This is a volume of great importance. The essays contained here set out an important agenda for a new approach to modern Chinese history: proper attention to the impact of the visual. Of course, the “visual turn” has been an important element of social and cultural history for some decades. The concept of the “gaze” and its significance in the construction of power relationships has been part of the way in which visual culture has been theorized and moved beyond the realm of the aesthetic. The work of scholars such as Craig Clunas has been important in bringing the concept of the “scopic regime” to the examination of the image in the Chinese world. Yet up to now, historians (as opposed to art historians) have been more reluctant to draw upon the visual as a tool for the interpretation of modern China. Perhaps the daunting array of textual materials that remain to be studied have distracted attention from the value of the image. Yet, as this set of essays shows, the visual turn has the potential to be highly productive in interpreting the turbulent experience of modern China.

In Christian Henriot and Wen-hsin Yeh, the volume has two editors who have done pioneering work in bringing the visual to the fore in the reading of modern Chinese history; Henriot has been lead investigator for “Virtual Shanghai,” a major online resource that has provided one of the richest repositories of photographs of pre-1949 Shanghai. In the introduction, the two of them make a powerful case, essentially a manifesto, that there should be a “more systematic and thorough involvement, especially among historians, to tackle the issues of visual representation and visual documents in Chinese history.” (p. xiv) Yet they are also rightly cautious about overly simplistic or naïve interpretations of history: images can hide as much as they conceal.

This volume contains eleven substantial essays: all are richly-sourced and thoughtful, and rather than try and give an inadequate sketch of each, I will concentrate on the wider points that they try to make. The first three essays, showcasing essays by Henriot, Robert Bickers and Jérôme Bourgon, act as three case studies on what the visual can (and cannot) reveal. The subjects of the gaze in their case studies vary greatly, from Shanghai street peddlers to British settlers to execution scenes, all of them exposed in photographs. The photograph, of course, has a particularly ambiguous status, because it gives the impression of being “true” – and yet, the posing of the image as well as the choice of what is photographed makes the image highly constructed. Photography has its politics – Bourgon notes the way in which a modernizing Chinese elite was discomfited by photographs of “traditional” punishments such as execution by sword. (One might also note also that retouched photography was the means by which the Dowager Empress Cixi chose to reconstitute her image at around the same time). This appearance of “authenticity” complements nicely the next section of essays by Virgil Ho and Joan Judge, which examine drawings as a means of penetrating a restricted area: the social life of the home. As women came into the public sphere, so their images, particularly in the new treaty port press, also became part of the visual public sphere. Overall, these essays make a powerful case for a modern social history of China read through images (photographic and drawn).

The next section leads naturally to the topic of propaganda. An intriguing and suggestive set of connections is made between the pre- and post-1949 world. Barbara Mittler's monumental essay (which is actually a short monograph) gives one of the most comprehensive accounts of advertising in the Republican press available in English today, and is accompanied by a shorter but very suggestive “prequel” on the late Qing by Jen-shu Wu and Ling-Ling Lien. Its placement with essays on the Mao cult by Stefan Landsberger and Pang Laikwan therefore force thoughts about the similarities as well as differences with the widespread use of the Maoist cult of personality in the later twentieth century. The topic of propaganda also leads naturally to the subject of film, and here, there are two essays (by Poshek Fu and by Paul Pickowicz and Yap Soo Ei) which concentrate on movies based on the works of the famed Shanghai writer Zhang Ailing. The use of film to interpret a period which is still hugely underserved by historians (the cultural history of the Civil War era) make this section an important and suggestive one.

This then, is a major, agenda-setting piece of work and will no doubt generate debate for years to come. It is a pleasure to report one other fact: as befits a book on visual culture, there are numerous images reproduced within the book. All are reproduced with great fidelity, the black and white images in the text itself, and the colour ones as plates at the back. This too, is a model of how future work of this sort should be presented.