Charles Musgrove's China's Contested Capital could have had a subtitle of “the making of modern Nanjing, 1928–1937.” And indeed that might have best captured the scope of this book and its tenet. Focusing on the Nanjing decade of the Republic of China, Musgrove proposes that he examines the history of Nanjing “by investigating what the city's experience reveals about China's modern development” (p. 6). In six chapters, Musgrove explores the connections between Republican Chinese political history and Nanjing's urban history, then exposes the ways in which political cults evolving around and after Sun Yat-sen's death contributed to the city's landscape, and finally lays bare anecdotes concerning citizens’ beliefs, the cityscape and their mutual experiences that shaped Nanjing at the street level. All these tasks are not easy to accomplish, and to present their outcomes altogether in a single book is surely daring.
It is indeed this particular quality of Musgrove's book that brings together aspects of a city that otherwise would have never been considered connected. Chapters one to three offer a history of Nanjing the capital by introducing it in relation to ideology and socio-political background of the Kuomintang. Here, Musgrove provides details about city planning and ensuing arguments among bureaucrats, planners, architects and civilians, and subsequently draws those individual agents together by discussing episodes that vary from Nanjing city plan's competition and designs of civil buildings to the construction of modern infrastructure. We also learn that, while Nanjing had never been a particularly metropolitan centre of China, it managed to retain vibes of imperial establishments from the Ming dynasty, and that, therefore, the demotion of Beijing and the revival of Nanjing as China's capital city also implied the end of the Qing dynasty as much as a relocation of the centre of power to the south.
Yet, the relocation of the capital was marked, not by the rise of a new leader, but rather his death. Chapter four and the majority of chapter five comprise details and analyses dedicated to Sun Yat-sen and the construction of his Mausoleum. According to Musgrove, Sun's Mausoleum and the social and political cults that evolved around it have created a necropolis within the city: a renewed capital marked by a leader's tomb. The analogy is fitting. Several major ceremonies in Nanjing during that decade were either conducted at Sun Yat-sen's Mausoleum or were carried out accompanied by a claim of following Sun's teaching. Musgrove's ability to interweave historical anecdotes, lore, legends and archival materials enables us to see how Sun Yat-sen's personae and political signifiers were repackaged and deployed as propaganda to aid the Kuomintang government's creation of the city's socio-political setting. Details about Nanjing's streetscapes and events occurring in the 1920s in chapter six further confirm the above arguments. For example, in 1931, during a student protest against Japan's encroachment upon China, a large group of students came down to Nanjing and held meetings with Chiang Kai-shek; although the government adopted different tactics to handle the students, the best offer went to those who agreed to return home, for they were treated to a special pilgrimage to Sun Yat-sen's Mausoleum (p. 223).
From the outset, China's Contested Capital's emphasis on the Republican period makes it a good addition to the growing oeuvre of books on Republican Chinese cities. One can also argue that this book's method of integrating experiences of historical agents “at the top” with those “at the bottom” is the result of the magnificent development of scholarship on this subject during the past two decades. In the 1990s, we saw the publications of David Strand (Rickshaw Beijing, 1993) and Frederick Wakeman (Policing Shanghai, 1995), and edited volumes by Wen-hsin Yeh (Shanghai Sojourners, 1992; Wartime Shanghai, 1998) and Joseph Esherick (Remaking the Chinese Cities, 1999). Subsequent monographs by Hanchao Lu (Beyond the Neon Light, 1999) and Di Wang (Street Culture in Chengdu, 2004) open up more exciting nuances in the study of everyday life and streetscape, just as Peter Carroll's Between Heaven and Modernity (2006) makes us rethink about Suzhou. (In retrospect, it is striking that, with an exception of William Rowe's study of Qing-period Hankow [1989] and the first part of Di Wang's book, every single monograph on Chinese urban history that has won an award from the Urban History Association has thus far concentrated on China in the early 20th century.) Seen in this context, after Beijing, Shanghai, Chengdu and Suzhou, Musgrove's study of Nanjing is an apposite new entry on the shelflist.
In The Remaking of Istanbul (1986), Zeynep Çelik remarks that two approaches to the study of urban history can be broadly characterized: that of social historians who emphasize the history of urban societies at large, and that of architectural historians who focus on urban form and architectural fabric. Almost 30 years later, her statement might not be universally applicable, because fields and disciplines have grown to overlap, and their methods are less rigidly defined. Nonetheless, there are still noticeable research strengths of each group that distinguish one approach from the other. Musgrove writes about architecture and cityscape, but his approach places this book squarely within the territory of social-cultural history. His fortes in archival research and socio-political history come through, and materials from archives in both China and Taiwan are well presented. Still, one wishes that he could have treated architectural images and city maps more attentively. Some of the images are printed in such small scales that a magnifying glass is required to observe details of buildings. It would have also been helpful to include a separate list of illustrations and maps, as well as a full citation (instead of a shortened form) of each figure's source in its caption. The book's citations are for the most part appropriate, but occasionally the sources of quoted phrases or anecdotes are placed far from the quotes and in a few cases they are difficult to clearly identify. The combination of in-text citations and endnotes, the latter of which also at times contain additional in-text citations, can cause confusion. All of these should not in any way ever discourage readers, because what this book has to offer far outweighs its minor flaws.
There are only a handful of books of substantial quality on the urban history of Nanjing, and most published monographs in English tend to concentrate on the atrocities of 1937. China's Contested Capital is a well-researched book that presents the overall urban history of Republican-period Nanjing with insightful arguments.
