in missionary reports. Ming-Qing folk heroes were fused with contemporary Mongol oral bowshot legends and with old stories of Nezha to create a new blend of Peking lore.

Chan's wide-ranging study raises interesting questions about Peking as a local place and about the relationship of its culture to that of the larger empire/nation. Chan posits a sub rosa localized oral transmission that kept the Nezha story and other Peking legends alive, acknowledging that such a theory is difficult to substantiate. How, then, did this local popular culture remain so detached from the culture of the court, or from the vast numbers of scholar-officials who made their way to and from Peking? Why did these Peking-centered stories not make their way into the mainstreams of Ming-Qing popular culture, particularly the novels and plays that featured Nezha as a culture hero? On the other hand, what are the implications of Jiangnan heroes—Liu Bowen, Shen Wansan, and others—being drawn in as part of a newly recreated local Peking identity?

To explain the modern stories, Chan invokes the notion of “recycling” developed in Madeleine Y. Dong's Republican Beijing, the City and Its Histories. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003). By recycling, these authors mean the complex and dynamic dialogue with the past that creates the modern. The revised stories of Peking show this kind of fruitful transformation well, but it would be interesting to learn more about how this recycling fits into the Republican era nostalgia and the search for a new Peking identity. In the twentieth century, these stories seem somehow denatured, like the 1980s portrait of Nezha in the Beijing airport (p. 168), increasingly detached from the institutional and religious foundations that nurtured them through imperial centuries and requiring excavation by anthropologists, folklorists, and historians.

This book is rich is sources, information, and analysis, and with careful exploration of the filiation and intermingling of these legends, Chan's work opens up new and important vistas for thinking about urban culture and the evolution of the popular imagination over time.