Despite Liang Qichao's influential and repeated lambasting of court-centered dynastic history over a century ago and despite the introduction of new historiographical methods during the twentieth century, dynasties still maintain their grip as the most common chronological framework in which to research and publish on Chinese history. In Japan, Taiwan, Europe, and the United States, Chinese history is pursued by members of dozens of academic societies specializing in the history of this or that dynasty. The history their members produce may not for the most part be court-centered, but the framework remains dynastic. Witness the arrangement by dynasty of the Cambridge History of China and Harvard's more recent six-volume history, the last volume of which is devoted to “the Great Qing.” And even within China itself, the form is about to be revived with the imminent appearance of a prodigious monument, the new, gargantuan dynastic history of the Qing (Qingshi) that has been edited at China People's University in Beijing with state funding and the participation of 1,600 historians. Its four-part arrangement is modeled on the jizhuan composite form of the 24 Histories, with the minor innovation of a fifth section of maps and diagrams. The content mirrors current political orthodoxies rather than imperial ideology. Nevertheless, its purpose remains the same: the present regime seeks to fix the correct view of the past and at the same time legitimize its own place in history. At over thirty million characters in ninety-two volumes, the new Qing History will be three-quarters the length of all the 24 Histories put together. Its release will coincide with the completion of the new edition of Zhonghua's 24 Histories in 2018.

Despite its title, Richard Smith's The Qing Dynasty and Traditional Chinese Culture inhabits an altogether different world. Smith may have begun his career by working on the Qing dynasty, but he soon branched out into scholarly surveys of the whole sweep of Chinese history, seen through the prism of map making in one notable study and in the reception of the Yijing in another two, and in many detailed studies of popular beliefs and practices.

This latest work is ambitious: it seeks to delineate the entire culture of late imperial China, covering language and symbolic reference, patterns of thought, religious life, arts and crafts, literary trends, social life, and the subsequent developments of all of these up to the present day. To situate these, there are two opening chronologically arranged chapters on the Ming and Qing and two more chapters on Qing institutions with an emphasis on distinctive Manchu contributions.

This is Smith's third take on this vast cultural panorama on which he first published in book form in 1983, expanded in 1994, and has now enlarged again in 2015.Footnote ¹ In the interim, Smith has absorbed new ways of looking at late imperial China. In 1983's China's Cultural Heritage: The Ch'ing Dynasty, 1644–1912, he took the traditional Chinese view and concentrated on the manner in which the barbarian Manchus promoted and adopted Chinese culture. In the present work, he seeks to bring into play the cultural heritage of the Manchus and the world of Inner Asia and their interaction with the Han Chinese. He has also put more emphasis on centrifugal and centripetal tendencies in Qing politics, society, and culture. In doing so, he has been able to benefit from new studies over the last twenty years in the fields of law, science and technology, gender, sexuality, and military affairs. Finally, he makes a more systematic effort to trace the interactions of elite and popular culture than he had done in his two previous works on the same subject. The introduction clearly defines what Smith means by culture and his use of the three related themes of cognition, ethics, and ritual to give coherence to the intriguing array of cultural practices and beliefs that form the main body of the work.

The appendixes contain interesting materials, including the Three Character Classic in Chinese and English; a bibliography of recent books in English on the Dream of the Red Chamber; and tables of contents of four editions of the popular encyclopedia, Wanbao Quanshu (1616, 1636, 1758, and 1828). There is a 100-page bibliography, the bulk of which Smith has also made available online.

Smith summarizes a large amount of scholarship, always acknowledging his sources. Here and there specialists may find fault with the details. For example, in the chapter on language and symbolic reference, he remarks that “Chinese characters had a magical, mysterious quality, presumably deriving from their ancient use as inscriptions on oracle bones and on bronze sacrificial vessels” (p. 175). But all knowledge of oracle-bone inscriptions had been lost for more than 2,000 years before the Qing, and they were only rediscovered in 1899. In the same chapter, he also assumes too easily that Mandarin (guanhua) was a single, empire-wide, common language, whereas we know that this was not the case. On page 180, he states that “the Lunyu contains twenty-two hundred lexical items.” I think this means separate characters (of which it contains 1,351, not 2,200). Generally slips like these occur in the context of excellent, thought-provoking, broader contexts (here how to define facility in the classical language) in which Smith is warming up to his main, well-grounded themes (in this case, the Yijing and its symbolic values, which form the bulk of the chapter on language and symbolic reference). Only very occasionally does Smith whet the appetite but fail to deliver. One example occurs on page ix, when he states that “archaeological discoveries have enhanced our understanding of the ways that the Manchus established and ruled their vast empire.” Intrigued by this, I immediately searched in the main text for Manchu archaeological discoveries but could find none. Nor does archaeology occur in the index.

Overall, Smith's take (or retake) on China's cultural heritage sparkles in a unique way that many students may find more attractive and thought-provoking than somewhat more conventional overviews such as William Rowe's China's Last Empire: The Great Qing, Evelyn Rawski's The Last Emperors, or Pei Huang's Reorienting the Manchus, all of which in their different ways concentrate on political history.Footnote ²