This exquisitely argued and exhaustively researched book on the role that odors have played in modern Chinese society and politics breaks new ground in sensory studies of Asia. Huang brings important insights to a field dominated by studies of Europe and North America in six chapters that span the eighteenth through the late twentieth century. As our most ancient sense, our ability to smell is exquisitely attuned and directly tied to centers of the brain that process memory and emotions, the amygdala and the hippocampus. Scents can therefore trigger pre-cognitive and deeply emotional responses, as well as anchor memories. At the level of society, scents are frequently used to define and exclude group members. These features make smells extremely complex and polysemous. Huang grants equal importance to the biological and cultural aspects of odors to conceive of scent as the “stranger” figure that takes on multiple meanings, overcomes all boundaries even as they shift about, and triggers a binary like/dislike response in people (5–13, 18).

To tame this protean subject, Huang constructs a sophisticated analytical framework of what she calls “four ‘grammatical’ principles”: the sense of smell is “ambiguous and individualized” and thus resists definitive labels; it has “a powerful discriminating capacity” and is often used to define social and political enemies; its remarkable plasticity “enables diverse forms of power to mobilize or even manipulate olfaction to internalize new norms, stereotypes, or discrimination”; and it has a “penetrating nature” that makes it “inherently trans-corporeal.” Stacking these four principles leads to the conclusion that “smell is ambivalence par excellence” (10–11). Huang’s interpretation of smell through the figure of the stranger connects with all four grammatical principles: the stranger is an ambiguous shapeshifter who motivates social exclusivity and refuses to respect physical boundaries between people. To construct this capacious analytical model, Huang draws from social theorists Georg Simmel and Zygmunt Bauman, Nobel prize-winning scientists Richard Axel and Linda Buck, and smell studies scholars Huan Hsu and Paolo Santangelo, among others.

Chapter 1 explores the many uses and meanings of smell in Cao Xueqin’s famous literary masterpiece, The Dream of the Red Chamber (Hongloumeng 紅樓夢). Huang’s analysis of this highly vaunted and thoroughly examined eighteenth-century work at once subjects it to a refreshingly insightful critique through olfactory studies and establishes a pre-contact understanding of smell’s many functions in late imperial China. She shows that this redolent world was replete with scents from freshly cut flowers, bottles of flower essence, incense, aromatic beaded bracelets, and a plethora of scented cosmetics crafted in the home, each of which carried potent meanings. Odor was an indelible sign of morality, and certain smells indicated sexual immoderation, déclassé bodies, and religious impurity, while another suite of scents marked their opposites. In religious rituals, odor was a means of communicating between the living and the dead. Above all, Huang argues that the novel functioned as an allegory of purity and contamination and therefore presaged the olfactory revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Reading the entire novel through smell, Huang notes that the Jia clan’s downfall is signaled by the intrusion of bad odors when their lower-class distant relative Grannie Liu pays a visit (58–61). She therefore reads the novel as an allegory of purity on the one hand, signaled by the effusion of pleasant aromas throughout the story, and on the other of contamination that occurs when this world is punctured by bad smells. This sets up the entire book for Huang’s exploration of the myriad changes in Chinese society, culture and politics upon contact with another olfactory universe.

Chapter 2, “China Stinks,” explores how China’s entry into olfactory modernity began with a new discourse on the country’s horrible and offensive odors. Huang astutely avoids making claims of actual filth and instead pinpoints seismic shifts in olfactory sensibility that other smell studies scholars, chief among them Alain Corbin, have analyzed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and North America. Based on detailed analysis of over one hundred foreign travelogues, this chapter explores what Huang calls the unfolding “orientalist structure of feeling” that was produced, bit by bit, in thousands of encounters between Chinese people and Euro-American foreigners. She takes methodological inspiration from historian Melanie Kiechle, who notes in The Smell Detectives that, “moments when people felt obligated to translate their olfactory experience into words deserve careful attention” (quoted on p. 66). This method renders written texts a reliable source for the historian of volatile organic compounds and their reception in the senses of past people. Invoking her analysis of odor as the boundary-piercing stranger, Huang argues that foreign sojourners manufactured a discourse of impure and revolting scents in China as a coping strategy to manage their own feelings of disquiet at encountering what was to them a distinctly foreign place (esp. 65–66).

Chapters 3 (“Deodorizing China”) and 4 (“Re-perfuming China”) together advance a core argument and significant contribution to the field: Huang’s insight that “[t]he human sensorium is … a crucial site of contest for sociopolitical forces” (142). Powerful foreigners’ assertion that “China stinks” rendered inevitable and obligatory the project of ridding the country and its citizens of odors deemed offensive. This in turn required that stench be located, and stagnant water invariably housed the contemptible stranger-as-enemy. In Chapter 3, Huang analyzes water-policing projects under three regimes in her native city of Shanghai—foreigners in the International Settlement from the 1850s to the 1890s, reformist Chinese elites in the native city from the late Qing through the early Republic, and Communist cadres in the 1950s—to show that all shared an obsession with bad odors as a “sociopolitical arch-enemy.” These projects in China’s olfactory revolution introduced sanitary engineering to Shanghai and rearranged the city’s social strata and physical spaces according to new hierarchies pegged to olfaction, all while producing a narrative of equality that obfuscated a profound unevenness that even socialism failed to level. The “deodorized” city now had room for the pleasant odors of perfumes, soaps, and cosmetics, enhanced with imported scents and volatile compounds produced in the chemistry lab. These mass-produced and heavily advertised consumer goods, Huang shows in Chapter 4, advanced the mission “to tune neurons to accept strangers as friends” (144). This stage in the olfactory revolution naturalized the scents of a capitalist economy and fostered a belief that one could purchase good smells, as well as the privileges and powers they afford.

Chapter 5 (“The Bouquet of Eros”) offers a sensory reading of canonical pieces of May Fourth era literature: 1920s works by members of the Creation Society; Lu Xun’s 1924 short story “Soap”; and Mao Dun’s late 1920s works. By foregrounding the evocation of libidinous odors in this literature, Huang shows how expression of an animalistic sexuality animated the May Fourth project of liberating the self from Confucian patriarchy. She follows this in Chapter 6, “The Politics of Smell,” with analysis of Mao Zedong’s astute exploitation of olfactory alterity to inform his “revolt of the pungent peasants against the perfumed landlords” (221). Huang argues that Mao consciously worked against the re-perfuming of modern China with the much-vaunted odors of mass-produced consumer goods, choosing instead to invoke stenches with copious references to excrement and “dog farts” (goupi) in his poetry and propaganda. These two chapters in Part Three, “A Whiff of Alterity,” show how the evocation of heterodox odors powerfully unseats established norms and can therefore be an indispensable tool for social change.

Replete with adept theorization, multi-layered arguments laid out in clear prose, and inspiring new interpretations of well-worn sources, Scents of China is sure to be a defining work. After learning from Huang just how central the nose was to China’s modernity, readers will never understand modern China in the same way. My sole disappointment with the book is that its analysis of the Republican era ends in 1927 and does not consider what either Japanese occupiers or the Nationalist government did throughout the war to advance the olfactory revolution. How, for example, did olfaction figure in Japanese soldiers’ anti-Chinese sentiment?. This small quibble aside, Scents of China charts a clear path for further studies in sensory history.