Overview

This masterful blend of history and urban storytelling brings to life the people and politics that shaped a single neighborhood in a Manchurian city across several centuries. What can one neighborhood reveal about the making of a modern nation? The Neighborhood deciphers the unexpected significance of Xita, a half-square-mile quarter in Shenyang, in Northeast China. As the historian Nianshen Song shows, over nearly four centuries, Xita has been shaped and reshaped by empire, war, migration, and urban transformation. Its history almost completely mirrors China's metamorphosis from a multiethnic Eurasian empire to a post-industrial society. Song begins with Xita's origins as a Qing-era Tibetan Buddhist center, following the lives of Mongol lamas and their imperial patrons. He tracks the neighborhood through the tumultuous twentieth century, when competing Russian and Japanese railway empires fueled its industrial growth, and Japanese colonizers turned it into a showcase for their imperial ambitions. Later, Xita became a vital enclave for Korea's diaspora before emerging in the post-Mao era as a neon-lit hub of commerce and entertainment. A thoroughly researched microhistory, The Neighborhood reveals how global forces play out in everyday spaces. By studying the emperors, warlords, merchants, laborers, and migrants who shaped Xita, Song presents a captivating perspective on understanding China's past—not from the top down, but through the streets and people who lived it.

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9780226843308

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Reviews

“By unfolding the past of one small corner of a city in the PRC’s northeast, this remarkable book illuminates the very nature of China as fluid, rather than contained by conventional boundaries. This is microhistory at its best—deeply researched, with compelling personal stories, sophisticated analysis, and a sweeping chronology—all anchored in an unassuming place made vibrant and meaningful by Song’s writing.” * Ruth Rogaski, author of Knowing Manchuria * “The Neighborhood tells the story of Xita and its iconic West Stupa over centuries and generations. Rejecting traditional periodization and national frameworks, Song weaves an insightful and eye-opening history of Xita through religious networks, dynastic conflict, interimperial rivalries, and transnational mobilities.” * Kate McDonald, author of Placing Empire *

Author Information

Nianshen Song is professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, China. He is the author of Making Borders in Modern East Asia: The Tumen River Demarcation, 1881–1919.

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