| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Susan Naquin. Peking: Temples and City Life, 1400–1900. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2000. Pp. xxxiv, 816. $80.00.

The subtitle of this book indicates its distinctive method: Susan Naquin shows how the temples in and around imperial Beijing helped to define urban life, in sacred aspects and secular, as nodes of social action, venues for public activities, and channels for the court's interaction with its subjects. Through the lens of Chinese religion in its social context, she projects a richly detailed history of imperial Beijing. 1

With temples as the focus, here is a five-century urban history that reveals the full range of political and cultural factors that defined the capital: the fifteenth-century founding of the city by the Ming usurper Yongle; the wrenching transition after the Manchu conquest, when all Chinese were forced to move to what became an "outer" city south of the Ming wall; the gradual emergence of a distinctive Peking self-awareness; the evolving physical structure of the city and its administration; and the changing relationship between the imperial city and its concentric surroundings. . . .

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