| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Antonia Finnane . Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550–1850. (Harvard East Asia Monographs, number 236.) Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center. 2004. Pp. xix, 453. $49.50.
In the sixteenth century, Yangzhou became a key node in salt supply and distribution across the richest parts of the Chinese Empire. In the eighteenth century, this city near the conjunction of the Yangzi River and the Grand Canal was at its height of wealth and glory, despite the devastation it had famously suffered at the hands of the conquering Manchus in 1645. In the nineteenth century, Yangzhou deteriorated along with the Qing Empire, leaving twentieth-century literati sojourners from Shanghai—the new cultural capital—to mourn and derive lessons from the sad fate of what was once a dreamland.	1
This story of rise and fall gives structure to Antonia Finnane's history of Yangzhou, but the book's great contribution lies in the clarity and depth of its analysis of the factors that shaped the eighteenth-century city and made it so vulnerable to dynastic decline. As Finnane points out, Yangzhou was not at all a typical Chinese imperial city. In its relations with its hinterland, she suggests, Qing Yangzhou may have been more similar to such late medieval and early modern commercial centers as Venice and Amsterdam than it was to nearby Suzhou.	. . .

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