This volume originated from an international conference held at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design in 2003. In the early twentieth century, approximately fifty Chinese students enrolled in universities in the United States to study architecture. Several attended University of Pennsylvania, where, in 1903, Paul Philippe Cret (1876–1945) established his version of Beaux-Arts architectural pedagogy. Beaux-Arts stone architecture was primarily suitable for large public structures and large-scale city planning. The challenges for Chinese architects returning home were how to introduce and promote their Beaux-Arts architectural education and combine their newly-learned design skills with appropriate elements of their inherited, timber-framed architecture. This book records their achievements and the diverse cultural and political influences affecting their practice in China.

After an Introduction by Jeffrey Cody, fifteen essays are arranged in three parts, with an introduction by Cody for each section. In the first part, “Divergence to Convergence,” Nancy Steinhardt reviews the salient features of traditional Chinese architecture and David Van Zanten recounts the pedagogical practices of Beaux-Arts training advocated by Cret. In part two, “Convergence to Influence,” Tony Atkin sketches the physical and historical setting of Philadelphia, where Chinese students could see actual Beaux-Arts buildings and city planning; he also recalls the successes of the Chinese students in their studies at Penn. Gu Daqing discerns three phases in the development of Beaux-Arts training in China: from 1927 until the early 1950s, an introductory period; from early 1950s to early 1980s when Beaux-Arts training became the model; and post-1980s, when, although architects have turned to other ideas, the Beaux-Arts “tradition may actually be engrained in the thinking of architects in subtle ways” (p. 73). K. Sizheng Fan discusses the dependence of the Chinese Communists upon the Soviet Union to help solve many of their social, economic, and other problems, including fashioning the “correct” style of architecture as embodied in new government buildings (pointing out that Soviet architecture itself was based on older Beaux-Arts styles). Fu Chao-Ching investigates Beaux-Arts teaching and practice in Taiwan, first by Japanese architects, then by Chinese architects who moved there with the Nationalist government in 1949.

Part three, “Influence to Paradigm,” highlights the careers of Beaux-Arts architects in China. It is sub-divided into three sections. In the first sub-section, Xing Ruan appraises the career of Yang Tingbao (1901–82) from his days at Penn to his Dahua Cinema in Nanjing (1935) and his Peace Hotel in Beijing (1951–53). Ruan's insightful analysis of the Peace Hotel plans reveals Yang's inventive combination of traditional Chinese garden elements and Beaux-Arts city-planning design principles. Seng Kuan evaluates Beaux-Arts ideals, especially for city planning, used by Dong Dayou (1899–1973) in his arrangement of monumental buildings in the Greater Shanghai Civic Center (1929–37). Zhao Chen's chapter is on Liang Sicheng (1901–72), noted in the West for his studies of traditional Chinese architecture. Zhao explores some of Liang's legacy, but proposes that Liang misunderstood the meaning of certain Western architectural terms.

In the second sub-section, Jeffrey Cody exposes the working relationships between Chinese and non-Chinese architects employed in Western firms in the United States and China, from tolerance to hostility to friendship and appreciation. Rudolf G. Wagner details the “ritual turmoil” (p. 226) that erupted upon the death of Sun Yat-sen in 1925 and the ensuing struggles about how he was to be memorialized. Wagner explains how Sun's ideas are reflected and symbolized in his mausoleum in Nanjing, designed by Lü Yanzhi (1894–1929). Delin Lai sets the construction of the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Auditorium in Guangzhou (1926–31; also designed by Lü Yanzhi) within historical and political contexts. Until 1959 the largest auditorium in China, the Memorial Auditorium was built in response to the need for a public meeting place “to commemorate Sun and disseminate his thought” (p. 280). In the third sub-section, Yung Ho Chang compares two 1959 architectural monuments flanking Tiananmen Square: the Great Hall of the People, whose design team was led by Zhang Bo (1911–99), and the Revolution and History Museum of China, designed by Zhang Kaiji (1912–2006), and their ultimate impact on contemporary Chinese architecture.

The last two essays in part three turn to broader views of the city proper. Peter Carroll reviews the Chinese appropriation of Beaux-Arts city planning for four Republican-era projects for civic centers in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Nanjing, and Suzhou. Zhang Jie exposes the largely negative consequences (after the urban reforms of 1978) of growth in urban population and economic prosperity on China's expanding urban landscape and subsequent urban sprawl. In his Afterword, Joseph Rykwert muses on the cultural effects of the Western predilection for arranging things in groups of “four” and the Chinese preference for categorizing things in units of “five.”

Overall, the essays are richly informative and well-illustrated. This volume is a welcome contribution to our understanding of architectural development in twentieth-century China.