If there is one thing that the book Water Lords is successful at, it is proving that the question of how to provide water to a city of hundreds of thousands – no less a city than Beijing, the highly militarized capital of a succession of great empires – is a daunting and fascinating one worth historical exploration. Lei Zhang’s project is to lay out the system by which water was sourced and provisioned to Beijing’s population from the founding of the Qing up through the Japanese occupation. Zhang terms this system a “water regime,” by which he means a structure through which forms of power were exercised via water provisioning. The parameters of this structure are complex, involving: 1) environmental conditions (arid climate, limited surface water, brackish shallow sub-surface water, and a deeper sweeter water table accessible only by modern drilling technologies or the fortuitous spring); 2) available technologies (well-drilling technologies, water carts, modern waterworks and piping schemes, emerging sciences of microbiology and chemical disinfecting); 3) markets and property rights (labour and infrastructure costs, ownership rights, water pricing schemes); 4) socio-political networks (Qing court power, Manchu privilege, native-place ties, professional/labour guilds, political parties); and 5) ideological visions and discourses (imperial patronage, nationalism, public health). The book undertakes the challenge of tracing major shifts in the city’s water regime over three centuries, with the most prominent through-line being the role of water carriers who, in the early 20th century, earned the begrudging sobriquet of “water lords” from Beijing’s denizens who found it nearly impossible to access water except on their terms.

The book proceeds chronologically, starting with the water regime established in the early Qing when the Qing court granted a group of trusted Shandong military porters monopoly rights over water provisioning to the exclusively Manchu Inner City, a privilege these Shandong water carriers leveraged to monopolize the Outer City trade as well. At the turn of the 20th century, however, the system of well-houses and handcart carriage faced a series of challenges. Chapter two explores the effects of the urban cataclysm of the Boxer Uprising on the system as well as the advent of foreign deep-well drilling technologies, which made Beijing’s deeper sweet water much more accessible (though many Manchu residents continued to prefer the saltier shallow wells). Chapter three focuses on the competition between the water carriers and the development of a modern piped waterworks, a system first implemented under the relentless pressure of Western resident entrepreneurs, but one that lacked sufficient financial impetus, either state or commercial, to extend clean running water effectively to the bulk of Beijing’s majority cash-poor households. Chapters four through six follow the fascinating power-struggles over controlling and regulating water through the 1920s–1930s, showing how the water carriers maintained their dominance, despite efforts by the Capital Waterworks to expand their market share and despite multiple city governments’ attempts to wrest control over the system. Though forced to reorganize their guild and make several concessions to state regulatory control, the water carriers never relinquished their exclusive customary rights over water delivery routes, even when government judges repeatedly declared their assertions baseless and illegal. Through bullying customers, attacking waterworks employees, collective acts of sabotage, withholding labour, price manipulation, political protest and guild organizing, the water carriers and well-house owners dominated Beijing’s water provision up to – and arguably through – the Japanese occupation.

The highlight of Zhang’s book is the anecdotes. There are dozens of fascinating stories gleaned from local newspapers, court records and archival reports: brawls with pipe-layers, strange cases of well water contamination, disputes over territory, and an apparent penchant of Beijingers to favour jumping into wells to attempt suicide.

Unfortunately, as a piece of historical analysis, the book has several shortcomings. One is a relative lack of comparative analysis. Beijing was far from unique in China, not to mention cities throughout the developing world in the early 20th century, in lacking the market or government funds to fully build out a large-scale running water system and to therefore have water carriers or similar labouring groups maintain a tenacious hold over a portion of the resource. In Hygienic Modernity, Ruth Rogaski wrote about this for Tianjin, but, though Zhang cites Rogaski once in passing regarding hygienic modernity, he fails to discuss the very similar story of Tianjin’s “dark drifters.” Beijing’s water carriers are a fascinating case, but far from unique. Zhang also tends to lump all water carriers and well-house owners together as a homogenous group, and it is not until the epilogue and discussion of Communist reform that he finally notes that their political-economic interests and work-lives could involve profound differences and hierarchies, a major historical issue that has been deeply explored in studies of late-Qing and Republican-era urban guilds. Most disappointing, however, is that the book is, I am sorry to say, so poorly edited that arguments that the author might be trying to make fail to unfold. Too frequently sentences do not flow into each other, assertions are made with no clear connection to evidence, and, in a small number of the worst cases, anecdotes seem to have been garbled (see p. 149, the Lama Temple case). There are smaller writing issues too, like on p. 110 the phrase “indoor politics” – which should of course be “inside politics.” Having myself published books and articles with my own share of flubs, I am not a stickler about a few writing mishaps, but the extent to which choppy writing interferes with argument and narrative here does a disservice to what could have been a more useful, insightful and engaging history.