In this important and aptly titled new book, Si-yen Fei uses data from late Ming Nanjing (and its subordinate districts) to reframe discussion of the Chinese city. Arguing that too much emphasis has been placed on commerce and the longue durée, she directs our attention to urbanization and agency. How did the Ming polity, originally conceived as a constellation of largely self-governing natural villages (lijia), accommodate the existence of cities holding hundreds of thousands of people? More broadly, what do answers to that question imply for our approach to Chinese cities at other times and in other places?
Between an introduction situating her work in the context of (Western) arguments over the nature and significance of late imperial Chinese cities and her conclusion, Fei advances her argument through four case studies. Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to local politics. The first, provocatively titled “We Must Be Taxed,” describes grassroots mobilization to create an urban tax in place of the labor services directly shouldered by Nanjing residents down to 1609. This is followed by a discussion of attempts (in one case, successful) by residents of xian in Nanjing prefecture to resist the imperial mandate that every county seat in the empire be walled. She then turns to the ways in which late Ming natives of Nanjing presented their locality, first by discussing the “prospects (jing)” that epitomized the city in the eyes of its elite, and second through a close reading of records of “conversations with guests (ketan)” that two Nanjing luminaries published in the early seventeenth century. Although she notes that we lack direct evidence of readers' responses and admits that many entries seem “tedious trivia” (p. 243), she argues that these collections not only provide direct evidence of what contemporaries found interesting but also preserve a creative contemporary effort to analyze the texture (and sources) of the city's social and cultural diversity.
Although one cannot know who the “armchair travelers” who snapped up copies of the Nanjing guidebook were, several of the prospects were urban—in marked contrast, say, to Wen Zhengming's depiction of the Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou (where any reference to the urban context was discretely omitted). Yet, in the collections of urban gossip that Fei discusses, one finds something less than an unambiguous embrace of the city: while the nature of deformity created by the interaction of locals and migrants varied by neighborhood, only in rural Jiangning did Gu Qiyuan describe the common people as “honest, pure, and willing to be at the disposal of the government” (p. 217). Thus, even as they demonstrate “that it was the social and economic interactions among city residents, rather than the state power wielded by the five borough offices, that dictated the formation of Nanjing's inner boundaries” (p. 243), these texts suggest that Nanjing elites remained uneasy about the effects of urban life.
The studies are very well done, providing fascinating glimpses of late Ming Nanjing. Yet, as Fei clearly recognizes, this was not just another big city. From 1421 to 1644, it was at once the empire's secondary capital (duplicating all the central ministries, including the Imperial Academy, and protected by an unusually large garrison), a prefectural seat, capital of two counties, and the place where provincial-level examinations were held every third year for all of Jiangsu and Anhui. Commerce and crafts certainly contributed to the city's late Ming recovery. Even so, the texture of life in Nanjing owed an unusual amount to the presence of the state, scholar-officials, and literati. If she is to succeed in her larger aim, Fei has to convince the reader that in key respects, developments in the Southern Capital represent broader trends.
Fei does this by supplementing her discussion of Nanjing wherever possible with brief but pertinent sketches of parallel phenomena elsewhere. These sketches enable her to argue effectively that, however unique the processes and singular the results, late Ming cities faced common problems and grappled with them in analogous ways. Hence, she seems fully justified in arguing that we have spent too much energy exploring conflicts between state and society in the late Ming, and too little on the far more common processes through which relationships between the two were successfully negotiated. At least as convincing is her demonstration that evidence of an emergent urban consciousness is to be sought less in the creation of a new vocabulary than in the ways in which words and images were repurposed. Together, these do much to support a third contention—that more attention needs be paid to the specific ways in which these forces played out, hence the need to bring the dynasty back in.
Fei is surely correct in arguing that a dynasty's institutional arrangements were crucial in framing negotiations. There is, however, something of a disconnect between her sketch of the Ming founder's vision and her discussion of the problems faced in late Ming Nanjing. Whatever his theoretical commitment to the empire as a collection of villages, early Ming China had many large cities—not least Nanjing. Although it is said to have lost half of its population when the capital was transferred to Beijing in the early fifteenth century, the city still held hundreds of thousands. Thus, urbanization was not nearly the late Ming novelty that Fei sometimes implies.
We seem to be dealing less with the creation of urban institutions and identity de novo than with their re-creation in the wake of the collapse of early Ming arrangements, arrangements that no longer served state or society adequately. Just as those earlier institutions can be seen as an awkward attempt to extend the lijia model to the city, so do their late Ming replacements owe much to the Single Whip method. Commercialization clearly made the latter possible. Nanjing officials were, however, outsiders, usually rotated in and out at a fairly rapid rate. One suspects that, were reform not simply to empower the widely despised clerks and runners, it had to be a variant of practices in widespread use.
Fei convincingly demonstrates that dynasties differed in important ways in their treatment of cities and that these differences mattered for how cities functioned. One can embrace her point and still wonder whether dynastic change mattered in quite the same way for places outside the capital. It is clear, however, that in the wake of Fei's work, all future study of late imperial cities will have to grapple seriously with the issues she has raised.
