Yangzhou was a central place within the Qing Empire. Situated strategically along the Grand Canal, the city served as a vital transportation node between north and south China. The region's salt flats generated enormous profits for the imperial salt monopoly and for the Huizhou merchants, resident in Yangzhou, who largely ran the enterprise. The city functioned as a nexus between the court in Beijing and elite networks in the economic and cultural heartland of Jiangnan, becoming a key locus of imperial patronage. Qing Yangzhou was, in the words of Antonia Finnane, a place of cosmopolitan “mondernity” (punning off the French “monde”) before the advent of the modern age. Yangzhou's centrality under the Qing is even more spectacular given its history of destruction. The city arose phoenix-like from the ashes of the wars of Qing conquest in the mid-seventeenth century only to suffer equally devastating ruin in the mid-1800s during the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864). The culture of Yangzhou during the centuries bounded by these crises becomes the main subject of the essays in Lifestyle and Entertainment in Yangzhou, edited by Lucie Olivová and Vibeke Børdahl.

Lifestyle and Entertainment, the first conference volume exclusively devoted to the study of Yangzhou, features eighteen essays by contributors from the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Many of the renowned experts on Yangzhou are among them, including co-editor Børdahl, noted for her exhaustive research on Yangzhou storytelling. The essays are grouped into four categories: City of Sights; Books and Literature; Performance and Entertainment; and The Yangzhou School of Painting. Certain recurring themes thread through many of the essays: the importance of court patronage to eighteenth-century Yangzhou culture; Yangzhou as a city of sojourners, especially the prominent Huizhou salt merchants; the decline of the city in the second half of the nineteenth century; and comparison—explicit or not—between Yangzhou and Shanghai.

While all the essays in the volume are informative, some move beyond empirical description to address questions of larger significance. J.S. Edgren's essay on the book culture of Yangzhou demonstrates important differences between printing in Yangzhou and in the major cities of Jiangnan. In contrast to Jiangnan, which boasted many commercial houses, Yangzhou publishing was dominated by familial printing and government-sponsored projects, such as the Yangzhou poetry office. State patronage was a double-edged sword, bringing prestige and resources while also dampening local cultural initiative. But while state presence loomed large in Qing Yangzhou, the piece by Tobie Meyer-Fong shows that literati culture was not entirely circumscribed by the state. Meyer-Fong explores the activism of local men of letters in the aftermath of the Taipings, showing that their activities and writings, never fully divorced from state-sanctioned modes of meaning and legitimacy, nevertheless played a critical role in reconstructing and recollecting the devastated city. Ginger Cheng-chi Hsü's chapter on the frontier-themed paintings of the artist Hua Yan (1682–1756) expands our understanding of local-state relations further by revealing that the expansion of the Qing territorial map, the experience of official exile, literati travel practices, and merchant patronage of artists in Yangzhou all played a role in generating a new cultural imaginary in which the non-Han frontiersman and his camel became stock iconography for commercial painting. Through her exposition of the appeal of such exotica to the art market, she captures the extent to which Yangzhou was tied not only to the court in Beijing but also to the larger multiethnic empire.

Like most conference volumes, Lifestyle and Entertainment is hard pressed to offer a consistent approach to its subject. A more expansive introduction elucidating common themes and analyzing the contributors’ varying methodologies and contributions would have provided greater coherence. Some essays overplay the distinction between Huizhou sojourners and Yangzhou natives. While the perception of Huizhou men as outsiders surely was prevalent, many of the Huizhou salt merchants had lived for generations in Yangzhou. The sons of these Huizhou men often had Yangzhou mothers. And thus, much as Huizhou merchants were caricatured as other—whether in commonplace jottings or in regional tales—in reality this important constituency of Yangzhou was highly integrated into the local community. Indeed, it was likely the very proximity of “sojourner” and “native” that bred suspicion, jealousy, and the desire of some to differentiate. For those essays that trace the discussion of Yangzhou into the present, more attention to national-level politics might have been warranted. Yangzhou's urban renewal in the 1990s surely had something to do with the rise to political preeminence of her native son, Jiang Zemin. That, too, may have something to do with the fact that—as the back-cover blurb notes—Yangzhou is under consideration for UNESCO world heritage site status.

On the whole, though, Yangzhou must be the envy of other locales vying for such status, for how many of them can boast of a conference volume dedicated to the history and culture of a once-central and now middling-level city?