One of the more exciting developments in Chinese history over the last decade has been a new wave of transnationally attuned scholarship exploring the relationship between the Chinese diaspora and the homeland.Footnote ¹ In Coming Home to a Foreign Country: Xiamen and Returned Overseas Chinese, 1843–1938, Ong Soon Keong contributes to this endeavor a rigorous urban history of one of the most prolific migratory hubs on China's southeast coast.

Xiamen was at the fulcrum of the myriad relationships that connected the overpopulated and chaotic counties of Zhangzhou and Quanzhou prefectures to the overseas Chinese communities in places such as the present-day Philippines, Taiwan, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and the wider world beyond. All of the interactions between members of the diaspora and their business partners and families in China—letters, remittances, commerce, and the movement of people—were squeezed through the port city. It was a place where people from rural southern Fujian prepared themselves to get on boats for a life-changing migration, the first place where returnees accommodated themselves to life in China, where the wealthy among them invested in real estate and settled. It became a new sort of homeland, argues Ong: not the hometown or ancestral village, but a rapidly modernizing Chinese city where educated and wealthy returnees could invest their capital and energy.

The book is divided into two parts and six chapters, with an introduction and conclusion. The first half builds out an explanation of Xiamen's particular trajectory of economic development over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In chapter 1, Ong shows how the city emerged as a natural fit to become one of the first five treaty ports in 1843, because of its long-standing role in the business of trade and migration between Fujian, Taiwan, Batavia, Malaya, and the Philippines. Chapter 2 then grapples with the question of why the port was such a disappointment to the British diplomats who had forced it open. Prior to 1843, Xiamen's maritime traders had thrived by connecting ports in central and north China to the southeast Asian and global economy. This was entirely undercut by opening of Shanghai and later Tianjin to foreign commerce, and British merchants and diplomats were forever pessimistic about Xiamen's potential after arriving in 1843. But, as Ong demonstrates in chapter 3, there emerged in Xiamen an “alternate path to prosperity” not recognized by the port's foreign inhabitants: a service industry built around human migration.

The three chapters that make up the second half of the book offer thematic analyses of the contributions of returned overseas Chinese to Xiamen's urban history during the early twentieth century. In chapter 4, Ong explores the ways in which diasporic returnees experienced and indeed manipulated the modern citizenship regime. Foreign subjects enjoyed extraterritorial protection in the treaty ports, and Xiamen became a key site for people with local language skills and family connections to set up businesses that were protected from interference by the Chinese state. The Republican Chinese state, argues Ong, was highly attuned to this issue and sought through research and policy to claim ownership over the overseas Chinese community. Chapter 5 then explains the modern urban reconstruction of Xiamen in the 1920s as the consequence of an influx of capital from diasporic returnees who had chosen to settle and invest in the port city. Xiamen was rapidly transformed in the 1920s and 1930s, as the city authorities and their private partners set about constructing new streets, sanitation offices, public transportation systems, and port infrastructure. The culmination of these efforts, writes Ong in chapter 6, was the emergence of a new sense of home and identity among the well-heeled returnees who found themselves at the helm of the city's modernization. Xiamen became the homeland where the overseas Chinese wanted to invest their money, “an environment where they could fulfill their personal potential and ambitions” (p. 158).

Ong's book should find ready audiences across the fields of Chinese and Southeast Asian history, and it is especially recommended for anyone interested in the history of the Chinese diaspora. The meta-narrative of the book is celebratory. I wondered how the mayors and naval commanders who ran Xiamen during the 1920s and 1930s approached and accommodated the foreign protection of the developers responsible for the port's urban reconstruction. The discussion of homeland and identity in chapter 6 is centered around people who settled in Xiamen from Singapore and the Philippines, and the contributions of the city's large Taiwanese community to this sense of home and identity is another question that future scholars could find value in exploring. These kinds of questions are provoked by the quality scholarship and good service Ong has offered to the field in this book: a transnationally informed guide to Xiamen's modern history and its unique role within the larger swirling history of diaspora.