Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895-1937

Combining social, political, and cultural history, this book examines the contestation over space, history, and power in the late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction of the ancient capital of Suzhou as a modern city. Located fifty miles west of Shanghai, Suzhou has been celebrated throughout Asia as a cynosure of Chinese urbanity and economic plenty for a thousand years. With the city's 1895 opening as a treaty port, businessmen and state officials began to draw on Western urban planning in order to bolster Chinese political and economic power against Japanese encroachment. As a result, both Suzhou as a whole and individual components of the cityscape developed new significance according to a calculus of commerce and nationalism. Japanese monks and travelers, Chinese officials, local people, and others competed to claim Suzhou's streets, state institutions, historic monuments, and temples, and thereby to define the course of Suzhou's and greater China's modernity.

Table of Contents:
Contents Acknowledgements xi-xiv Historical Eras Mentioned in Text Introduction 1-28 Part I: Roads to Modernity Chapter 1: Industry and Vice Along the Horse-Road 29-108 Chapter 2: Arteries and Veins to Nourish the Urban Body 109-157 Part II: In "Tradition's" Temple, the Prefectural Confucian Temple Chapter 3: Renovating the Structures of Academic Ritual and Learning 158-207 Chapter 4: The Building of Modern Chinese Culture 208-268 Part III: Preserving National Essence Chapter 5: A Tocsin Sounds at Hanshan Temple 269-320 Chapter 6: Revaluing National Treasures in the Urban Landscape 321-377 Conclusion and Epilogue, Preservation and Industrial Development in the "Peaceful Backyard of Chinese Culture" 378-392 Selected Bibliography 393-434

About the Author :
Peter J. Carroll is Assistant Professor of History at Northwestern University.

Review :
"Carroll's rigorsly researched and cogently argued study... is a model of how to combine both spatial and historical analyses. Through detailed examinations of urban planning, historical preservation, and architectural history, Carroll shows how seemingly abstract ideas about national identity and modern life took concrete form in Suzhou and linked the city to the nation and the world beyond." - International Journal of Asian Studies "Carroll's book covers a lot of ground in a very sophisticated way. The case study approach makes for a very engaging read, and also leaves plenty of room for other work on Suzhou's modern transition... The questions Carroll raises are important, the documentation he cites in answering them is rich, and his writing is generally clear and graceful." - Journal of Chinese Studies "In his exploration of the impact of modernity in Suzhou, Carroll integrates the cultural historian's interest in symbolic space with the social and economic historian's more familiar concerns about community and class. The result is an imaginative cook that... may well help reshape the writing of modern Chinese history." - New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies "In this engrossing cultural history, Peter Carroll has taken on quite a few sacred cows from venerable historians who imagined an eternal Suzhou to the founder of Chinese architectural history. Other scholars have critiqued nationalistic history and Eur "This marvelously rich book describes the ways in which ideas of "tradition" and "modernity" are mapped onto symbolic spaces, such as historical sites (whose presence and preservation are re-imagined as essential to a modern republic) and new roads (inten