Between Heaven and Modernity: Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895-1937 9781503625792

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Between Heaven and Modernity Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895–1937

peter j. carroll

Between Heaven and Modernity Reconstructing Suzhou, 1895–1937

stanford university press Stanford, California 2006

Stanford University Press Stanford, California  C 2006 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Carroll, Peter J., 1966– Between heaven and modernity : reconstructing Suzhou, 1895–1937 / Peter J. Carroll. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8047-5359-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Suzhou (Jiangsu Sheng, China)—Economic conditions— 19th century. 2. Suzhou (Jiangsu Sheng, China)—Economic conditions—20th century. 3. Suzhou (Jiangsu Sheng, China)— Social conditions—19th century. 4. Suzhou (Jiangsu Sheng, China)—Social conditions—20th century. 5. Suzhou (Jiangsu Sheng, China)—History—19th century. 6. Suzhou (Jiangsu Sheng, China)—History—20th century. I. Title. hc428.s8c37 2006 330.951 136—dc22 2005031345 Printed in the United States of America Original Printing 2006 Last figure below indicates year of this printing: 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Typeset at TechBooks, New Delhi, in 10/12.5 Minion

This book is dedicated to the memory of k e n g e r b e r and m i c h a e l g . p o w e l l boon companions in the exploration of favorite cities: New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, medieval Lyon, and late Qing and Republican-era Suzhou

Contents

Figures Acknowledgements Historical Eras and Abbreviations Introduction Part One: Roads to Modernity

ix xi xv 1 21

1 Industry and Vice along the Horse-Road

23

2 Arteries and Veins to Nourish the Urban Body

71

Part Two: In “Tradition’s” Temple, the Prefectural Confucian Temple

99

3 Renovating the Structures of Academic Ritual and Learning

101

4 The Building of Modern Chinese Culture

132

Part Three: Preserving National Essence

171

5 A Tocsin Sounds at Hanshan Temple

173

6 Revaluing National Treasures in the Urban Landscape

205

Conclusion and Epilogue: Preservation and Industrial Development in the “Peaceful Backyard of Chinese Culture”

241

viii / Contents

Reference Matter Notes Selected Bibliography Index

251 253 293 317

Figures

1. Map of Suzhou, 1933

2

2. Pingjiangtu stele: Map of Song dynasty Suzhou, 1229 ce

12

3. U.S. Air Force aerial reconnaissance photo of Suzhou, 1945

13

4. City canal and bridge outside Pan Gate, ca. 1910

48

5. “Seductive Countenance Induces Lust,” Summer 1897

54

6. Flourishing commercial area along the horse-road outside Chang Gate, ca. 1910

65

7. Horse-road commercial district in 1930

69

8. Street-side foods stands, late Qing

86

9. Commercial celebration at Jin Gate in 1934

94

10. Map of the Prefectural Confucian Temple

102

11. Suzhou Prefectural Confucian Temple Western Ceremonial Arch, ca. 1910

103

12. Front of the Pavilion of Great Achievement, ca. 1910

103

13. Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall during the 1930s

156

14. Pavilion of Great Achievement

165

15. Diagram by Liang Sicheng representing Qing Rules for Structural Carpentry

166

16. Diagram by Liang Sicheng illustrating the evolution of the Chinese “Order”

167

x / Figures

17. Sedan chairs awaiting visitors to Hanshan Temple, ca. 1910

189

18. Hanshan Temple during the 1930s

197

19. Monks ringing the Hanshan Temple bell, ca. 1993

197

20. Graves of Sun Jian and Sun Ce

198

21. Guanqian street performance in front of Xuanmiao guan, early 1890s

225

22. Market in front of the Xuanmiao guan, ca. 1910

226

23. Daoguang era (1821–50) map of Xuanmiao guan

228

24. Guanqian Street, 1920s

229

25. Guanqian Street, 1931–7

232

26. Model of shop complex being built at Xuanmiao guan, July 1931

233

Acknowledgments

Since this book stems from my doctoral dissertation, I would first like to thank my Ph.D. advisor, Jonathan Spence. More than anyone else, he has helped develop and sustain my appreciation for the rigor and play of humanist scholarship. I also thank my other main teachers at Yale, Beatrice Bartlett, Valerie Hansen, and Emily Honig, for the strength of their teaching, scholarship, and friendship. My sojourn in New Haven, like my overall interest in China, is the product of whimsy: as a college freshman, I took up the advice of a flyer I received by campus mail and enrolled in Chinese class. I both thank and blame Ted Tao-chung Yao for stuffing the mailboxes in an attempt to drum up students. I remain grateful to Jerry Dennerline, Amrita Basu, Linda Lewis, Sam Morse, Robert Thurman, Helen von Schmidt, and my other teachers at Amherst College for extending me an invitation to view the world differently. This book relies on unique materials preserved in archival and library collections in Suzhou, Nanjing, Beijing, and Shanghai. In particular, I would like to thank Lin Zhilin and the entire staff of the Suzhou Municipal Archives, Chen Wei the indefatigable steward of Republican-era publications at the Suzhou Municipal Library, Wu Qin at the Suzhou Museum, and Mr. Tang at the Suzhou University Library. Many thanks also to Professor Wang Guoping, Suzhou University, and Xu Jinfang, who have graciously facilitated my research trips to Suzhou and leavened them with camaraderie. I would also like to thank the dedicated staff at the Nanjing Library, the No. 1 and No. 2 National Archives of China, the National Library of China, and the Shanghai Library. Their scrupulous concern and appreciation for the fragile written remnants of China’s late Qing and Republican eras make historical research both possible and compelling.

xii / Acknowledgments

In the United States, I have had the good fortune to work in the libraries at Yale, Northwestern, Columbia, and Stanford universities, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, the New York Public Library, and the Library of Congress. I also benefited from work carried out in Taiwan at the Academia Sinica, the National Palace Museum, and the National Central Library. I thank the librarians and staff at these institutions for their professionalism and scholarly expertise; these constitute a bulwark of academic life. I am especially grateful to Harriet Lightman and Diane Perushek, now University Librarian at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, for supporting the purchase of essential research materials for the Northwestern collection. Pross Gifford and company at the Library of Congress’s John W. Kluge Center, and Mi Chu Wiens and Lily Kecskes of the LOC Chinese Section made my time in Washington both productive and enjoyable. I am also happy to acknowledge my debt to many scholars in Taiwan, especially Chuang Chi-fa, Chen San-ching, Hsu Hung, Li Hsiao-t’i, my Taida xuezhang: Ch’iu P’eng-sheng, Wang Hung-t’ai, and Wu Jenshu, and my Yelu xuejie Wang Cheng-hua. I greatly benefited from a post-doc with the Project on Cities and Urban Knowledges at NYU’s International Center for Advanced Studies. Tom Bender, Alev Cinar, Jordana Dym, Camilla Fojas, Beng-lan Goh, Harry Harootunian, Abidin Kusno, Michael Peter Smith, and Gwendolyn Wright, among others, generated a milieu of captivating dialogue. Yeh Wen-hsin, Fred Wakeman, Steve West, Liu Xin, Robert Ashmore, and Alan Pred and the students in his social geography graduate seminar quickened my reframing of this project during a subsequent post-doc year at the Center for Chinese Studies, UC Berkeley. Conference, workshop, and seminar discussions at Bilkent University, the 2000 and 2002 AAS meetings, National Jinan International University, and other places were essential to my elaboration of this project. I thank Ronald Knapp, James Watson, Louise De Vito, and all other respondents and participants for their comments. I am grateful for the generous financial assistance of Yale’s Council on East Asian Studies and Council on International and Area Studies, the Pacific Cultural Foundation, the ACLS, the Luce Foundation, and the Fulbright Board, which awarded me a Junior Fulbright grant to Taiwan and a Fulbright Research grant to China. Many thanks to Wu Jingji and the Foundation for Scholarly Exchange, Taibei, and David Adams and everyone at CIEE in Washington, DC, and Beijing, as well as Li Yihai, Li Li, Xiong Yuezhi, Zhou Wu, and the other scholars and staff at the Shanghai Academy of Social Science. I am delighted to acknowledge the aid of many friends and colleagues, whose interventions helped sustain me during the research, writing, and mastication of this book: Joel Allen, James Carter, Ann-ping Chin, Mei Chin, David Erikson,

Acknowledgments / xiii

Khaled Fahmy, Ben Frommer, Michael Hickman and Eddy Zheng, Talbot Imlay, Huri Islamoglu, Yeewan Koon, Lai Delin, the late Michael G. Powell, Kristin Mulready Stone, and Paola Zamperini. Heartfelt thanks to Muriel Bell, Kirsten Oster, and John Feneron at Stanford University Press. Ruth Rogaski and Tobie Meyer-Fong reviewed the manuscript for the press; their perceptive comments helped me craft a better book. Henry Binford, Mark Bradley, Bonnie Cheng, Doris Garraway, Carina Johnson, Sarah Maza, and Moriguchi Chiaki kindly commented on various iterations of the entire manuscript or particular chapters. Special thanks to Melissa Macauley and Laura Hein for their successive critical readings. Ezra Getzler analyzed and proofread the text with exacting care. Earlier versions of Chapters 1 and 6 were first published as “‘Huangliang jingse’: wan Qing Suzhou xiandaihua jiedao de pushe yu xiandai dushi jihua de nayong daolu wei zhimin xiandaihua zhi jiben sheshi” (‘Rather desolate scenes’: creating the modern street and the appropriation of urbanism in late Qing Suzhou), in Zhongguo de chengshi shenghuo (Chinese urban life), edited by Li Xiaoti (Taibei: Lianjing, 2005), 497–553; and “The Local Articulation of Nationality: the role of historicity and ‘National Essence’ in Republican China’s urban modernity,” in City and Nation: Rethinking Place and Identity, edited by Michael Peter Smith and Thomas Bender, Volume 7 of Comparative Urban and Community Research (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001), 97–135. I thank the publishers for permission to reuse this material. I am as grateful for the intellectual and personal generosity of advisors, colleagues, and friends, as I am humbled by it. I have not always heeded their suggestions, yet I hope that I have accorded their insights some modicum of justice. Needless to say, any remaining errors or shortcomings are my own. I am relieved to be able to finally inform my parents, James and Barbara Carroll, and my brother, Brian, that “my paper” is truly done. This book is dedicated to the memory of two dear friends who died far too young.

Historical Eras and Abbreviations

Historical Eras Mentioned in Text: Warring States Period 481–221 BCE Tang Dynasty, 618–907 CE Northern Song Dynasty, 960–1126 Southern Song Dynasty, 1127–1276 Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644 Qing Dynasty, 1644–1911 Republic, 1912–49 People’s Republic of China, 1949–present Abbreviations for Reign Titles of Qing Emperors used in text for Qing period dates, which are given in terms of the Chinese lunar calendar, followed by Gregorian calendar equivalents in parentheses: Ex., GX34.12.27 refers to the twenty-seventh day of the twelfth month of the thirty-fourth year of the Guangxu reign, that is, January 18, 1909 CE of the Gregorian Calendar. Because the Republic adopted the Gregorian calendar, dates from the Republican period are given in terms of the Gregorian calendar in the same Day-Month-Year format as the preceding example. If a Republican document gives the lunar calendar date or it is unclear as to which calendar is being used, the date is given in the same Year.Month.Day format as for Qing period dates. Republican dates in which the year was originally listed as “1st, 2nd, 3rd . . . Year of the Republic” or according to the sixty-year Celestial Stem-Terrestrial Branch Cycle are given in terms of the equivalent Common Era (CE) year. SZ: Shunzhi 1644–61 KX: Kangxi 1662–1722 YZ: Yongzheng 1723–35

xvi / Historical Eras and Abbreviations

QL: Qianlong 1736–95 (This emperor continued to rule for three abdication years, 1796–9). JQ: Jiaqing 1796–1820 DG: Daoguang 1821–50 XF: Xianfeng 1851–61 TZ: Tongzhi 1862–74 GX: Guangxu 1875–1908 XT: Xuantong 1909–12

Shang you tiantang, xia you Su Hang. Above is Heaven, Below are Suzhou and Hangzhou. —Popular maxim dating from the Southern Song dynasty.

“Within cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desire and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.” “I have neither desires nor fears,” the Khan declared, “and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.” “Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer that it gives to a question of yours.” —Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1974

To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world—and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything that we have, everything we know, everything we are. Modern environments and experiences cut across all boundaries of geography and ethnicity, of class and nationality, of religion and ideology: in this sense, modernity can be said to unite all mankind. But it is a paradoxical unity, a unity of disunity: it pours us all into a maelstrom of perpetual disintegration and renewal, of struggle and contradiction, of ambiguity and anguish. To be modern is to be part of a universe in which, as Marx said, “all that is solid melts into air.” —Marshall Berman, All that is Solid Melts into Air, 1982

Introduction

I

n t h e t w i l i g h t of the Qing dynasty, the hoary cultural capital of Suzhou saw itself remade as a modern city. This book explores the experiences of various groups—the landless poor and business elites, Chinese and foreigners, locals and outsiders—as they helped effect the interrelated transformations of space and time involved in this project. Despite the self-conscious newness with which people in China and elsewhere proclaimed modern cities to be a fundamental break with existing and previous patterns of commerce, architecture, state power, and social organization, the disjunctive modern city inevitably continued to contain the material, intellectual, and experiential bequest of the past. This inheritance played an essential but ambiguous role in the distillation of modernity. Under the onslaught of imperialism and rise of nationalism, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the local was seen as a site of enduring value on the basis of its particularity, yet it was also viewed as a storehouse of national values.1 Similarly, economic development would ideally bring mutual benefits to the locality and nation, yet at times the two were in conflict. The scope of urban reconstruction provoked concerns regarding the integrity of “Chinese” or Suzhou local cultural identity in light of the transformation of the economic, social, and physical cityscape under the influence of foreign-origined urbanist technologies and practices. The drama of this process was tied to the singular beauty and historic richness of what Suzhou was—and, to some extent, remains. The human builtscape of walled courtyard compounds with one- or two-storied buildings, low white-washed Ming-style houses sitting on the quays of the canals that cross-cut the entire city, “renowned scenes and ancient monuments” (mingsheng guji), narrow unimproved streets, scholar gardens, temples, outdoor markets, and squatters shacks, not to mention

2 / Introduction

f i g . 1 . Map of late Qing Suzhou. 1. Pan Gate 2. Japanese Concession, Horse-road 3. Xu Gate 4. Chang Gate 5. New Chang/Jin Gate 6. Railroad Station 7. Southern Garden 8. Old/New Ping Gate 9. Hulong jie (Attend/Protective Dragon Street) 10. Suzhou Prefectural Confucian Temple 11. Guanqian Street 12. Xuanmiao guan Daoist Temple. Source: Cao Yunyuan, Li Genyuan et al., eds., Wuxian zhi, tu: n.p.

the accumulated centuries of human experience, both promoted and hindered state- and business-led urban modernization. Starting in the 1890s, concern for national and local political and economic vitality led businessmen and state officials to appropriate and deploy Western urban planning in Suzhou. This process led to the revision and transformation of intellectual and physical urban spaces, which in turn reshaped urban social and economic relations. Under this nascent regime of city planning, both Suzhou as a whole and individual components of the cityscape—notably, roads, temples, and ancient sites—were assigned new significance according to a burgeoning modernist calculus of commerce and nationalism. These symbolic readings of the city amounted to more than pure intellection and affected more than

Introduction / 3

discourse. They took on physical form, as in the construction of the first improved street or the rebuilding of the noted Hanshan Temple (first built in the sixth century CE), to help shape the course of the city’s reconstruction and determine Suzhou’s standing as a modern place. The course of urban reconstruction proved contentious. Various actors, ranging from the powerful official Zhang Zhidong, civic improvement groups, and municipal planners, to street vendors, tourists, and Japanese Buddhist monks, supported radically different visions of individual and communal interest. Urban modernity in Suzhou was not the simple product of accommodation between the centralized state and local business. It was constructed out of conflict over notions of local self-interest, national civilization, and local history.

The Symbolism of the City and its Sites The symbolic resonance of Suzhou and its initial modern rebuilding during the late Qing and Republic was an outcome of its 2,400-year history. The city, or rather its earliest iteration, was established in 514 BCE as the capital of the Warring States kingdom of Wu. Laid out according to the dictates of classical ritual and historical texts, the square walled city emulated the shape of the universe, in order that the movement of people and goods might mirror the natural flow of primal energies and ensure accord with the cosmos.2 Whether due to its cosmologic form or more profane attributes, the city flourished. Suzhou lies in a region of fertile soil and plentiful water. With its temperate, humid climate, the land is well suited for rice cultivation and other agriculture. From an early time, Suzhou emerged as one of the main grain baskets of the Imperial period. Navigable waterways facilitated commerce and the city became a regional trade center. By the Southern Song period (1127–1276), the city had a population of approximately 300,000 and had become a favored retreat for scholar-officials and their entourages from the Imperial Court in Hangzhou. Populous and bountiful, Suzhou’s status as an exemplar of urban life was enshrined in the still universally known saying, “Above is Heaven, Below are Suzhou and Hangzhou” (Shang you tiantang, xia you Su Hang).3 Through the end of the Imperial period—and beyond—the city was celebrated for its rarified elite society: literati painters, poets, and scholars mingled with active and retired officials, and merchant princes rich from the production and trade of silk or handicrafts, as well as those with fortunes built on shipping, commerce, and agricultural landholding. The city continued to thrive, with the population reaching its apogee of 700,000 to 1 million, in either case one of the world’s largest, in the early nineteenth century. Suzhou and its environs suffered wholesale devastation

4 / Introduction

from the 1860 Taiping siege and the 1863 Qing recapture during the Taiping Uprising (1851–65), a cataclysm in which perhaps some 20 million perished nationally and in which the city lost half to two-thirds of its inhabitants.4 By the beginning of the third decade of the Guangxu reign (1895), when this study begins, much of the city had been rebuilt (though large swaths of land within the city wall still lay empty) and the initial surviving population of 300,000 had risen to 500,000.5 As a dominant (sometimes the dominant) commercial, manufacturing, and cultural urban center during the last thousand years of the Imperial period, Suzhou’s fame extended far beyond China. The city was (and remains) a paragon of urban sophistication and elite classical culture for many throughout East Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Despite the unlikely truth of Marco Polo’s account of his fantastic travels in China, the factual richness and verisimilitude of his latethirteenth-century description of “Sugiu,” a city of “trade and industry” with merchants “of great wealth and consequence” that made “much silken cloth for their clothing,” inspired centuries of European imaginings of Suzhou as a metropolis of dazzling wealth and size—“[a]bout forty miles in circumference” with “fully 6,000 stone bridges” and “so many inhabitants that no one could reckon their number.”6 During the eighteenth century, when Jesuit mission reports inspired widespread admiration of Chinese politics, society, and arts among Enlightenment thinkers and their followers, the European image of the city as the Chinese epitome of material plenty and cultivated sophistication was burnished by descriptions such as Abb´e Jean-Baptiste Grosier’s encomium from his influential General Description of China: Europeans who have seen it compare it to Venice, with the difference that the latter sits amidst the sea, while Suzhou is cross-cut by canals of fresh water. . . . There is perhaps no other region in the universe as pleasing, whether in the agreeableness of its location or the mildness of its climate; the air is so temperate, necessities of life so abundant, land so fecund, and manners so gentle that this city is seen as the Paradise of China. “Above,” Chinese writers say, “is Heaven; below is Suzhou.” [sic] To see the continual movement of the immense population of inhabitants and the hindrance caused by the hilly terrain and those selling and buying, one has reason to think that people from all provinces come to conduct business here.7

No matter how ardent, the strength of European admiration was outstripped by the longevity and intimacy of Japanese familiarity with the city and its historicity. While Europeans and people from the Americas often perceived Suzhou through comparison with Venice, Japanese and other East Asians drew upon their own centuries-old heritage of elite Sinic cultural traditions to appreciate Suzhou on its own terms—or rather, in terms of its preeminence in scholarly Chinese culture and the authority this legacy commanded in their own lands. Due to its relative proximity, Jiangnan was likely the earliest point of contact with

Introduction / 5

Japan. Trade and other connections quite likely predate the historical record, which attests to first-century CE relations between the kingdoms and rulers of Wa (an early name for Japan that also means “dwarf,” a long-standing Chinese epithet for the Japanese) and the Han dynasty (207 BCE–220 CE). (Present-day Fukuoka and Shanghai lie only 535 miles apart.) The region remained the central point of contact throughout successive centuries, as demonstrated by the widespread influence of Jiangnan elite culture and rice cultivation in ancient and medieval Japan.8 Japanese cultural borrowing reached its high point during the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE). Yet again, Jiangnan served as the main gateway through which travelers, monks, and scholars acquired and exported the riches of Chinese technology, Buddhist scholarship, literature, and Confucian statecraft back to Heian Japan, where they had a profound impact on elite cultural traditions. Japanese trade in Suzhou luxury goods and general manufactures helped spread knowledge of the city’s burgeoning economy and the refined tastes of its elite classes. At the same time, Japanese scholars appropriated the entire classical Chinese literary tradition, which they esteemed and mastered as their own. Literary writings, particularly Tang poetry, which is replete with vivid images of Suzhou scenes, significantly contributed to the city’s reputation within Japan as an exemplar of urban sophistication and richness. For Japan, the city’s already considerable allure was augmented by two centuries of Tokugawa isolation, during which China became a semimythic, unreachable storied land, and Suzhou became one of its most fantastic attractions. Under the threat of Admiral Perry’s expeditionary force, the Shogunate suspended the policy of national seclusion in 1854, yet the borders remained firmly closed to Japanese subjects as they had been since 1635. The Tokugawa bakufu government started to relax its interdict of foreign travel in 1860, when it began sending official missions abroad to acquire foreign knowledge useful for reasserting Japanese sovereignty. Given the dual convenience of geographic and linguistic proximity, the bakufu initially seized upon China as an accessible venue for observing and learning about the technology, mores, and habits of the modern West. It dispatched a mission to China in 1862 and initiated an era of increasingly regular and free contact.9 Despite the Tokugawa regime’s emphasis on foreign travel as a means of encountering modernity, many voyagers contrarily set out for China in order to seek the past and learn its present fate. Inspired by centuries of imaginative intimacy and eager to experience the physical sites they had visited in poetry and prose, small numbers of intrepid Japanese travelers began to arrive in Suzhou. By the late nineteenth century, these few adventurers were joined by leisure tourists, some even organized in tour groups, who traveled in ever-increasing numbers to visit Suzhou’s sights. As a result of Japan’s fealty to Chinese classical culture, educated Japanese travelers unable to speak Chinese could still communicate

6 / Introduction

through the medium of written classical Chinese. This excerpt from a 1910 “brush conversation” conducted at the Suzhou Prefectural Confucian Temple reveals the excitement and anticipation that motivated many Japanese to visit the city: I look at the monuments of your esteemed country’s rise and fall and examine the places mentioned by Confucius. Since I have always admired your esteemed country’s history and Confucius’s teaching, now that I tread here myself it is just as if I were encountering my parent country. I feel great happiness.10

This construction of East Asia as a family was a hallmark of the various strains of Pan-Asian thought pervasive in Japan and China alike during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the metaphor was intended to evoke the existence of a natural familial harmony and sympathy, more often than not it evinced the historical intimacy and resultant contemporary tensions between China and Japan. The far-reaching state-directed industrial, military, and educational reforms begun under the aegis of the Meiji “Restoration” (revolution being the more apposite word) were shifting the balance of power between “parent” China and “child” Japan. Japan’s rising power was reflected in Japanese travelers’ accounts, which posited an inexorable and growing gulf between China’s historical florescence, its contemporary enervation, and Japan’s own boundless prospects. This critical knowledge, in turn, helped establish the truth of China’s backwardness and Japan’s modernity. With a mixture of enlightened condescension, eager expectation, and protestations of resignation, Japan assumed the burdensome mantle of imperialist power and became the self-appointed vigorous guardian-nation for its infirm “parent country”—along with the entirety of East and, later, Southeast Asia. In a key episode of this transition, Japan’s centurieslong intellectual familiarity with Suzhou produced a pointed realpolitik legacy: Suzhou was one of the cities that Japan demanded be “opened” to it (and, hence, all other nations as well) as a treaty port after its resounding 1895 victory over the Qing. Throughout the late Qing and Republic, Suzhou was one of the places where the fantasies of Japanese imaginings of China confronted—and were often disappointed by—the realities of contemporary Chinese urban life. In the roiling military, diplomatic, and cultural confrontation with imperialist Japan, particular Suzhou locations, sometimes even individual buildings, became sites of struggle in the contest between foreign conquest and national defense.

Suzhou and Societal Change Lauded for centuries, Suzhou has often been privileged by Chinese and foreigners alike as a true, revelatory symbol of Chinese society and culture. Though they may seem mutually exclusive, the city’s particularity and its representative

Introduction / 7

nature have been understood as one and the same. As such, Suzhou has been both exalted and denigrated as something more than a particular place. Likewise, the faults and merits of individual buildings often denoted more than the aesthetics or physical state of a particular structure. Whether Chinese or foreign, Suzhou denizens, sojourners, and travelers were all wont to read the city symbolically. The layout, material culture, and bustling social life of the city were perceived as unmediated symbols that revealed trenchant social truths: the essence of Suzhou as a place, the vigor of the Chinese state, the role of the city within the empire and later Republic, and the relative global level of traditional or modern civilization of China. Neither a modern by-product of foreign imperialism like Shanghai, nor a Manchu-inflected Imperial political and cosmological capital like Beijing, Suzhou has long been viewed as the most purely Chinese of all cities and the quintessence of domestic urban development. For centuries Chinese intellectuals have promoted Suzhou as an exemplar of Chinese urban experience. The city’s history, cityscape, and social life are lovingly chronicled in literati jottings (biji), recorded more formally in some thirty-five local gazetteers (difangzhi) dating from the sixth century CE to the present, and celebrated in numerous literary works. During the Qing, Suzhou was a base for important scholarly and political networks and often praised as the most urbane city in all of China: when awarding superlatives among the Great Qing’s metropolises, the late-eighteenthcentury epicure Li Dou declared that Suzhou ranked first in the quality of its lively urban scenes.11 The patchwork of canals, grand and humble gardens enclosed by courtyard walls, teahouses, opera stages, restaurants, brothels and “painted” pleasure boats, famed ancient temples, pavilions, and other historical sites bespoke a centuries-long accumulation of particularly urban pleasures. In the “sprouts of capitalism” debates of the 1950s and 1960s, PRC historians extolled Suzhou’s past as one of China’s most advanced late Imperial commercial and manufacturing centers, which, they concluded, had served as a nursery for indigenous strains of capitalism and class consciousness. For all these observers, Suzhou’s atypical social, economic, and cultural life made it a prototypical “traditional” city insofar as it embodied the most progressive aspects of late Imperial social, economic, and cultural change. According to this Marxist evolutionary narrative, Suzhou’s role as a crucible of social progress abruptly ceased with the advent of the modern period. At that point, foreign intervention changed the endogenous path of development by coercively bringing Shanghai, other treaty ports, and thus the entire Qing Empire into the network of global mercantilism and capitalism. Perhaps more significantly, force of foreign arms shielded Shanghai from the Taiping Uprising, while Suzhou and other advanced cities were lain waste. Spared the destruction of the Taiping conquest

8 / Introduction

and later recapture by Qing forces, Shanghai and a few other cities became leading strongholds of modernity, while Suzhou and other former metropolises became relative backwaters. In light of this narrative, it is understandable that many of the Chinese and Taiwanese with whom I have spoken could not fathom why I would study Suzhou during the late Qing and early Republic (Qingmo Minchu), let alone think that it could exemplify modern urban trends. Most assume that I have misspoken and graciously attempt to correct me, “Don’t you mean late Ming and early Qing (Mingmo Qingchu),” when Suzhou was the uncontested harbinger of social progress? No, for this historiographic truism has been definitively overturned in Chinese-language scholarship during the past decade, as Suzhou has emerged as a favored case study on late Qing and Republican modernization. In several significant monographs and articles already exalted as classics, Zhang Kaiyuan, Ma Min, and Zhu Ying have examined the Suzhou Chamber of Commerce (established in 1905), one of China’s earliest and most active, and the allied city area development group, the Suzhou Citizens’ League (established in 1909), as models of institutional and economic modernization.12 Their work actively engages the critical theoretical interest within the U.S. academy during the late 1980s and early 1990s in J¨urgen Habermas’s interpretive history of the public sphere. In particular, Zhang, Ma, and Zhu have drawn from the “public sphere” debate within American and European Chinese studies of the early 1990s and clearly recast it in terms of class and civil society. They have proposed that through commercial organizations, businessmen mediated with officials and charted a new course away from “tradition” toward modernity. Their creative scholarship has alerted a generation of scholars to the possibilities of nuanced local studies in elucidating systemic societal change. Similarly, Zhang Hailin’s omnibus study Suzhou zaoqi chengshi xiandaihua yanjiu [Research on the early period of urban modernization in Suzhou] (1999) examines crucial topics related to urban modernization such as the development of factories, police, public schools, and local administration.13 While extraordinarily rich in detail and replete with insight, these studies examine modern transformation exclusively through commercial and state institutions. They do not examine greater cultural or social formations, nor do they necessarily trace the varied effects of the institutions they study. Furthermore, this scholarship fails to interrogate the meanings or aims of modernizing changes, which are taken to be self-evident. However, as anyone who has grappled to define modernity will appreciate, its meanings are legion and forever multiplying. And necessarily so, for modernity, to echo Peter Osborne, has been and continues to be “a different time.” Without a clear beginning and, as yet, no end, modernity is an indistinct yet nonetheless dominant temporal marker. Moreover, it is a hegemonic project

Introduction / 9

that seeks to promote a triumphalist temporal structure and self-conscious mode of thought in which the modern vanquishes all rivals as antiquated and therefore inferior. Connected to market capitalism and, since the nineteenth century, largely inextricable from the frame of the nation-state, it changes with time.14 As a multivalent phenomenon, modernity encompasses a bewildering array of avatars: science and technology, nationalism, popular culture, fine arts, music, and commerce, to name a few. In this book, I will examine particular ways that the cityscape became a field for inscribing and reading Suzhou’s relative modernity through the use of urban planning for economic development, historic preservation, and the creation of public national monuments. These activities often dominated the workings of state and civic institutions; they also provoked a series of conflicts that reshaped social relations and propelled the reconstruction of the city. They were thus not only integral aspects of modern experience; they also helped to shape the very form and meaning of modern Suzhou. In other words, these processes demonstrate how modernity was (and continues to be) made on the ground in a particular place. Despite the totalizing logic of a cultural formation such as modernity or the hubris of its propagators, “universal” modern processes such as urbanist economic or national political development can only be realized in their specific local iterations. To the extent that modernity in China was both the constituent material and largely the exclusive product of cities such as Suzhou, urban space and the material and social particularities of place effectively defined its contemporary instantiation. The modern Chinese city was thus postulated as encompassing three related disjunctures. Domestically, there was a temporal and territorial rupture between contemporary society and an advanced urban sector that ostensibly previewed the future of the general province and nation. In addition, the city embodied a fracture between the particularities of local society, with its many constituencies and visions of urban development, and provincial and national ideals. In a comparative international frame, the city also contained the gap between itself and the purported achievements of foreign cities and nations. The meaning and aim of modernist change was contingent, produced in accordance with local society and history, and variously interpreted by Chinese, Japanese, and American observers as a symbolic revelation of the essential state of Suzhou and greater China’s civilization.

Spatial and Social Transformation The multitude of disagreements over the absence or presence of significant social change in Suzhou begs several methodological questions regarding the perception and analysis of urban social change. Might alternate criteria or

10 / Introduction

methods of identifying urban transformation lead to different results? Could one locate modernity in or at different sites? In Chinese and foreign language scholarship and reportage, the Suzhou builtscape, its social life, and urban institutions are often presented as the very archetypes of “tradition.” Moreover, they are cited as evidence of continuity (or, more negatively, stasis) in the social, material, and intellectual structure of Chinese cities over the longue dur´ee. Xu Yinong’s recent study, The Chinese City in Space and Time: The Development of Urban Form in Suzhou (2000), details Suzhou’s development as a paradigmatic representation of Imperial urban ideals from the sixth century BCE to the mid-nineteenth century CE. While Xu spotlights and imaginatively analyzes shifts in the city’s morphology, he finds no substantive breaks in the structure or significance of the built environment. Rather, he strikingly demonstrates the physical and discursive integrity of the classical urban paradigm through the late nineteeth century, that is, when foreign urbanist notions began to transform the physical and intellectual configurations of the city. This longevity was vividly symbolized by the city’s forty-five-li-long (approximately fourteen miles) city wall, which had been repeatedly rebuilt on the same foundations since the thirteenth century—if not several centuries earlier.15 The symbolic identity between city and wall is particularly apt for it echoes a fundamental linguistic one: in Chinese, the term city (chengshi) is a compound of the words city wall (cheng) and market (shi), denoting a city’s fundamental identity as a preserve of state power and commerce. Xu’s macrolevel focus on city form is predisposed toward emphasizing continuities, while slighting shifts within Chinese urban thought and city planning. However, as Craig Clunas demonstrates in his book on Suzhou’s celebrated urban gardens, a rather different picture emerges by more fully considering the meanings and uses that urban space acquired through social practice. During the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, many gardens were radically remade in an attempt to “re-create” ancient models. This pursuit of “authentic” primordial forms partly masked anxieties about the moral consequences of consuming gardens and other extravagances within the rapidly developing urban world of Ming Jiangnan.16 By pointing to such fundamental shifts in the political-economic conception and valuation of urban land within the seeming continuity of tradition, Clunas underscores the analytic significance of considering the fine details of social practice. The most widely cited exposition of Suzhou as an exemplar of material continuity is a lyrical 1973 lecture by the cultural historian Frederick Mote. Mote eloquently emphasized the stability of Suzhou’s urban space by pointing to the astonishing continuity of the city’s fundamental form: the outlines of the 1229 CE Pingjiang tu (Map of Pingjiang, the city’s official name during the

Introduction / 11

Song dynasty) stele closely matched up with those of a 1945 U.S. Air Force reconnaissance photograph when the two images were superimposed. Mote, concluded, Actual land use changes may have occurred, but within an enduring shell of physical forms, and a continuing pattern of open and occupied space. . . . In the remarkable continuity of Soochow [Suzhou] as a city, the impermanence of the city’s individual parts and the stability of its form and physical presence, as well as the permanence of its past in the minds of the living, are typical of Chinese cities, and of Chinese civilization.17

Framing his argument in terms of Chinese civilization, Mote drew on the cultural holism implicit in much twentieth-century civilizational discourse to propel his analysis to an elegant and profound totalizing conclusion. Citing the undeniable persistence in the basic physical pattern of Suzhou’s streets and walls, he argued that there was a homologous stability, if not stasis, in overall “concepts of time, space, and form.” Not only within Suzhou, but among Chinese cities as a genus and throughout Chinese civilization as a whole. Physical artifacts of the past and their historicity did remain important components of the city. Indeed, through the basic retention of its medieval form, a large number of celebrated scenic and historic sites, aged housing stock, and several hundred memorial arches to virtuous widows and other worthies, the city was essentially a living city of antiquities. In fact, this material endurance does not support Mote’s contention that the city’s urban space remained stable. In their attention to the endurance of Suzhou’s historic morphology, Mote and many other commentators have slighted “actual land use changes” as epiphenomenal. However, certain land use changes, such as the creation of modern improved streets, revolutionized the function and meaning of space without fundamentally altering the city’s basic plan. Finally, the understanding of particular city sites and the significance with which people imbued them changed fundamentally, provoking significant shifts in their uses. Even ancient monuments and other structures, seemingly unchanged over the course of centuries, were continually endowed with novel meanings and functions, demonstrating the essential fluidity of the urban environment. These shifts have gone unmarked and unstudied. This situation has much to do with our historical appreciation of modernity, which is usually understood comparatively, whether internationally or domestically. In the hierarchy of Chinese national modernity, Suzhou has been a symbol of continuity. Suzhou’s permanency is rooted in the fact that local changes in the streets, transportation, architecture, industry, clothing, and other material artifacts by which urban modernity is usually judged appear slight in comparison to neighboring Shanghai, the paradigmatic modern Chinese city. However, such an exclusive

12 / Introduction

f i g . 2 . Pingjiangtu stele: Map of Song dynasty Suzhou, 1229 CE. Source: Liu Dunzhen, Suzhou gu jianzhu diaocha ji (Beiping: Zhongguo yingzao xueshe, 1936), image 21.

Introduction / 13

f i g . 3 . U.S. Air Force aerial reconnaissance photo of Suzhou, 1945. Source: Photograph RG 373, Can ON 23143, Exp TV-104, Apr. 28, 1945, 1:58,000, Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, Photograph Record Group 373, National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

14 / Introduction

vision of modernity, in which only the leading archetype qualifies as significantly or fully modern, fails to represent accurately the modernist transformation of urban space in Suzhou or other cities. It overlooks the fact that changes which that in hindsight appear negligible in comparison to contemporary Shanghai and other places were appreciated by late Qing and early Republic denizens of Suzhou as momentous. To focus on the transformation of urban space is to recapture the lost history of late Qing and Republican businessmen, government officials, local denizens, and tourists: people who saw the changes in the physical and social landscapes of Suzhou as, for better or for worse, fundamental components of a new, indisputably modern era in which the entire city was revalued and reshaped according to a burgeoning calculus of nationalism and economic development.

Considering Urban Space and Place To excavate past human use and perceptions of the city builtscape, it is useful to make urban “space” a primary object of analysis. Here I am not proposing a grand theoretical pronouncement, but merely acknowledging that space is no passive container. Rather, it is a social product and human practice that, in Henri Lefebvre’s evocative phrase, “implies, contains, and dissimulates social relationships.” At the same time, it can be analyzed in terms of its material as well as social, intellectual, and cultural components to reveal the workings of social power relations that often lie unacknowledged and obscured by the common belief in the transparency and natural “realness” of the built and natural environments.18 The implications of Lefebvre’s theoretical model are clarified by geographer Doreen Massey’s useful gloss of “place” as a relational product that forms out of the intersection of social relations and their effects at a particular location. This unique confluence, in turn, produces other novel social effects.19 Massey’s open-ended and dynamic conception of place helps capture the interplay of influences, Chinese and foreign, local and distant, that contributed to the modernist recreation of Suzhou. The elements that collectively produce a notion of place are not bound by set political or geographic boundaries. As place is both a demarcated physical space and clusters of interaction, its identity emerges through its intersections with other hierarchically organized spaces. While focusing on linkages may seem poised to make the bounds and significances of place hopelessly indeterminate, this analytic approach actually highlights the mechanisms by which notions of place achieve coherence. In particular, one can observe how under the onslaught of modern urban development, nationalism, and imperialism, the use of memory and other essentialist notions of difference

Introduction / 15

have become ever more salient in the attempt to negotiate local identity.20 Indeed, the various conceptions and subject positions of China and Suzhou were created, revised, and maintained through hierarchical interconnections with Shanghai, the central Qing state, Japan, and the “West.” Since Marx, social analysts have described how the increasingly abstract frame of capitalism has led to the erasure of difference in the modern era. Reconstructing Suzhou as modern produced a maelstrom of creative destruction. The cityscape morphed as roads and buildings appeared, disappeared, or transformed through renovation and reuse. Alternate forms of value, whether cultural, historic, or familial, were challenged, though not effaced, by ascendant economistic ideals. Instead, the physical layout, significance, and function of the city bore the marks of past history. Suzhou was a palimpsest, or to draw on Pierre Nora and others working in the vital field of historical memory, a site of memory.21 The entire city, “modern” and “ancient,” was an integrated site of memory, as well as an assortment of discrete ones. New construction occurred on the site of previous usage; historicity could be enfolded into new structures or put to new use. Innovative structures such as the horse-road to the south of the city road were created from long-settled human areas. Novel constructions, in turn, produced their own histories: ambitious schemes for industrial and economic growth, real estate development, or the establishment of a precociously modernist culture, whether successful or not, soon passed into the realm of contemporary memory to infiltrate and react with the course of everyday life. These strands of sited memory, whether historical or contemporary, were more than antiquarian or intellectual curiosities. In the ongoing reconstruction of the city, they became reagents and helped to determine Suzhou’s relative modernity in the eyes of local denizens, people from throughout the empire and later Republic, foreign sojourners, and travelers, as well as those who only voyaged there via newspapers, books, or their own fancy.

Changing Intellectual Notions of the City Suzhou’s late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction involved and, perhaps more significantly, was understood as encompassing interconnected changes in the physical, social, and intellectual forms of the city. By locating the beginnings of this shift in the 1890s, I would revise the findings of Kristin Stapleton’s important book on late Qing and Republican urban reform in Chengdu. Stapleton notes that from 1895 onward the management of cities emerged as a main focus of administrative activism under the particular influence of the Qing New Policies during the first decade of the twentieth century, the early Republican city administrative movement, and the Nanjing decade of centralized Guomindang

16 / Introduction

(GMD) control. In Chengdu (and Suzhou, as well), lack of funds and instances of overt elite and popular opposition to city reconstruction projects hampered the ambitions of late Qing and Republican urban reformers. Nonetheless, support for urban planning was particularly strong in provincial capitals, such as Chengdu and Suzhou. These cities were privileged by the state and their own business and gentry communities as laboratories for the creation of modern urban institutions. Convinced that their city, as a provincial capital and a cultural center merited especial attention as a cradle of economic, political, and social change, state and commercial elites, not to mention common folk, effected a wide array of progressive urban initiatives during the first decades of the twentieth century. While local pride played a part, it did not constitute the main motivation. Rather, the breadth of support for city reconstruction and reform stemmed from the fact that people of all backgrounds anticipated that urban modernization would generate a host of economic, political, cultural, and entertainment benefits. Despite these changes, Stapleton qualifies her argument, “Even after 1895, cities were not immediately seen as distinct or particularly important arenas for social change.”22 It is true that cities were not distinct, integrated administrative units. During the Imperial period, large Chinese cities were often divided into separate political units, each governed by a different county (xian) administration, for which the city (or rather, one corner of it) served as the county seat. Individual cities could also serve as the capital for larger, overlapping political units. Thus, late-nineteenth-century Suzhou was simultaneously the seat of Wu, Changzhou, and Yuanhe xian, and Suzhou Prefecture (which contained nine counties), while also serving as the capital of Jiangsu province. After the 1911 Xinhai Revolution, the three urban counties were unified in 1912 as Wu xian. The city proper was briefly (1927–30) granted the boon of a municipal government that attempted to carry out many infrastructural and social reforms before reverting back to the previous form of county administration, Wu xian.23 Though important, the state’s administrative divisions did not necessarily correspond to popular cultural categories; nor did they prescriptively structure people’s experience. During the late nineteenth century, Chinese cities were seen as important arenas for societal change. Stapleton’s engaging study actually presents much evidence to this effect. True, the cosmological principles of capital cities aside, “the city” did not serve as a central analytical subject or metaphor in Chinese philosophy as it did in the “Western” tradition exemplified by Plato, St. Augustine, and Condorcet, among others. Yet by looking to state administration as the main index of change in the conception, organization, and function of cities, Stapleton and others grant the Qing (or any state) too much power. Haphazard and episodic changes on the ground would be easily

Introduction / 17

overlooked in her model. In Suzhou at least, significant urban change more often proceeded through contingency and happenstance, than the mythic “rational” plan of bureaucrats.24 The promotion of “the city” as a discrete political and administrative entity stemmed from the modernist transformation already underway in cities such as Suzhou, but also, as discussed in Chapter 2, from a growing appreciation for foreign cities as economic engines propelling the general commercial, social, political, and cultural development of Japan, Europe, and the United States. This appropriation of nineteenth-century scientific urbanist ideology constituted a fundamental philosophical shift in the conception of cities and provoked manifold changes in the structure of Suzhou urban space. Under modernist urbanism, cities were reconceived as economic engines that would transform the entire nation. This political-economic vision meant that cities like Suzhou bore a particular burden as national symbols and vehicles of national development.

The Nationalization of Place and the Location of Place within the Nation Nationalist narratives generally present nationality as an undifferentiated, natural expression of a primordial identity evenly imprinted throughout a national territory. These hegemonic claims mask the fact that nationality is more typically experienced through local articulations individually enacted in different locations. Notions of a nation are grounded in particularities of place, the symbolism of which is then expanded and applied to the nation as a whole. The discursive reflex of generating nationality through synecdoches transcends the cultural variation, geographic spread, and unevenness of material modernity within national borders to create an image of national coherence and uniformity. In addition to masking various aporia within China, the process of creating nationality through local culture obscures differences in national time between China and foreign centers of normative modernity in Europe, North America, and Japan. The shifting formations of Suzhou as a place illustrate the formative role of “the city” in modernity and the particular influence of national prerogatives upon the structure of place. As Partha Chatterjee, Prasenjit Duara, and others have argued, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the fantastic project/projection of the nation-state became so dominant as to almost constitute the sole licit form of large-scale political organization, while also becoming a prime locus of social imagination. In addition, in China and other semi- or fully colonized nations, the searing trauma of “Western” imperialist

18 / Introduction

domination heightened local imperatives toward nation building and the inculcation of ethnonational consciousness. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this violent induction into modernity served as a touchstone in the creation of nationalist narratives, contemporary politics, and formations of place—and has continued to do so, up to the present. State- and business-sponsored planning and development profoundly altered the spatial, social, and intellectual maps of the city. Elites and common people alike initiated protests and debates regarding the form and meaning of their increasingly alien city environment. To some, the reliance on foreign technologies to augment Chinese national subjectivity through modernization created a troubling dissonance between nationalist goals and the methods for achieving them. Could the city remain “Chinese” if all traces of its past were gone? Or, more parochially, would specific neighborhoods and streets retain their distinctive “atmosphere” if characteristic markers such as markets, walls, or buildings were removed to facilitate modern planning? The changing physical cityscape not only transformed the experience and conception of Suzhou culture and identity, it also altered corollary constructs of the nation. Focused debates over the value and place of historic monuments in Republican Suzhou served as forums for more general discussions regarding the nature of the modern urban economy, community morality, and the contemporary relevance of China’s cultural patrimony.

The Plan of this Book This book is organized into three two-chapter sections, each of which examines a key physical and conceptual site in the late Qing and Republican-era reconstruction of Suzhou as a modern city: the improved road, the Suzhou Prefectural Confucian Temple, and historic monuments. Chapter 1 provides a close case study of the city’s first macadamized street, the foreign concession horse-road. Begun as a joint official-merchant enterprise to expedite industrial development and forestall Japanese territorial expansion, this horse-road provoked a series of unforeseen and often controversial economic and social effects antithetical to its original purpose. Chapter 2 explores the political significance of street and social conflict over their use as the local government and business elites attempted to stimulate commerce and social progress by building horse-roads within the walled city. Chapters 3 and 4 detail the political, architectural, and social transformations of the city’s most influential and venerable state institution, the Suzhou Prefectural Confucian Temple. The site of official sacrifices to Confucius and a government school, the temple was viewed as the brain of a hidden geomantic

Introduction / 19

dragon, the influence of which underlay the unparalleled success of local Suzhou men on the Imperial civil service exams. This communal scholarly achievement, in turn, had long served as a key source of the city’s wealth and power. Chapter 3 focuses on the late Qing revitalization of the temple as a political institution through its leading role in the dissemination of modern educational reform and the recreation of Confucius as a modern national hero. Chapter 4 examines how with the demise of the Imperial state, the temple and its historicity were variously rejected as antithetical or embraced and/or essential to modern Republican progress. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the emergence of state preservation of historical sites as a touchstone of modern urban reconstruction and nationalism. Chapter 5 focuses on the reconstruction of the celebrated Hanshan Temple and traces the late Qing transformation of historic monuments from local cultural treasures to national properties symbolizing China’s antiimperialist struggle and primordial “National Essence.” Chapter 6 presents two case studies that examine the revaluation of the city’s cultural identity and its historic monuments in light of Nationalist-era economic growth and commercial activism. The first traces the quixotic efforts of a local grave protection and historic preservation society to preserve the sanctity of graves amid burgeoning urban development; the second analyzes the prolonged 1927–31 conflict over the renovation of the grand Xuanmiao guan Daoist Temple for purposes of business development. The conclusion and epilogue assess Suzhou’s late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reconstruction in light of recent attempts to remake the city as modern through the application of contemporary political-economic ideals. Two decades of market-oriented reforms and foreign investment by multinational corporations have arguably altered the city more fundamentally than at any time in its history. The radical (and arguably much needed) modern reconstruction of Suzhou has been accompanied by similarly unprecedented state pledges, some almost bordering on protestations of faith in their fervent piety, to preserve the ancient fabric of the city. Whether viewed as cynical political posturing or evidence of the chronologic dialectic lying at the heart of modernity, or perhaps both, the simultaneity of state commitments to rebuild and preserve the city have proceeded apace. In light of the fundamental needs of city residents living in dank and aged, albeit picturesque, housing without sewage or other amenities, demolition and reconstruction have necessarily commanded greater influence than preservation. Though undeniably transformed, Suzhou continues to be seen as one of China’s “ancient” places. As the 2003 controversy over the construction of an I. M. Pei–designed modernist Suzhou Museum building that required the partial demolition of a nationally protected relic, the palace of the Taiping Prince Li Xiucheng, demonstrates, the disposition of

20 / Introduction

modern and historical sites within the city reveals much about the particular valuation of the past by the market economy and the expansive role of the ancient in China’s contemporary modernity. One of the arguments of this book is that the myriad changes in the city and its spaces were largely unanticipated and contingent. Nonetheless, I hope that the following chapters convey both the happenstance and the logic of politicaleconomic and historical change. The book begins and ends on two very different roads that lay less than two miles apart. Though they did not intersect, these streets were very much interconnected through the process of urban modernization. It is no mere coincidence that a book exploring modern Suzhou begins and ends on the urban road, for few other spaces as clearly manifested the attempt to realize a new intellectual conception of the city through the reconstruction of its physical form and social life. The late Qing and Republican transformation of urban space was epitomized by the shift in the conception of the city from a preternatural landscape richly endowed with propitious veins of earthly dragon energies, to a space dedicated to generating maximal commercial and industrial profit, in which concepts of fengshui (geomancy), cultural longevity, and even the moral obligations to the dead were refracted through the lens of modernist national development. The violent collision of different spatialities precipitated and sustained the drama of Suzhou’s transformation from heaven on earth to that phantasmal, ultimately elusive location, modernity.

chapter one

Industry and Vice along the Horse-Road

I

n t h e l at e q i n g popular novel The Nine-Tailed Turtle, the ne’er-dowell Zhang Qiugu travels less than a day from his home in nearby Changshou County to a fantastic and unusual place, Suzhou’s first and only improved macadam street. Lying outside the city’s southwest Pan Gate, this thirty-threefoot broad, straight span of firm, level road was quite unlike the crooked, narrow, and uneven roads within the city. In fact, this “horse-road” (malu) was a remarkable physical object.1 No more than a few years old, this street was an example of as yet rare foreign engineering. Yet, of greater interest to libertine Qiugu, “Large restaurants, opera theaters, and story telling houses were everywhere. As was the traffic: carts flowed like water and horses flew like dragons. It was really hopping.” La dolce vita Suzhou: storytelling houses, opera theaters, brothels, photography studios, restaurants, guest houses, and horse-carriage rides, in short, the public entertainments of modern urban life, not infrastructure, were what attracted his interest. Nonetheless, the unique physical qualities of the road, along with the specific institutional arrangements and novel political-economic ideas that animated its construction, provided the possibility and conjunction of circumstance for the creation of this new leisure quarter. This one improved street, an artifact of foreign technology and engineering introduced by imperialist colonization, played a formative role in the inception of modern urban industry, commerce, and leisure in Suzhou. Yet, as Qiugu’s reaction shows, for contemporary people, the street was less compelling than the ways that they made use of it for work and play. In fact, altering the nexus between work and play—and the more general concepts of productive activity and leisure—was but one of the many fundamental, if largely unforeseen, effects of the street’s creation and growth. This chapter explores the series of material, social, and conceptual innovations by which this particular macadam

24 / r o a d s t o m o d e r n i t y

road transformed the lives of all Suzhou people, not merely those who toiled, frolicked, or traveled along its course. By creating a novel milieu for industry, commerce, and socialization, this horse-road helped precipitate challenges to established conventions of gender propriety, Qing state political economy, and cultural attitudes toward the form and meaning of the built environment. Along with Chapter 2, which covers subsequent road improvements within the walled city and the social conflicts they engendered, the first section of this book argues that street reconstruction led to the creation of an economistic regime of city planning as transport-driven economic development became the favored instrument for effecting the political, cultural, and social changes deemed necessary for societal modernization.

Suzhou Urban Roads and their (Inter)National Significance Roads are one of the most commonplace yet distinctive aspects of any urban setting. As both basic physical components and essential social routes, they are integral to the structure of all cities. Yet, the universality of streets as a material construction contrasts with the specificity of their attributes as a particular place. The streetscape spied from the road often constitutes the dominant sense of individual urban locations. The city as viewed from the street, that is, the material culture, social hierarchies, economic activities, and cultural life visible in the streetscape, often shape a viewer’s impression of the entire urban community. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, streets probably exercised more influence over the physical, social, and intellectual structures of late Qing and early Republican cities than any other component of the built environment. In this sense, the modern macadam road was the defining artifact of Chinese modernity.2 Not that urban street order had been ignored previously: since classical times, if not earlier, state and civil bodies had both advocated and exercised responsibility for road construction and maintenance, in addition to regulating the various uses of streets for economic, transport, and social activities. In the particular case of early Qing Suzhou, Tsao Jr-Lien has emphasized that as a common public venue, home to the poorest, site of commerce, and space for protest and control, Suzhou streets were the focus of private and limited state philanthropy and social welfare that attempted to stave off the most detrimental effects of urban poverty and defuse potentially destabilizing social protest.3 Surviving stone stelae, gentry writings, and paintings—Zhou Chen’s 1516 album “Beggars and Street Scenes” being the most well-known—all attest to the impact of the street on the city’s elite as a human and physical milieu rife with potential menace and considerable social consequence.

Industry and Vice along the Horse-Road / 25

Given the popularity of streets as a topic in Qing literati writings, many of which lovingly describe Suzhou or other cities in terms of the author’s intimate mental landscape, the written record provides surprisingly little detailed description of physical street ways. Surviving nineteenth-century writings on Suzhou, largely biji (belles-lettristic essays), mainly concentrate on nationally famous and locally celebrated spots, but give little indication of the somatic experience of the street. In short, it is unclear how Suzhou people regarded their streets before the late Qing.4 From the late 1890s onward, however, we can observe an eruption of discourse by local officials and residents regarding the physical state and social disorder of Suzhou streets. Foreign travelers and residents, by contrast, had long recorded their impressions of Chinese urban roads (i.e., streets within a city wall and those of the immediate suburbs) and cities with precise disgust. By the late nineteenth century, the “fact” that Chinese cities were landscapes of social and physical disorder, malodorous pestilence, danger, and vice was already a well-established literary topos of foreign writings on China. In these writings, roads consistently appeared as a primary narrative subject and served as a venue for foreign critiques of Chinese inadequacies. For instance, in one widely reprinted description of Chinese life, the prolific British missionary John MacGowan argued, “Whatever ability the Chinese may possess, it certainly does not lie in the direction of city building.” Chinese cities ostensibly revealed the monotony of designs “drawn up when the world was young [and]. . . reproduced age after age after an identical pattern.” The narrow, crooked streets, the unsubstantial one-storied buildings, the badly-paved roads, the poverty-stricken aspect of the poorer quarters, and the prevalence of the most horrible and disgusting smells, amongst the rich and the poor alike, are the features that most impress themselves upon the mind of the stranger, as he perambulates around in search of novelty. . . . The streets are the same all the year round. There men are crowded so close to each other that there seems no place to breathe. There cholera and plague and fevers run riot, and there the great human heart bears the tragedies of life, and with a heroism that is pathetic strives to make the best of a life from which romance and poetry have been driven out. 5

Similar lurid descriptions of the social anomie and degradation of Chinese urban life by travelers and China hands such as the missionary writer Arthur Smith, whose uncomplimentary analysis of the “Chinese character” was treated well into the twentieth century as an authoritative Western commentary on contemporary Chinese life, were ubiquitous.6 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an avalanche of essays, reportage, travel guides, and other writings regarding China and its people issued from foreign presses to feed the voracious curiosity of American, Japanese, and European national reading publics.

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Despite the disparities between their own domestic political and social contexts, these foreign writings shared significant modernist assumptions regarding the signal importance of urban life and street order, in particular, in determining societal order and vitality. By increasing the circulation of commodities, goods, and people, macadam streets (and their regional and national complement, railroads) had helped create industrial capitalism. As such, they were seen as embodying the very essence of progress. These attributes, in turn, supported an almost obsessive focus on urban streets as a synecdoche for China as a political, social, and cultural unit. The logic of this materialist-cultural critique was forcefully illustrated in a blistering critical pronouncement by the Japanese opinion-maker Tokutomi Soh¯o, one of the most commercially successful and influential journalists and publishers of Meiji, Taish¯o, and Sh¯owa Japan. After a two-month tour of Suzhou and several other cities in 1906, Tokutomi declared, “In sum, up to the present there are no roads that deserve to be called such. . . . [In the cities] although the streets are all paved, they are not up to the level of modern roadways. In fact, there are only the remnant hulks of roads.” Tokutomi went farther, assessing Chinese society on the basis of this fact: “China’s streets are iron-clad evidence of the lack of public mindedness among the Chinese people.”7 Tokutomi’s opinion is significant because he not only reflected but also shaped Japanese public opinion. The purported backwardness and even physical danger of simply passing over the rough pavements of the dark, narrow street ways of many Chinese cities remained a staple of travel literature and reportage by foreign writers well into the Republic. Within this foreign discourse of urban menace, Suzhou remained a particularly infamous and enduring example of Chinese primitiveness, as in the Japanese fiction writer Akutagawa Ry¯unosuke’s 1921 complaint, “Within the city, the streets are dank, narrow, and mean. . . indeed, the road paving stones are so loose that our passage on mules made me nauseated. In fact it was all extremely dangerous. . . far inferior to even the worst roads in Tokyo or Kyoto. . . .”8 What were the streets of the city (i.e., the roads within the city wall) like? Given the lack of explicit Chinese testimony on the subject, we must turn to foreign observers. In a passage that sharply departs from the sympathetic and often admiring tone of his 1899 narrative of Suzhou’s history and present socioeconomic condition, the long-term Suzhou resident, Hampden Du Bose, an American Presbyterian missionary, posed the same question: What is a street? The European would answer: “A broad thoroughfare with rows of tall houses on either side, and rows of trees,—the side-walks for men, and the road for horses.” How differently a native lexicographer would define the word.

As Du Bose explained it, the Suzhou main streets, intended to be eight feet wide when the city was originally laid out in the Warring States period, had in the

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intervening centuries been narrowed several feet by shop counters and railings. Alleys, in turn were crowded with morning markets. As a result, these “narrow defiles” were inadequate for the city’s array of humanity: . . . riders on horses, Mandarins in chairs with their official retinues, funeral processions a quarter of a mile long, workmen carrying the framework of a building, chair-bearers, burden-bearers, loads of straw, men with bundles and women with baskets, the aged tottering on a staff, and the blind feeling their way with a cane, the water-carrier with quick step, and the scholar with a snail’s pace.

All of these people daily wound their way through Suzhou’s narrow urban passageways. From the perspective of foreign visitors, the telling absence of mechanized transport, horse-driven carriages and other animal-drawn vehicles, and even rickshaws from “this tangled thicket of pedestrians” constituted an unequivocal sign of Suzhou’s and greater China’s backwardness. Most people moving through Suzhou walked, were carried by some of the city’s several thousand sedan chair bearers, or were pushed in wheelbarrows.9 (Donkeydrawn carts were introduced as a substitute for push carts and wheelbarrows in 1902, one of the first late Qing attempts to increase urban street circulation.)10 Roads were generally one to two yards wide and so structurally unstable that many were wont to wash out after a heavy rain. As they ran throughout the canal-filled city, their course was continually punctuated by some 300 sharply pitched bridges, making them impassable to many forms of wheeled transport.11 The street surface was “paved with small stones, raised in the center, and in the rainy season very slippery. A few are laid with flag-stones,” but as successive Japanese descriptions of the city complained into the 1920s, the size of these stones often made walking difficult. As for general sanitation, Du Bose archly commented that during the cold winter months there was no stench from rotting rubbish, thus Suzhou could be considered clean—for a Chinese city. A Japanese reporter also writing in 1899 more concretely described the scene and its attendant sensations: “The Chinese shockingly leave excrement and urine lying everywhere, such that I avoid breathing. The combined stench from the mountains of feces and pools of urine, which surround every street corner and bake under the blazing sun, is enough to make me vomit.”12 The roads and their conditions were the product of urban institutional arrangements and the social attitudes they both reflected and engendered. For much of the late Imperial period, the physical integrity of Suzhou’s streets and other essential urban infrastructure, such as the city wall and canals, like those of all Chinese cities, greatly relied on civic largesse: street building and routine maintenance were generally beyond the limited financial and human resources of the Qing state, which exhorted and bestowed honors upon guilds, nativeplace societies, and public-minded individuals for sponsoring necessary repairs

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and improvements. Community philanthropy, even though often quite spirited, generally failed to keep pace with the inexorable physical deterioration caused by weather and constant human use. Moreover, many Suzhou streets were essentially auxiliary routes for canals, which provided an efficient means of city transportation and often enjoyed priority in terms of public support. As a result, routine road maintenance and even widely desired street improvements were often deferred, sometimes permanently. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the national imperative of rapid industrial and commercial development, along with the burgeoning influence of urbanist growth, contributed to a thorough revaluation of the utility and significance of city streets as economic and social pathways. Drawing inspiration from foreign experience and social-economic theory, many late Qing political and business elites embraced an almost unbridled faith in the capacity of improved roads to stimulate local development, thereby augmenting national strength and hastening China’s ultimate release from foreign domination. In Suzhou, street improvement and ancillary measures to regulate the streetscape were enthusiastically espoused by an ever-increasing coalition of provincial and local state officials, gentry, business interests, and common people as a mechanism for promoting general economic and social progress. Roads were thus transformed from quotidian routes into the preeminent functional and symbolic sites of Chinese urban modernity, or rather, urban colonial modernity. As with other modern material and intellectual innovations of foreign origin, in China, the advent of improved roads and the circumstances necessitating their creation were a product of foreign colonial occupation and the threat of its future expansion. In this way, whether in China and other parts of the colonized and semicolonized world (not to mention the colonial metropoles of Europe, the United States, and Japan), the development and pursuit of advanced industry, educational and societal reform, nationalism, and other components of modernity were deeply imbued by the inequities of global power relations. As we shall see, improved roads and other aspects of modern life in Suzhou bear clear testimony to the colonialist origins and nature of modernity.13 Scholarly explication of the advent of transformative societal processes such as colonialism, modernity, and nationalism is often an imprecise undertaking. In the case of late-nineteenth-century Suzhou, however, we can speak with more specificity. The physical realization of colonial modernity and the concomitant process of reconstructing the city’s urban spaces according to the developing logic of modern Chinese economic nationalism and urbanism began with the construction of the first macadam road outside Pan Gate.

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The Horse-Road: The Domestication of Foreign Technics Beginning on the second day of the “Almond” second month of 1896 and continuing throughout the spring, an isolated tract of wasteland lying south of the city’s protective moat was transformed. A crew of Chinese workmen (possibly Green Standard Army soldiers), working with machinery specially brought inland from Shanghai, toiled under the joint supervision of Qing army officers and an Englishman serving with the Imperial Maritime Customs to construct a 1.3-mile-long horse-road on a wide strip abutting the embankment for the considerable sum of 40,000 Mexican dollars.14 This new carriage road lay at the northern edge of a tract of unbuilt land known by the flowery name Qingyangdi (site of the Spring Eastern Palace), an historical allusion used to describe any flourishing, opulent location. While the land may have once flourished as an urban rice field, the Qingyangdi was anything but opulent. Separated from Suzhou’s bustling population by the city moat, it was mainly composed of fallow fields that for years had been occupied primarily by impoverished squatters and graves.15 The new bund ran east to west along the southern edge of the city moat from the Midu Bridge to a point opposite the southwestern Pan Gate and never passed through the city gates to enter the city proper. The expenditure of considerable effort and a comparatively large outlay of public funds for such a short span of roadway in an isolated area beyond the city may seem paradoxical, for at the time of its construction, this horse-road was truly a road to nowhere. The term horse-road dated from early classical texts such as the Zuozhuan in which it referred to large roadways that could accommodate horse traffic.16 Indeed, the northwestern “Stinky horse-road” used by night-soil carriers from the eighteenth century to the 1950s was the most long-lived example of an older style of horse-road.17 However, the Qingyangdi horse-road was markedly different from anything that had theretofore existed in Suzhou. It was a distinctly modern foreign artifact. European macadam-road engineering had previously been deployed in a few select Jiangnan cities, such as Shanghai starting in 1846 and Nanjing in 1894. The horse-drawn vehicles that gave this road its name were contemporary European horse carriages, all of which were still imported from abroad.18 Compared to the narrow streets of the city, the horse-road was ten zhang (approximately 33 feet) wide, and was strewn with dung, earth, sand, and, judging from contemporary roads in Shanghai, a mixture of gravel and coal slag to provide a smooth, tough surface to accommodate animal- and human-driven wheeled transport.19 The popular foreign presumption that superior roads were an exclusive product of Western technology and industry is illustrated by the comments of a group

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of British cyclists, whose 1898 spin on the horse-road convinced them that the structure was so fine that no Chinese could have built it. Soochow [Suzhou] is about nine miles round. That night of our arrival we must have gone round it three times, and when we were tired, we sat down on grave mounds and said it was just our luck. We went on again. We found a good road. Hullo! No Chinaman ever made this, we agreed. Then great cotton mills, rattling and roaring and electriclighted, loomed in sight. It was like a stray street in Burnley or Oldham, instead of far-off Cathay.20

Contrary to the convictions of the British cyclists, the horse-road was Chinese through and through. It was “Chinese” as a result of its geographic location; the road was built by Chinese workers for the use of Chinese living in Suzhou. It was also “Chinese” by virtue of its overtly nationalistic purpose. The arrogant cyclists were correct, however, in the sense that the road was built with foreign economic and strategic power in mind. The horse-road was a by-product of the 1895 Shimonoseki Peace Treaty that ended hostilities with Japan and opened Suzhou as a treaty port where foreigners would enjoy rights of residence, manufacture, and trade. Yet, neither the treaty text nor the subsequent agreement governing the treaty port explicitly mentioned the horse-road.21 While the foreigners’ presence necessitated the road, they did not impose it. Rather, the critical prize of more than eight months of Qing diplomatic gamesmanship, the horse-road was the strategic and physical center of the Qing Empire’s attempt to preempt Japanese economic and territorial hegemony.

The Shangwuju: Defensive Development and Bureaucratic Capitalism Once the plenipotentiaries of the Great Qing and Japanese Empires, Li Hongzhang and It¯o Hirobumi, had signed the peace terms at Shimonoseki on GX21.3.23 (April 17, 1895), Suzhou’s status as an “inland” place distant from the foreign–Chinese hubbub of treaty port life abruptly ended. Presently, Suzhou, too, would be opened to the Japanese and all other foreign powers that wished to establish residential and commercial enclaves. (Germany and Britain were expected to establish individual concessions as well, but did not.)22 Three days later, amid the atmosphere of expectant uncertainty, Jiangsu-Zhejiang GovernorGeneral Zhang Zhidong cabled the Zongli Yamen (Qing Foreign Ministry) professing his vexation, “I hear that every article of the treaty is unfavorable. I am worried and achingly indignant that the Japanese, victorious, are so unrestrained.” Though the concrete ramifications of the harsh treaty for Suzhou

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and the rest of China were, as yet, unclear, Zhang warned that ceding the right to reside, carry out trade, and establish industrial manufacturing to foreigners would undermine Chinese economic integrity and inflict particular devastation on Suzhou. With the city as a base for foreign shipping, the Japanese could take control of commercial and military transport, while “as for the manufacture of silk in Suzhou . . . each nation will no doubt imitate the others’ craft and establish local manufacturing ventures.” The imminent advent of technologically advanced foreign textile plants threatened local silk spinning and weaving operations, which in combination with silk-worm production and silk retailing constituted the mainstay of the local and regional economy, as well as silk concerns in Hangzhou and Sichuan. The stakes, Zhang exclaimed, were enormous: “China’s national industrial and commercial livelihood faces extinction.” Zhang implored government ministers to consider how best to redress the impending crisis.23 The governor-general was not alone in his apocalyptic forecast. In the following months, the Zongli Yamen echoed Zhang’s sentiments and called for immediate investment in modern silk mills to fortify the Suzhou economy to withstand local Japanese competition.24 Despite the official consensus, a practical means of bolstering the Chinese economy remained elusive. Three months after soliciting others’ advice, Zhang proposed an answer. In a remarkable July 1895 memorial ghostwritten by Zhang Jian, the Nantong entrepreneur who served as his personal secretary, the governor-general forwarded a slate of expansive reforms to resolve the causes of China’s recent military defeat and mitigate the effects of the new foreign occupation authorized by the Shimonoseki Treaty. As the centerpiece of his strategy, he proposed that a Shangwuju, or Commercial Bureau, be established in each province to expedite the development of Chinese industry and transport. Reflecting the expanded social roles of commerce (shangwu) and industry (gongzheng) in nineteenthcentury political-economic thought, Zhang’s memorial also called for a separate bureau to coordinate “industrial” affairs. However, Zhang’s use of the term Commercial Bureau was something of a misnomer, for he actually hoped that Shangwuju would largely serve to incubate industry, not trade. Countering those who argued that foreign trade was the main creator of domestic wealth, Zhang contended that modern, technologically advanced industry was the seminal source of national plenty. In practice, his proposed Industrial Bureau was collapsed into the Shangwuju.25 A guandu shangban (officially supervised and merchant run) enterprise, the Shangwuju was conceived as joint forum for officials, who would staff it, and local business leaders and gentry, who would meet to plan business strategies, advise the government, and, most crucially, supply the majority of the capital needed to launch joint-stock industrial companies, a Western form of business

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organization widely admired in state, business, and media circles as a key source of foreign economic and political power. Throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, the guandu shangban structure was touted as a means for obviating reliance on foreign loans for financing capital-intensive industrial ventures. In the absence of sufficiently capitalized domestic banks, textile mills, mines, and railroads often took loans from foreign banking syndicates. This dependency on foreign capital was widely decried for ceding the control of key national economic sectors to foreigners and leading to the export of Chinese capital and profits abroad. In the case of Suzhou, Zhang urged that investment be slated toward mechanized textile mills, which could battle anticipated Japanese and other foreign factories for control of local silk production. At the same time, Zhang recommended that the Shangwuju build its plants near its foreign competitors to take advantage of the synergies created by immediate proximity to other commercial and industrial concerns. It was therefore essential that all foreign industry be concentrated together in a geographically circumscribed, undeveloped spot that afforded an adjacent area where Chinese businessmen could, in turn, establish their own factories and warehouses and construct a horse-road linking the foreign and Chinese commercial areas. 26 (This arrangement, not coincidentally, would serve Chinese defensive purposes as well. Any suitable location was likely to be safely distant from the city. Zhang also expected that making the foreign concessions contiguous to one another within a delimited area would make them easier to manage and reduce, if not deny, foreigners the opportunity to expand their settlements into urban territory, as had happened in Shanghai.)27 Zhang was hopeful that if this design were applied in Suzhou, the density of industries and shops would spur further commercial growth so that after a few years the Chinese and foreign industrial zones would expand along the line of the horseroad to coalesce into one integrated development that might rival the flourishing commercial areas of Shanghai or Hankou.28 The Shangwuju might thus prove to be more than a stopgap against Japanese hegemony; it might serve as the institutional mainstay for fostering the wholesale modernization of the local Suzhou and greater Chinese economy.29

Zhang Zhidong’s Vision of the Horse-Road as an Industrial Cordon Sanitaire His war strategy complete, Zhang turned to the specifics of winning the coming battle on the ground in Suzhou. Given the strategic importance of roads for industrial development, beginning in the summer of 1895, Zhang exhorted Suzhou and Zongli Yamen officials to be especially diligent in defending Chinese territorial and administrative sovereignty over the as yet unbuilt streets.

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In particular, the governor-general repeatedly urged the Zongli Yamen to demand that Suzhou be opened to the Japanese under the precedents set by the so-called Ningbo Rules, not the modus vivendi at Shanghai and other ports. Under the Ningbo Rules, which were developed after that city was opened as a treaty port in 1843, the Chinese retained administrative authority over the entire city, including foreign areas. The Chinese local administration retained responsibility for street maintenance, policing, and general public works. As a result, Zhang wrote, the foreign areas in Ningbo were not “concessions” per se, but “settlements,” the prime distinction being that the latter remained under Chinese jurisdiction while the former did not. Here Zhang was hoping to exploit linguistic ambiguity to preserve Qing sovereignty. The Shimonoseki Treaty was rather vague regarding the conditions under which Suzhou would be open to Japanese residence, trade, manufacturing, and industry, simply reading that these would be “under the same conditions and with the same privileges and facilities as exist at the present open cities, towns, and ports of China.” Because no single arrangement governed foreign residence throughout all of China, the question then became which pattern would pertain. As Chinese and Japanese diplomats all realized, the Chinese term zujie, which was used to refer to foreign-occupied areas, had two distinct meanings in English: concession and settlement.30 The former involved the surrender of control to foreign governments and the prohibition of Chinese from living in the area, as in the Guangzhou Shamian and Hankou English concessions. The latter, which was the system functioning at Ningbo, allowed foreigners to rent and buy land and to construct buildings and roads. Chinese and foreigners could live intermingled, and, most importantly, the area remained under Chinese administration. 31 In the fall, Zhang’s focus on the strategic import of Chinese control over improved streets grew even more nuanced and emphatic as a result of summer events in Shanghai. Chinese officials and businessmen had surmised that French authorities were planning to execute a land grab by citing economic necessity as a pretext for extending their main commercial road into Chinese territory, which they would then occupy and arrogate to their concession. Having decided to “Make the foreigners shut up!” these same officials and businessmen were planning to preempt French territorial and economic ambitions by building their own horse-road along the border of the French concession to service new Chinese factories. (This street was soon built and administered by a merchantcontrolled body created for this express purpose, the South City Roadworks Board. Modeled after the French and British concession public works boards, the South City board formed a proto-municipal government and was widely emulated by businessmen elsewhere seeking to develop improved roads and other

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public urban infrastructure.) Impressed by the strategic ingenuity of this response, Zhang instructed Suzhou officials to fully exploit the Shangwuju horseroad’s potential as an industrial conduit and territorial marker by using the roadway to clearly demarcate the border between Chinese and foreign territory. 32 The viability of this industrial cordon sanitaire was, however, threatened by Japanese territorial demands, namely the It¯o government’s insistence that that Japan’s concession be placed near the city’s northwestern Chang Gate. This was the exact location that Zhang and Suzhou officials were most eager to keep out of Japanese hands because the area adjoined the main commercial wharves and afforded access to the walled city’s most important commercial areas. To Zhang’s chagrin, during the fall of 1895 Japan’s demands were championed in the foreign press, which joined the Japanese negotiators in claiming that the area was uninhabited, fallow land and that Qing reservations were yet another instance of baseless Chinese provocation. The reality, as Zhang accurately described, was rather different. The Chang Gate suburb was thick with people and arrayed with a number of streets lined with shops.33 For Zhang, the import of refusing this demand was unambiguous: if Suzhou officials conceded to Japanese pressure, he wrote, “We might as well allow the foreigners to raze the houses, shops, and roads outside the city-wall and simply surround the city!”34 (Newspapers later reported that this very rumor was circulating among the populace and had provoked many living on the city’s edge to nervously consider relocating.)35 Zhang’s opposition was motivated by more than his desire to deny the Japanese undue advantages over Chinese commercial and industrial interests. He was also loath to risk the ire of powerful landholders and business owners, the very people whose financial support was crucial to the Shangwuju’s success, by forcing them to sell potentially lucrative properties in order to establish a foreign concession. In addition, the cost of acquiring Chang Gate real estate would likely exceed the state’s meager resources, even if the land were repossessed under eminent domain.36 Most crucially, Japan’s insistence upon Chang Gate threatened to undermine Zhang’s overriding goal of making the best of an undesirable situation by attempting to exploit the foreign commercial presence for the benefit of Chinese industry. The governor-general became so exasperated with Japan’s intransigence that in a late October communiqu´e to the Qing negotiators in Suzhou he passionately, if perhaps somewhat disingenuously, complained that the Japanese dismissal of all alternate locations as too isolated was both shortsighted and inimical to foreign and Chinese interests. When the most successful treaty ports, such as Hong Kong and Hankou, were founded, he noted, the concessions sites were deemed commercially inhospitable because they were largely unpopulated and barren. However, such inauspicious beginnings proved essential to

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later success: wide-open areas allowed for the expansion of shops and factories, as well as the construction of necessary horse-roads. If a densely populated, relatively small area like the Chang Gate suburb was chosen as the foreign concession, it would be impossible to accommodate a large number of new foreign businesses and warehouses, let alone the desired Chinese ones or the crucial Shangwuju horse-road. “What commerce could then develop?”37 The Japanese negotiators, for their part, were acutely aware that existing commercial development might make the Chang Gate area too costly for the Qing administration. Indeed, they feared that the location’s strategic commercial value might make concession land prices so exorbitant that small-scale Japanese merchants would be discouraged from opening shops and other businesses, leaving the concession a nonstarter. Yet in light of the area’s likely emergence as a major commercial center, they pressed their claim anyway, only to face stonewalling by Zhang and the Qing negotiators. In the late fall, the Japanese finally acquiesced out of frustration and accepted the Qingyangdi as the concession site. At the same time, however, they strongly objected to Zhang’s proviso that China should retain a ten-zhang-wide strip of land along the canal median at the northern edge of the concession in order to build a commercial horse-road.38 In addition to demanding sovereignty over all concession area streets, the Japanese correctly noted that since existing treaty ports offered no precedent for denying foreign powers direct waterfront access, this Qing demand clearly contravened the Shimonoseki Treaty terms. However, Zhang had orchestrated a diplomatic legerdemain to assure Chinese control: the ten zhang median was also slated to be the site for wharves and the Imperial Maritime Customs House. Given that agreements governing other ports granted China control of commercial wharves and the fact that the Maritime Customs was undeniably a Qing state organ, the It¯o government was forced to accept Chinese sovereignty over the horse-road in late December 1895. Zhang’s victory was not complete, for the Japanese retained, per Japanese law, sovereignty over streets within the concession.39 The governor-general was exultant nonetheless. Once built, the Chinese horse-road would form a buffer of Qing administrative and police control between the foreign concessions and the city. Should foreigners later attempt to expand their concessions, they could only move southward, away from the city and its commercial and transportation centers.40 In the meantime, diplomatic talks discussed other matters and the road remained unbuilt. When the negotiations became mired at an impasse in January and February of 1896, Zhang’s latent suspicions regarding Japan’s trustworthiness moved him to execute his own act of duplicity: given that Chinese sovereignty was implicated in every inch of road and each individual building, he set the March groundbreaking in motion by instructing Suzhou officials to

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complete construction of the road and buildings along its course before the Japanese arrived to contest the situation.41

The Struggle to Fund the Shangwuju The diplomatic contest with Japan had tested Zhang’s political prowess, but his Shangwuju scheme ultimately faced two more formidable obstacles: official vetting by the court and protracted difficulty amassing the necessary government and private investment capital. Following Zhang’s initial proposal, the state quickly pledged to devote the lijin (internal customs duties) receipts for a set period to help underwrite the Suzhou bureau and exhorted local businessmen to supply the greater balance. Such efforts, Zhang complained, were likely to only produce empty words: the Qing state treasury was immured in deepening fiscal crisis and exhortations, no matter how heartfelt, could guarantee nothing more than symbolic gestures in return. Aiming to ensure the immediate infusion of investment capital, the governor-general proposed an unorthodox and seemingly populist funding structure that would “let local gentry and businessmen use their own capital” to underwrite the Shangwuju. Zhang recommended that the state defer returning some 2,260,000 taels raised through provincial coastal defense bonds sold to Jiangsu businessmen during the just-concluded war and use the money to fund the Shangwuju. With “gentry and businessmen [thus] undertaking responsibility for the arrangements” and the city’s twenty largest qianzhuang (native banks) and pawn shops, the usual sources of local business capital, providing financial guarantees, the Shangwuju would become an expression of the entire business community’s resolve to secure Chinese control over the Suzhou economy.42 Zhang’s representation of the Shangwuju as a milieu of official-merchant cooperation and voluntarism was likely intended to obscure the extent to which its commercial aims and finances were subject to official fiat and his personal control. Zhang recognized that by appropriating merchant capital to fund the Shangwuju and dictate its activities he risked alienating the constituency most essential to the bureau’s success. He also invited court scrutiny for abuse of official power. (Indeed, widespread dissatisfaction among the business community would make the latter all the more likely.) In an attempt to avoid these complications, he decided that the Shangwuju director must be an official with strong local ties whose personal connections and status could variously mollify and inspire Suzhou investors into supporting the bureau. However, in light of the Qing practice of “local avoidance,” that is, not appointing officials to serve in their province of origin, it was impossible to appoint a respected native man as director. Zhang circumvented this prohibition by enlisting Lu Runxiang,

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a Suzhou native on official mourning leave from the Hanlin Academy (an elite state advisory council) in Beijing, as bureau head.43 Lu put his position and connections to good use. By early January 1896, he and his staff had successfully “convinced” bondholders to forego redeeming their capital and relend it to the Shangwuju for ten more years.44 (Lu’s powers of persuasion aside, bondholders had little choice.) Zhang’s rose-colored reports to the court made much of this putative enthusiasm and announced that the Shangwuju planned to further borrow more than 600,000 taels to build factories along the horse-road.45 The situation on the ground in Suzhou was, however, quite different. A month later, Lu soberly informed Zhang that individual investors were expressing little enthusiasm for buying new shares in the horse-road industries. Lu’s lack of success was likely not completely unexpected: a year previously Zhang had been frustrated to find Suzhou’s middle-rank businessmen and large landowners extremely reluctant to purchase provincial wartime bonds. (This had not been true in Shanghai and likely reflects Suzhou’s more traditional financial and business climate. The predominance of industry and foreign concessions in Shanghai had made businessmen there more familiar with the concept and use of innovative, originally foreign financial instruments to support public debt and industrial development projects.) These same groups, which Zhang had expected to show more interest in the Shangwuju, were again declining to purchase stock. Even more importantly, qianzhuang and pawn shops, which had bought many war bonds and which Zhang had depicted as among the Shangwuju’s biggest financial backers, were unwilling to invest. Many people had (presciently) concluded that Shanghai, with its excellent port facilities and commanding lead in factory development and foreign trade, would likely remain a more successful industrial center and that Suzhou’s horse-road factories would, at best, prove to be marginal successes.46 Faced with insufficient capital, Zhang did not hesitate to violate his own stipulation that the Shangwuju be predominantly locally supported, with no particular project receiving more than 100,000 taels in state funds. To that end, he appropriated at least 910,000 more taels in government funds dedicated for other purposes to expedite the mills’ creation before the Japanese arrival.47 In the meantime, Zhang’s Shangwuju proposal, which had yet to be approved by the court, suffered trenchant criticism. In early January 1896, Imperial Censor Wang Pengyun argued that Zhang’s scheme be amended to make bureau officials subject to Beijing supervision and that they be required to consult regularly with elected representatives of the business community. These checks on local officials’ autonomy would lessen the potential for abuse of official power and preserve the tradition of state noninterference in most commercial matters. The Zongli Yamen, as the arbiter of all foreign-related activities, including the

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development of “foreign” industrial technology, officially commented on Zhang and Wang’s proposals in early February 1896. The Yamen’s recommendation that the Shangwuju be operated by the businessmen and not be subject to central or provincial government coordination was then approved by the throne.48 The court-mandated structure radically reduced the level of official control and constituted a firm rebuke of Zhang’s actions. Yet these objections were effectively beside the point. Zhang and Lu had already spent several months organizing the Suzhou Shangwuju per Zhang’s original proposal, though Zhang, seeming to anticipate court opposition, played politic and did not officially memorialize on the bureau’s establishment until mid-February.49 Although Zhang presented both the Japanese and the court with the fait accompli of constructing the horse-road and factories exactly as he saw fit, he failed to convince a large number of businessmen to invest. Nonetheless, by appealing to their patriotic convictions and promising highly advantageous financial terms (a dividend by year’s end and repayment of the principle within two years, after which the loan would be reissued and accrue 0.7 percent interest per month), Zhang and Lu did convince a handful of extremely wealthy literati-businessmen to invest some 1.5 million taels and serve as the bureau’s “merchant” directors. The most active came from Suzhou’s leading scholarly lineages—arguably among the most distinguished and powerful cohorts in the empire—and included men such as the retired official Sheng Kang who, as editor of the third Huangchao jingshi wen (1897) anthology of statecraft writings, demonstrated a firm commitment to urban industrial and commercial development as a means of national regeneration. Sheng, in particular, represented the burgeoning ambition and energy of contemporary industrialists. In addition to his own activities, he was intimately connected with the theory and practice of modern industry through the activities of his sons, particularly Sheng Xuanhuai, an official-industrialist entrepreneur active in the development of signal concerns such as the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, Imperial Telegraph Administration, and the Imperial Bank of China, as well as textiles, mines, and railroads.50 Therefore, despite his advanced age Sheng Kang emerged as the most active leader and later served as Shangwuju head. The bureau’s “merchant” directors reflected the extent to which the ostensibly separate social and functional spheres of “scholars” and “merchants” intermingled or cohered. For all its ideological sanction, the classical scholar-peasant-artisan-merchant paradigm of the ideal social order had long ceased to provide an accurate assessment of the complex realities of late Imperial society. Their economic and political activism as Shangwuju directors attested to the growing influence of the city’s business elite in shaping local economic and political policy, as well as their nascent presumption that it should be so.51

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The confidence and substantial investment of the city’s literati-business elite notwithstanding, the Shangwuju industries were initially beset by financial difficulties. In late 1897 the Shangwuju mills remained so dependent on the state treasury and the unreturned war-bond monies that they had yet to make their payments to investors. In addition, expenses had overrun by more than one million taels, sending Sheng Kang and other directors to Nanjing and Shanghai to seek additional financing.52 Despite this inauspicious beginning, the Shangwuju’s political and financial backers remained hopeful that the industries and the horse-road might yet fulfill their destiny and become bulwarks of “national fiscal administration and the people’s livelihood.”

Popular Attitudes toward the Horse-Road Qing officials wanted the horse-road to isolate and limit the foreign presence while simultaneously engaging it to develop local industry and commerce. Their views are clearly and rather amply recorded in state documents. But what were the views of nonelite Chinese, particularly Suzhou denizens, regarding the placement, administration, and construction of the concessions and horse-road? Writing fifty years later, the celebrated native Suzhou novelist and essayist Bao Tianxiao commented on the contemporary reaction to the Shimonoseki Treaty in Suzhou. In one widely known passage, Bao remembered that previous to the shock of national defeat at the hands of the Japanese “young Chinese readers paid no attention to current events, but now we were shaken,” causing him and his peers to become avid readers of Shanghai newspapers in order to understand the source of the immediate local and national crisis. As a result, “most educated people, who had never before discussed national affairs, wanted to discuss them: why are others stronger than us, why are we weaker?”53 One can only suppose that the news that Suzhou would shortly be opened as a treaty port, although left unmentioned by Bao at this point in his narrative, added to the impact of the Shimonoseki Treaty in Suzhou. Though distant Korea and the Bohai Gulf remained the main battlefront, the Suzhou populace followed the disastrous progress of the war during the autumn of 1894 and winter of 1895 with deepening concern. The fall of L¨ushun (Port Arthur) on the strategic Liaodong Peninsula precipitated rumors that the Japanese army, now unstoppable, would maneuver south and inland to occupy Suzhou. Panicked residents pressed for the evacuation of children and the elderly, fomenting sufficient disorder that in early January local authorities attempted to quell the developing chaos by targeting rumormongers. When news of the tentative agreement between Japanese and Qing officials to establish a foreign concession in Suzhou was leaked in March, local opposition was pointed.54

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Though initially shaken, and quite possibly angry and fearful at the imminent battle-won arrival of foreign diplomats, industrialists, and traders, with the passage of time many Suzhou denizens seem to have also harbored other milder, even positive, feelings toward the incursion. Sources reveal that curiosity, hope, confident expectation, and avid ambition joined with concern and outrage in marking the popular mood. Irrespective of the deleterious ramifications for national sovereignty, the widely anticipated commercial and corollary institutional and social effects of the foreign presence and the horse-road were seen by some local people as a boon. Writing two months after the announcement that Suzhou would become a treaty port, the North-China Herald characterized the popular mood as positively sanguine. The reporter (almost certainly the missionary Hampden Du Bose) pronounced that the possibility of increased trade with foreign nations found favor among “the business and middle and lower classes, who look upon the whole affair as a chance for personal gain.” Indeed, he claimed that generally, “[w]ithout a doubt the vast majority [of Suzhou people] are pleased with the prospect; some seem quite delighted.” The main naysayers, he claimed, were the “large and conservative aristocracy, who, without doubt, regard the movement with displeasure.”55 Du Bose’s report merits a fair amount of skepticism: his assumption of a natural commonality between foreign and native interests—as if concerns of national sovereignty were not only absent but superfluous—fits well within the body of late-nineteenth-century colonial reportage and travel writing. The attribution of all opposition to increased commerce with foreign nations to a “conservative aristocracy,” whose obduracy derived from their social reaction and perverse disregard for foreign technology and treaty “advantages,” and the notion that the “gentry” class was not only distinct but often hostile to the money-making ambitions of the business class are both shibboleths of much late-nineteenth-century writing on China by foreigners.56 (This is particularly ironic because the horse-road was a grand capitalist enterprise sponsored by a state bureau and individual literati-officials.) Despite these caveats, Du Bose’s reportage was no screed bewailing Chinese hostility to progress. His dispatches evoked some of the complexities of the Chinese experience of and attitudes toward foreign imperialism. Social class, economic interest, and other factors undoubtedly influenced opinions toward the intruders. Indeed, the potential economic impact of the concession, its foreign population, transportation technology, and increased opportunities for direct foreign trade probably made the concession variously pleasing or disturbing to different constituencies. The opening of Suzhou as a treaty port was the outcome of caprice: Japan’s surprising military success was followed by the vagaries of negotiations at

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Shimonoseki and later at Suzhou. Nonetheless, it seems that the eventuality of foreign occupation had been foreseen for some time. In recent decades, incidents such as the forced entry of the Earl of Elgin and his naval expedition into Suzhou in 1858, the failed 1863 scheme by Shanghai foreign merchants to construct a railroad line between the two cities, and the rapid increase in the number of resident foreign missionaries had made it clear that foreigners harbored commercial and diplomatic designs on the city. In fact, by placing the Japanese and foreign concessions (and consequently, the new textile mills and horse-road) in the Qingyangdi, the protracted Qing-Japanese negotiations had merely affirmed “an old saying” that had predicted that the area would probably become the site of a foreign concession at some point in the future.57 As for the foreign-style roads, in early 1896 Du Bose reported the city populace was quite curious about the coming “iron” (rail)road (approved by Imperial edict in 1895, the Suzhou line was surveyed in late December 1895, though due to many delays it would not be completed until 1906) and horse-roads, though many people previously having seen neither seem to have had difficulties distinguishing between the two.58 Therefore, Du Bose’s claim that “the masses of the people are in favour of the horse-roads. . . . The majority think that general commercial prosperity will result from the proposed changes,” is particularly significant.59 Despite caveats regarding the accuracy and representative nature of this description, the report suggests that even before horse-roads, railroads, and other forms of foreign modern transport had appeared in the local area, people were not only aware of their existence, but already convinced that these land roads would provoke economic development and prosperity. To some extent such optimism may have reflected the personal experience of those who had traveled to Shanghai and the few other Chinese cities with horse-roads. Yet even when people had not personally encountered them, their faith in unseen foreign technology and its power to trigger general social improvements was likely not blind. Rather, it probably reflects inroads by locally available Shanghai media such as the Dianshizhai Pictorial and Shenbao. Whether sold through its own network of local offices (the Suzhou office was located near the Xuanmiao guan Daoist temple on the main city shopping street, Guanqian Street) or as a supplement to Shenbao (available to Suzhou subscribers with only a one day delay via special mail courier), Dianshizhai circulated in provincial capitals and large cities throughout China and served as an essential venue for propagating knowledge of modern technology and urban life throughout the country. These Shanghai newspapers introduced news and images of horse-roads and other unwitnessed Shanghai marvels, such as electricity and fire hydrants, as well as foreign customs and curiosities, to a large number of the literate public and an even higher proportion of local business, gentry, and state official elites.60

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Those familiar with Dianshizhai Pictorial, Shenbao, or other Shanghai media would have good reason to find the coming horse-road an exciting prospect. In reporting the development and effects of these improved streets in Shanghai and the few other mainly Jiangnan locations where they had appeared, Dianshizhai and Shenbao journalists had long praised horse-roads as far more than a welcome convenience. They regularly professed that these new urban pathways were facilitators of commerce. Given the flurry of construction of new horse-roads in Suzhou, Hangzhou, Shanghai, and elsewhere during the spring of 1896, a series of lengthy pieces in Shenbao explored the horse-road in great depth. As one editorial exclaimed, “Smooth roads, from ancient times they have not been ignored. The Lijing refers to them as a sign of good administration,” while other sources praised them for their beauty, like smoothness convenience, and straightness. However, a new era had dawned with the opening of treaty ports and arrival of Western traders, who understood that the construction of macadamized roads was a fundamental precondition for commercial growth. Postulating that urban economic growth was a function of increasing the street circulation of people and goods, this same editorial boldly stated, “The flourishing of Shanghai is due to horse-roads.” The unending stream of carriages and rickshaws along the horse-roads piqued area commerce, increasing the value of local real estate and the amounts charged for rent.61 Furthermore, as numerous other articles explained, the horse-road was merely the first component in a series of allied urban reforms: the new roads required a modern Western-style police force to patrol them, lights to illuminate them, sanitation workers to clean them, and a joint civic-government-controlled public works board to administer them all. In other words, the building of a horse-road made it clear that the Chinese should emulate Westerners and reorder entire cities after the model of the foreign concessions.62 One 1898 article neatly summarized the contemporary media discourse regarding horse-roads and their effects by simply stating that these roads—and the commercial growth and institutional improvements that developed as a result of their construction—made the surrounding area a “civilized place” (wenming dizhi).63

The Cost of Civilization: Uprooting the Dead The cost of creating such civilization could potentially be prohibitive, as both the Japanese and Chinese authorities were aware. Japanese diplomats feared that opposition might coalesce around the fact that the tentative location for their concession and the horse-road was already the location of temples and shrines, the removal of which might be seen as catastrophic or deeply offensive. Even more provocatively, the area contained some 160 or more graves. The problem was less that all the bodies would have to be removed before construction,

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a highly labor-intensive task, than the almost universal fengshui (geomancy) belief that the orientation of individual family graves in relation to energy flows within the earth profoundly affected the fortune and health of lineage descendants. As a result of this superstition, Japanese Consul Chinda Suteomi informed his superiors in Tokyo, people at all levels of society viewed the excavation and removal of corpses with utter abhorrence. The consul, overlooking the value of family tombs in Japanese society and writing with an assured tone of imperialistic arrogance, dismissed Chinese disquiet over the violation of fundamental familial bonds and affect as unmodern.64 Chinda nonetheless acknowledged that the movement of graves in Suzhou was not to be taken lightly. The area’s great wealth and the social prominence of many city lineages was notorious for fostering an ostensibly universal addiction to luxury, which had made “Wu customs” an object of moral censure for centuries. Families spent lavish amounts, sometimes amassing severe debt, on the exacting observance of obsequies, including the purchase of a grave site endowed with superior fengshui. The extravagance Suzhou people dissipated on mourning rituals was, from the perspective of moralistic scolds at least, less an expression of filial piety than a non-Confucian preoccupation with social status—whether in the present through the public demonstration of a family’s wealth and propriety, or the future through the intervention of ancestral spirits and the numenal influence of their graves.65 The Qing authorities, for their part, were quite aware of the sanctity of family graves, as well as the complex, long-standing conflict between moral and economic concerns over the disposition of land. In China, as in most urbanized societies, legal writings, state fiats, and belles-lettres from ancient and medieval times onward document a perennial struggle over the respective rights of the quick and the dead to occupy urban land. In the event, these concerns did not matter, though they might have under different circumstances. As it turned out very few of the graves belonged to wealthy mandarin lineages. The vast majority were tombs of poor folk buried in charitable graveyards or anonymous plots. Impoverished families reliant upon the philanthropy of charitable cemeteries could hardly afford to fight the order, nor did they possess a commanding social position imperiled by the removal of their kin’s remains. Zhang and local officials did not hesitate to order the graves removed and construct the road. Chinda’s scornful characterization of the sanctity of graves as unmodern was therefore not without merit. In this particular case, the balance between the prerogatives of the city’s poor and their ancestors shifted in light of the unique and powerful benefits of modern urban planning and development. Moreover, attitudes on this subject were changing fast. The simultaneous creation of concession areas in Suzhou and Hangzhou (where some 500 graves were affected) led to massive disinterment and reburial operations, which in turn

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provoked close media scrutiny and editorial discussion about burial practices and beliefs. As one Shenbao editorial argued, popular belief in the determinative influence of lineage graves on general family welfare was one of the clearest and most infamous examples of the failure of Chinese customs to measure up to contemporary foreign standards of civilization. Shenbao echoed centuries of Confucian criticism of popular funerary practices to condemn the fetishization of grave location as “foolish, loathsome, and not sanctioned by the Classics.” Yet the Shenbao editorialists marshaled this traditionalist analysis to redress a uniquely contemporary crisis: in attacking fengshui as ignorant superstition, foreigners were correct in deriding China as backward. Fengshui and a plethora of other traditional beliefs were both a manifestation and cause of Chinese national weakness, which allowed foreign nations to oppress the empire with impunity.66 In order for China to repel foreign incursions and exercise its rightful sovereignty, concerned patriots would have to uproot fengshui and other noxious popular traditions. Other commentary argued more positively that the fastidious treatment of corpses should rightfully be celebrated as both a general humane and a particularly Chinese cultural imperative that demonstrated the distinctively Confucian moral excellence of Qing society. After all, one commentator asked, were not arrangements “ ‘to inter skeletons and bury putrefying flesh’ a sign of superior governance” in ancient times, not to mention the present?67 In 1896 Suzhou, superior moral, government, and economic order all prevailed. The governor and county officials ordered that all corpses be removed from the Qingyangdi site before construction commenced. As with many other public works and philanthropic enterprises, the Qing state, with its meager budget and small bureaucracy, did not assume responsibility for the removal. The moral and practical challenges of clearing the Qingyangdi of the dead was first taken up by the Xilei and Kangji benevolent societies, which “gathered untold thousands, ten-thousands, hundred millions of [loose, scattered] human bones and buried them” in a respectful manner. Some families also relocated the tombs of their relatives. Nonetheless, as the beginning of construction drew close, numerous graves remained. In some cases, they had been abandoned, had no surviving family caretakers, or contained anonymous dead. In other cases, identifiable relatives were living, yet the bodies had not been moved because the family could not afford the cost of removing and entombing the remains. The benevolent associations thus gathered money and workmen to remove, encoffin, and take charge of the remains by placing them in their own charitable ossuary—at two taels per coffin plus immediate and long-term custodial fees, not an inconsiderable financial, not to mention moral, obligation.68 However, diplomatic obligations and the economic benefits of clearing the land, with the

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latter presumably assuming more significance to the gentry and businessman supporters of the benevolent societies, outweighed the costs. In Suzhou, Shanghai, and Hangzhou, indeed wherever they had been built, concessions and horse-roads had been constructed on burial grounds. To a large extent, this systematic plunder was necessary; cemeteries were one of the few sources of unbuilt land near Jiangnan’s commercially vibrant cities. Moral qualms regarding disrespect to the dead were mitigated by the dynamic growth of horse-road commerce. As a Shenbao editorialist argued on the basis of the Shanghai experience, “[t]he concession was formerly an area for collecting bodies, an unbroken vista of mournful weeds and white willows. However from the time that Westerners broke ground and built horse-roads and bridges, these field tombs and grave pathways have all become level, easy thoroughfares.” Furthermore, “once built suddenly the entire area transforms. . . with commerce improving daily,” and the road played the fundamental role in the transformation.69 Against this novel modern formula for economic urban development, local society’s onus toward the dead could be (and was) revised to accommodate a new street. Soon it would become clear whether the horse-road, once built, would satisfy official and popular expectations by catalyzing the city’s commercial development.

Leisure, Economy, and the Street Go out Chang Gate and down to the Pan Gate (horse) road; by the weeping willow there is a painted pavilion [both are associated with bordellos].—Late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Suzhou popular saying.70

The horse-road proved a stunning popular success before it was even built, although not in the ways intended by its planners. Upon the breaking of ground, the novelty of the construction made the site a popular spot for leisure crowds from the city. Shenbao noted that “city people have been seeing what they have never seen before and all are coming to view the sights,” coming in such numbers that “gentlemen and ladies. . . have been rushing, jostling one another, to come marvel” at the creation of the “concession’s unsurpassed flat roads.”71 Almost immediately, “those seeking profits” had cleared the weeds and assembled crude shacks in which they opened wine shops, teahouses, restaurants, and opium divans to serve the spectators. With the crowds, the immense expanse of the half-built mills with chimneys that towered over the low city, the ongoing horseroad construction, and the thriving leisure establishments, the scene was unlike anything previously seen in the city. The spectacle was such that another report hyperbolically declared one could “go a few steps from Pan Gate and feel as if you’ve opened your eyes onto a bustling vista. It has truly surpassed the city

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center”—in novelty and license, if nothing else. Even the provincial governor’s May clearing of businesses housed in shacks illegally squatting on state property did not stall the quarter’s rapid development.72 By early July of 1896, several specially constructed, permanent “public resorts” had replaced the original complement of rude huts. With such an expeditious beginning, it seemed as if the new street might indeed live up to its name and prove to be an opulent quarter (qingyangdi). As a North-China Herald correspondent noted, the Suzhou horse-road already merited comparison with la mode Shanghai: three of the Suzhou establishments novelly combined a teahouse with an opium den and were as large as the grand leisure palaces located along Shanghai’s Fuzhou Road. With people coming from the walled city and neighboring villages to get a glimpse of the new road and foreign concession area, all of the new establishments were “daily filled to overflowing.” The thriving social life along the Chinese section of the road contrasted starkly with the desolation of the Japanese concession, which, still bereft of any buildings, was nothing but bare ground.73 The rapidity of this transformation reflected Zhang Zhidong’s decision that the Shangwuju should compensate for its chronic dearth of funding by developing real estate speculation as a secondary investment strategy and much needed additional revenue source. Though initial construction costs would be quite high, Zhang was confident that development would recover all costs and generate profits that could be successively reinvested to fund further real estate speculation and extend the road until it eventually reached past Chang Gate, where it would connect up with the steamboat wharves and the projected Shanghai-Nanjing railway.74 In this way, the horse-road might form the central artery for the entire network of modern Suzhou industry, commerce, and transport. This rash of popular entertainment and entrepreneurial activity came at an extreme cost to a marginalized population of homeless vagrants, indigent native “small people,” and immigrant “guest people” whom the Shangwuju had dispossessed to lay claim to the area. Guest people was a catchall term for those who had left their native place, whether in search of greater opportunity or because they had been rendered homeless by famine, flood, or war. Viewed as outsiders, sometimes for generations, guest people formed a subaltern group eking out their living on the edges of the economy and, according to popular perception, the law. Given the vicissitudes of weather, the economy, and social stability, guest people could be found all over China, including Suzhou. Those living in late-nineteenth-century Jiangnan were a varied lot. Some were refugees from northern Jiangsu fleeing famine in the wake of the Taiping Uprising or

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later hunger in Hunan, Hubei, Henan, and northern Jiangsu during the 1880s. Others had come from Zhejiang during the 1880s. Their different mores and customs made them unpopular and an object of suspicion among many natives. Furthermore, by competing with natives for the best fields, the “guests” had earned a reputation for being contentious and difficult. Evicting such marginal groups thus probably cost officials little political capital among native Suzhou people. Yet their ouster at the hands of the local administration was a tragic irony, for the state had actively recruited them to reclaim the swaths of land abandoned during the Taiping violence and still left fallow decades later.75 Relatively few of these residents held legal title or had ever paid taxes on their land. Because state compensation rates were based on the previous agricultural taxes paid for the area, the official prices were quite low. Land was appropriated for a paltry fifty taels/mu (thirty taels for the permanent subsoil rights and twenty taels for the agriculturally productive topsoil rights), while buildings were assessed at only fifty taels a structure—half the originally announced price.76 Such meager compensation had moved a delegation of the already desperate Qingyangdi residents to parade into the city carrying sticks of burning incense in a gesture of supplication. They then proceeded to the southern military parade ground where the governor was reviewing troops to forcibly gain a hearing for their pleas for redress. As it turned out, the governor had already departed and their petition had no effect.77 Cheaply acquired, this land then sold at a premium as teahouse, wine shop, and shipping company proprietors were willing to “fight first and worry later” to secure a commercial site along the new horse-road. The frenzy for commercial property created a bull land market: property in the vicinity of the horse-road was selling on average for 1,000 taels per mu, that is, several times the set official price for land within the adjoining foreign concessions. At the same time, the Shangwuju was busily constructing Chinese-style buildings as commercial properties, as well as “Shanghai native type” houses in a hybrid foreign-Chinese treaty-port architectural style. Anticipating that the land in front of the houses would soon become a busy street linked to the adjacent foreign concessions, local people were so eager to claim an advantageous spot in the new suburb that all the sites sold for premium prices before this road had been completed.78 By early 1897 the area outside Pan Gate, which had been dotted with graves or shanties the previous spring, had already transformed into a thriving, highpriced suburb “packed with people and smoke.” Institutional investors such as the Shangwuju and Yangwuju (the local Foreign-Affairs Bureau, which also developed many properties along the street) and individual speculators were already profiting handsomely on their investments.79

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f i g . 4 . City canal and bridge outside Pan Gate, showing (r.) warehouses outside the city wall and (l.) buildings along the horse-road, ca. 1910. Source: Haku K¯osei, Sosh¯u meish¯o no annaiki (Suzhou: Kitahara T¯oy¯odo, 1910), photo 3. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Moral Challenges of the Horse-Road: Western Architecture In addition to being lucrative, the horse-road also proved to be a powerful agent of cultural and technological change. In addition to the macadam road and the mechanized textile mills (three were built by the turn of the century), the street introduced the area to many of the distinctive artifacts of modern urban material culture, including horse carriages, rickshaws, indoor electric lighting, telephones (introduced in 1898), state-administered street lights (first gas-lit and then starting in 1910, a year before their spread to the city, electric), and Westernstyle architecture. In fact, the rapid growth of the area as a leisure quarter for the urban population initiated Suzhou into the late Qing urban mania for things foreign. The notion of foreign culture, as something to be partaken at leisure, became, perhaps, one of the horse-road’s most popular commodities. Occidental buildings were among the first and, in some ways, most arresting evidence of the spread of foreign material culture from Shanghai and other treaty ports to cities inland. In Suzhou the new horse-road police and Maritime Customs, both organized along foreign lines and led by Qing-appointed foreign personnel in an attempt to simultaneously demonstrate Chinese mastery of

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foreign technics and quell foreign complaints of Chinese malfeasance, were each housed in foreign-style structures.80 The choice of alien architecture seems to have been intended to bolster the yamens’ (i.e., government offices) foreign bona fides. Business and gentry elites sometimes demonstrated a similar essentialist logic by finding Western-style edifices (or, more accurately, ersatz Westernstyled structures) most appropriate for activities viewed as distinctively foreign and domestic buildings best suited for Chinese ones. For example, some donors bankrolling the new schools offering Western curricula, which sprouted up shortly after the city was opened as a treaty port, elected to construct foreign buildings to house their institutions.81 The contemporary enthusiasm for foreign architecture was so marked that officials in Shashi, Hubei Province, one of the other cities opened as a treaty port under the Shimonoseki accord, contemplated erecting Western-style buildings to spur forward the development of its own horse-road.82 It is unclear whether the Suzhou Shangwuju and Yangwuju initially speculated in foreign-style commercial buildings (as opposed to residences), though they did when the road was extended during the late 1890s and 1900s.83 Nonetheless, because much of the horse-road real estate was officially owned, with both local bureaus collecting rents, many of foreign-style buildings lining the horse-road likely represented attempts by bureau officials and, perhaps, the Shangwuju’s literati-merchant investor-directors to harness the burgeoning local Occidentalism for the development of the horse-road. Or, if not officials, then ordinary businessmen. Irrespective of the bureaus’ actions, according to a spring 1897 Shenbao report, “[w]ithin the last year or so in Suzhou, everyone seeking a profit has put up a resplendent looking facade imitating the Western-style on his buildings” to increase the patronage of his business or the desirability of his property by appearing attractively a` la mode. As such, not a single one of the horse-road’s or center city Guanqian Street’s numerous new entertainment establishments, whether teahouse, wine tavern, opium divan, or photography studio, “had not followed precedent and added to its excellence, with the overall effect dazzling the eye.” This trend had attracted official scrutiny and concern. Many of these Western edifices had been built, at least initially, by crews of Ningbo carpenters and artisans, who had been brought some 115 miles to Suzhou on account of their long-standing familiarity with Western construction methods and design. Once in the city, some guest workers had become embroiled in public disturbances, inviting the special attentions of the constabulary and city jailers, and earning the group general notoriety as a dangerous alien force. More fundamentally, Governor Zhao Shuqiao had personally appraised the new Occidental palaces and expressed unequivocal disapproval. The governor found such lavish spending on the adornment of buildings in his own provincial seat excessive, if not reprehensible. He therefore ordered the Wu,

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Yuanhe, and Changshu xian magistrates to identify those who had so flagrantly violated state sumptuary laws and then dispatch runners to detain the offenders and destroy the offensive architecture. Despite the crackdown, landlords and proprietors were unswayed in their enthusiasm for the commercial benefits of an exotic foreign facade. In the days following the state-ordered demolition, builders and other craftsmen were uncommonly busy repairing the damage.84 The construction of ornate architectural facades, like the free-spending on opium, banquets, and elite courtesans in the public houses within, represented a morally objectionable form of commerce. According to Confucian politicaleconomic thought, the conspicuous consumption of luxuries and pursuit of lavish entertainments were “superfluous things” that perverted the imperative that economic activity provides the people with basic sustenance with sybaritic dissipation. More pointedly, the general prevalence of luxury challenged two sacrosanct tenets of Qing state ideology: (1) the espousal of agriculture as the basis of an ideal social order, and (2) a corollary belief in limited economic growth.85 During the nineteenth century, these traditional notions of politicaleconomy had been increasingly attacked as inadequate in the face of the state’s deep-seated fiscal crisis and the gathering economic and military onslaught by imperialists. In particular, a succession of dire monetary crises during the 1820s and 1830s had precipitated iconoclastic and wide-ranging debates at court and in the scholarly world regarding the proper institutional response. These discussions had led many literati and merchant elite to conclude that the state and business circles should quickly adopt theretofore unorthodox or novel principles and practices, such as the superior morality of espousing economic growth, the necessity of aggressive state economic intervention, and the relaxation of strictures on the assumption of debt. Yet this pointed exploration did not forge a clear philosophical or institutional consensus, nor was it invulnerable to attacks by conservative officials who supported more traditional, noninterventionist approaches to the management of the economy.86 At the same time, the ascendance of growth-oriented ideals of economic life did not remove the enduring association between luxury and decadence, which underlay both Governor Zhao’s displeasure and the sumptuary regulations he attempted to enforce. The Shangwuju and its promotion of real estate speculation represented an effective application of these economic innovations, yet the horse-road’s immediate commercial dynamism did not qualify as an unmitigated success. In contrast to the vision of Zhang Zhidong and other economic nationalists who hoped to raise the fortunes of Suzhou and China as a whole through industrial development, the street thrived not as an entrepˆot or trading and manufacturing hub but as a center of urban leisure and entertainment. To officials and business people for whom industrial growth remained the preferable, normative mode of

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economic activity, the growth and management of the horse-road thus presented a fundamental moral and political-economic dilemma. On the horse-road western architectural facades, prostitution, and opium were not superfluous luxuries; they were quickly becoming mainstays of the street’s commercial life. It is unclear whether others in officialdom or society at large shared Governor Zhao’s disquiet. Yet the governor was not the only one who had been made uneasy by the ornate Occidental structures. The appearance of alien buildings along the horse-road had aroused the suspicions of peasants living a few li outside the city and helped engender a panic that convulsed the entire area. On July 19, 1896, some Western merchants living in Suzhou and their Chinese servants ventured sight-seeing north of the city. At Lumu village five li outside the city, a large crowd of rural urchins surrounded them cajoling, “Foreign Devils! Foreign Devils!” The irritated Westerners responded by intemperately brandishing their pistols, while their servants loudly threatened that the foreigners would come and get anyone who misbehaved. The children fled terrified, and were quickly replaced by a seething, armed mob of parents and other villagers who might have permanently ended the city dwellers’ travels had not an official happened upon the scene and dispersed the crowd. Boat traffic conveyed the news of the foreigners’ nefariousness, so that by the next day the countryside north of the city was rife with reports that Westerners were stealing children to bury them alive as supports for the Occidental buildings going up along the Pan Gate horse-road. In the eyes of peasants living throughout the region, the foreign-style structures, with their large foundations and imposing height, appeared too heavy for the native water-logged soil. Drawing on popular beliefs about the utility of soul stealing and other black magic in building construction, rural people reasoned that the overweight Western structures required some enchanted intervention to prevent them from sinking. On July 20, panicked parents took their children and fled for safety. In all, an exodus of perhaps some “tens of thousands” sought refuge from the marauding foreigners and their voracious buildings by evacuating to Suzhou city or even farther afield to Changshu xian to the north, leaving the countryside “as deserted as if laid waste in war.” Then the next day, in a development Shenbao mordantly characterized as “truly pathetic but also laughable,” all water transport between Suzhou city and Dangkou, some forty li to the north, came to a stop for three days as news of the outrage spread further. Though left unstated in news reports, the hysteria was fundamentally based on an incorrect premise: the buildings rising along the horse-road were being built by the Qing state administration and elite Chinese investors, not Western merchants. These arrangements had been announced by various city yamens, closely reported in the press, discussed in public, and viewed by holiday crowds

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from the city. Nonetheless, testifying to the gulfs of class and place separating local informational and cultural networks, peasants living only a few li outside the city were ignorant of these facts. Rather, to people in Lumu and beyond, the foreign style of the unfamiliar horse-road structures identified them as wholly “Western” buildings, which naturally would be constructed only by Westerners, that is, white European or North American merchants. The Japanese, whose military victory was indirectly responsible for the construction, were not associated with the buildings, as demonstrated a few days later when a temporary panic in Yongchang Village twenty li northwest was provoked by a false sighting of a boatload of Western kidnapping devils—and was calmed when the passengers turned out to be Japanese. Peasants of the area seem to have assumed a direct, ethnically exclusive correlation between the Occidental origin, local function, ownership, and cultural marking of the buildings as “Western.” They did not imagine that these alien structures were actually being constructed at the behest of leading Qing officials and businessmen. Contemporary editorialists were immediately drawn to the incident and probed it for insights into popular views of Western material culture, Westerners, and the general nature of Chinese society. Exactly what aspect of these Western buildings had proven so disruptive? Furthermore, what was the origin of such concerns, and what did their prevalence reveal? Considering these matters, writers in Shenbao answered, “Whatever enmity Westerners have for Chinese, and superstitious fear Chinese harbor toward Westerners, all originates in rumor.” While the culpability for idle, ignorant talk and its shaming effects might lie with Chinese and foreigners alike, the Shenbao editorialists shamefacedly declared that the stigma of such nonsense fell more heavily on the Chinese. Westerners might be intolerant. Yet, the prevalence of baseless tales of “Westerners gouging out eyeballs or kidnapping and murdering children to make potent medicines” or interring them alive to construct buildings made it seem that “Chinese remained primitive addled fools,” whose actions could easily lead to “disaster”: senseless violence, mayhem, and the inevitable foreign response, whether in public opinion, diplomacy, and/or military reprisal. Thus, Shenbao concluded, the main blame for the child-stealing hysteria lay not with the Westerners’ boorishly belligerent provocation, but in the mendacity of “bandit” rumormongers and the gullibility of “foolish rural folk.”87 Local and national honor were potentially at stake in every exchange between foreigners and Chinese, and even in local people’s responses to the changing cityscape. What could be said for the civilizational level or economic and political destiny of a nation in which the untutored xenophobic mass could be unnerved and stirred to murderous rage by the appearance of modish Occidental buildings?88 The editorialists left their question unanswered.

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Their tacit pessimism at the level of popular folly may have had its merits. Their critique, however, overlooked the extent to which these Western buildings and the circumstances of their construction both defied and transformed cultural ideals regarding the built environment, commerce, morality, and social order. In the end, buildings were not the only appropriated alien technology with socially disruptive effects. The area’s unique array of foreign material culture and other novel forms of entertainment spawned several unanticipated and controversial challenges to gender mores, notions of publicness, and other basic categories of social life.

Women in the Street Judging from mid- and late-nineteenth-century accounts of the city’s social life, it is clear that unlike in some places in the north, in Suzhou women customarily maintained a lively presence on the streets. Middle-class women freely frequented the city’s shops, outdoor markets, and famous gardens, often unaccompanied by male chaperones.89 Even so, within months of the initial groundbreaking, the horse-road had already triggered dramatic and, to some, nefarious challenges to orthodox norms of gender propriety by becoming a major leisure destination for male and female city residents. As reported in Dianshizhai Pictorial during the summer of 1897: Seductive Countenance Induces Lust Since the opening of the Japanese concession in the Qingyangdi quarter of Suzhou, the area’s commerce has grown more flourishing each day. Nonetheless, the concession presently contains very few residences. Much undeveloped wasteland remains. Suzhou people, whose experience is limited to what they see and hear, brag that the area is already a hot and lively quarter. As a result, there have been some unprecedented developments: fluttering shadows and perfumed vestments criss-cross the quarter as pairings of ladies have taken to promenading through the quarter. The Suzhou leisured pleasure seekers are a mixed group. A few days back, the gorgeously attired and enticingly seductive young mistress of an official gentry family and her maid, a beauty as lovely as a passing cloud, were at Heaven’s Happiness Teahouse. They were experiencing the sensual pleasures of song and dance, enjoying themselves with such enthusiasm that they became covered with sweat. After the last musical selection, their clothes soiled, they had to clean themselves up. So, the lotus feet set off on the road toward an unbuilt, deserted area in order to take some night air. The women were walking alone when suddenly they were aware of a large group [of men] following behind, volubly commenting on their appearance and deportment. Some of the men menacingly lurched towards the young mistress, who was really between a rock and a hard place. Her trusty maid cried out in a loud voice, “The lady of my house is a woman of station, the daughter of a high official, and should not be treated discourteously!” and then called for the police. A constable arrived, saving

54 / r o a d s t o m o d e r n i t y the young mistress who then returned home. From this one can see that young ladies should not be able to indiscriminately leave the Inner Chambers [the women’s section of a house]. All household heads should restrict the female members of their families.90

The accompanying illustration provided a counterpoint to the text’s staid endorsement of orthodox patriarchal norms by illustrating just how common the female presence on the road had become. The altercation was depicted in the foreground, where the official’s daughter, easily identified by her fan, opulent dress, and tiny bound feet, leans for support on her natural or lightly bound footed serving maid while surrounded by a crowd of male harassers and onlookers. Moving from the background toward the fore, a lone patrolman of the new horse-road constabulary, races to the scene. The policeman has just passed three more promenaders, two women in the company of a male escort, two of whom gaze back toward the running policeman and the developing fracas.

f i g . 5 . “Seductive Countenance Induces Lust”: a high official’s daughter and her maid walk to a teahouse on the horse-road and are harassed, summer of 1897. Source: “Yerong huiyin,” Dianshizhai huabao ([ca. 1897]; rpt.; Guangzhou: Guangdong renmin chubanshe, 1983), zhen:85b–86a.

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The point of contention was not simply women’s use of the street, but the general licitness of women’s presence in public and its affects on area morals. These perennial moral concerns had been stirred anew by the newfound vogue for promenading. The Dianshizhai account demonstrably exaggerated the strictness with which local society had previously observed orthodox standards of gender propriety. It is, however, clear that by luring men and women, singly and in mixed- or single-sex groups, to stroll along the road around the outskirts of the city, the horse-road had provoked “unprecedented developments.” Midnineteenth-century compendia of local customs noted that it was common for men and women to indulge in walks about the grounds of city attractions such as the Xuanmiao guan Daoist Temple, especially on festive occasions such as the Chinese New Year.91 Strolls in elite gardens had also long been popular with gentle society, yet it seems that rambles through the streets had not constituted an explicit popular form of quotidian entertainment. With the advent of the horse-road, however, leisure promenades (and later, drives) along the course of the improved street became—and for several decades remained—a popular fair weather pastime for male and female Suzhou residents alike.92 Though curiosity regarding the horse-road quarter or the new fad itself may have helped spark the initial enthusiasm for horse-road walks, it seems likely that the origin of the popular taste for promenades partly lay with the structure of the street itself. One could speculate that the sudden vogue for horse-road promenades among middle- and upper-class women was partly due to the simple fact that the broad, level road surface provided relatively easy passage for women walking on bound “lotus” feet. In any case, they quickly availed themselves of the recreational opportunities afforded by this new milieu and soon made up many of the revelers along its course. To conservative Confucian moralists, the orthodox literati ideal that women should be confined to the Inner Chamber provided a fundamental means of protecting society from the dissolution and lawlessness born of unbridled lasciviousness and all manner of improper social relations. Female presence in public leisure establishments constituted such a stark transgression of orthodox mores that it had long been viewed as portending general social disintegration. The quixotic Dianshizhai editorial against female promenades resonated with recurrent attempts to proscribe women from mixing in public places such as teahouses or theaters in order to establish a traditionalist social order, which would purportedly trigger a return to the classical order of rites and propriety. The most recent instance of this precedent had occurred thirty years before when Governor Ding Richang, attempting to reestablish Confucian morality and Imperial power after the Taiping interregnum, prohibited women from entering teahouses. Embroidering on a well-known passage from Mencius, Ding

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argued that only “[w]hen men and women avoid contact, going so far as to walk on different sides of the street, then is propriety upheld.” He then ordered that the guarantor of any teahouse that admitted women would be sentenced to two months in the cangue. As with the Dianshizhai article, the actual effect of Ding’s regulation remains unclear. However, the prim sexual moralism animating both efforts dominated influential Suzhou circles well into the Republic. Ding’s precedent remained praiseworthy among conservative Confucian scholars who approvingly quoted long passages of it in the 1933 Wu xian gazetteer. Unlike many places in Jiangnan, where such legal proscriptions had been abandoned, men and women were banned from performing together in theaters along the horse-road and elsewhere in the city until 1925, and even then, audiences at many public performances (particularly those in teahouses) remained segregated by sex.93 The Dianshizhai article also resonated with nascent anxieties regarding the horse-road as a site of disorder and danger, especially for young unaccompanied women, as a result of several recent infamous incidents. The brutal gang rape of a young woman by five horse-carters along the road late one June night had earned prominent discussion in the press. Similarly, in the spring Shenbao had reported on the daily harassment of young female mill workers by toughs and louts who frequented area inns and congregated about the factory gates at day’s end. Contemporary comment blamed the former on lax Qing officials, who then failed to pursue the case with the same vigor as the foreign-led police. The latter phenomenon, however, was attributed to the advent of the textile mills, which preferred to hire female operatives and had newly impressed large numbers of women into the industrial labor force. As one reporter noted, textile mills had spawned the exact same predicament in Shanghai, where the mass of young women workers were subject to daily harassment on their way to and from work.94 Suzhou was thus experiencing one of the unfortunate and perhaps seemingly inevitable consequences of urban industrial growth. Dense with seedy bars and inns, yet isolated from the main centers of population and foot traffic within the city wall, the horse-road was a new urban frontier where the administration of law was uncertain. This reality may have endowed the report’s closing admonition, “All household heads should restrict the female members of their families,” with particular force. Whether they were sitting in teahouses, promenading, or walking to and from work, the presence of women along the horse-road did presage significant changes in the city’s social order. At the same time, the seeming upsurge of violence and other outrages against them provided a chastening comment regarding the dangerous instabilities of urban change.

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New Teahouses: The Changing Space of Consumption Many of the teahouses along the horse-road, including Heaven’s Happiness Teahouse, which had attracted the official’s daughter and her servant during their stroll, were harbingers of commercial and social innovation. When the new teahouses opened their doors during the summer of 1896, the North China Herald correspondent excitedly announced the transferal of Shanghai’s sophisticated boulevard culture inland to Suzhou. In scale, appearance, and manner, these new public establishments were quite unlike the teahouses clustered near the Xuanmiao guan or in other areas of the city center.95 Their arrival represented more than the appearance of new leisure spots: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, teahouses in Shanghai and other metropolises were at the forefront of social change, simultaneously reflecting and stimulating shifts in social attitudes toward publicness and mass material culture. Recalling his first trip to Shanghai in 1884, Bao Tianxiao described being in awe of the imposing teahouses along Fuzhou Road and other boulevards of the foreign quarter. These establishments were some of the most popular destinations within the Shanghai horse-road pleasure quarter and helped create its distinctive hubbub. To a boy from Suzhou, they seemed uncommonly large and quite different from anything that he had encountered inland. Often several stories tall (buildings of more than two stories were unusual in Suzhou and most other cities), these Shanghai establishments were built on a massive scale, combining huge, wide-open, unobstructed public spaces and intimate seating—not to mention divans where serving girls catered to male clients’ desires for tea, opium, and sometimes sex. Suzhou teahouses, even if quite large, generally maintained a distinctive geographic identity by offering teas, food, and sometimes the entertainment of one particular region. Several of the newer Shanghai horse-road establishments, by contrast, offered an unparalleled variety of regional teas and foods, a development that bespoke of the broadening of public taste as well as the creation of a more-inclusive consumer culture.96 With the completion of the Suzhou horse-road, these mass-oriented, regionally and culturally inclusive establishments came to dominate the local teahouse trade and other segments of the leisure entertainment sector. These shifts in the architecture of taste resonated with a general latenineteenth-century broadening of public culture that was reflected in the compounded effects of newspapers and other new media, novel habits of leisure, and an increasing belief that civil society should take a more active role in the regulation of local and national society. In Suzhou, the horse-road helped provide a physical site and social milieu for the local distillation of a more socially inclusive public. The horse-road teahouses, theaters, and other leisure

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spots provided grand, socially heterogeneous venues where customers were able to encounter people and cultural activities beyond the family, native-place, professional, or other networks that normally structured quotidian existence. Similarly, the road served as a uniquely inclusive forum for sociability, its broad expanse surpassing any street or temple courtyard within the city. (Temple courtyards often served as the most important form of public space in late Imperial Chinese cities, which did not contain parks or squares, and accommodated state functions, public charity, marketing, pilgrimage, politics, and leisure.) The street and the businesses it engendered constituted a transitional step toward the creation of mass-consumer society and the consolidation of increasingly broad local, regional, and national social publics and identities, which would foment the political and social revolutions of the late Qing and Republican periods. The growth of new leisure entertainments along the horse-road came at the expense of some previously popular, long-established cultural forms. As one Republican ethnographer wistfully noted, after the opening of the city as a treaty port and the building of the horse-road, Suzhou’s most venerable Yangzhou-style teahouse had closed its doors, never to reopen. Given the wholesale transformation of the city’s urban atmosphere and customs, the distinctive, rarefied ambiance of Yangzhou-style establishments was no longer popular.97 New mass forms of entertainment and spaces of consumption and association were on the ascendant.

Horse-Carriages as Popular Entertainment In his memoirs, Bao Tianxiao noted that during the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s, a ride in a horse-carriage was a mandatory ritual for visitors from Suzhou and other interior locations when they traveled to Shanghai.98 The phenomenon was so pronounced that in 1874 the Shanghai British consul Medhurst spoke of “whole families coming, it is said, all the way from Soochow [then one and a half to two plus days distant by boat] to secure the coveted drive in a foreign vehicle” as proof of Chinese curiosity toward and initial acceptance of the products and technologies of foreign material civilization as beneficial and even necessary components of contemporary urban life.99 It is difficult to say if contemporary Chinese imbued horse carriages and other artifacts of foreign material culture with such significance. However, literary and mass media sources do demonstrate that people in Jiangnan viewed the new horse-roads and their panoply of uniquely urban modern amusements with interest and even fascination. Horse carriages, in particular, appear to have been the object of a great amount of public curiosity and subject of much public discussion. The pages

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of the Dianshizhai Pictorial and other papers, presented readers in Suzhou, Shanghai, and other places with a barrage of stories chronicling the effects of the horse carriage on urban social life. In addition to their value as news and prurient entertainment, these reports also served an important pedagogical purpose for readers in Suzhou and other places where many foreign technologies were new or not yet known. Horse-carriage mishaps were a particularly favorite news item. Whether involving two carriages, a carriage and a rickshaw, an unlucky pedestrian or street-side vendor, or a runaway horse, all depicted the particular danger of improved streets, where serious accidents and injury were the obverse of benefits such as increased speed and ease of transport. As both a fabulous spectacle and roving menace, the horse carriage was represented as the most characteristically modern mode of transportation, synonymous with the new roads.100 With the opening of the bund road, however, horse-carriage rides and other urban recreations along the Suzhou horse-road became, in turn, a regional attraction for people from inland Jiangsu like the Nine-Tailed Turtle’s fictional protagonist Zhang Qiugu. Indeed, the area’s development can be traced through the proliferation of horse carriages and rickshaws, which offered the exotic delights of foreign technology and speed. Horse carriages first appeared on the Suzhou road shortly after the Chinese New Year in 1897, when several horse carriages for hire started taking passengers on pleasure rides. Horse carriages seem to have achieved almost instantaneous success as popular entertainment. The Imperial Maritime Customs inspector, writing a few weeks after their introduction, explained that “on fine days the road is crowded with people [pointedly, “gentlemen and ladies,” in the Chinese version of this text] from the city, amusing themselves walking and driving.”101 For two Mexican dollars a passenger could indulge in a ride all the way along the road and back, either singly or in the company of as many friends as could be crowded into the vehicle.102 Considering that the contemporary fare for a one-way steamboat passage to Shanghai cost $0.40 (Mexican) for second class, and $0.20 for third (deck) class and that two dollars represented an inordinate portion of many working people’s monthly wage, horse-carriage rides were an expensive luxury.103 Nonetheless, the immediate city and surrounding area contained a sizable population both willing and able to pay the high fare. By December of 1898, there were forty carriages; five months later, the number of carriages for hire had grown to seventy-five.104 Furthermore, horse carriages were not the only type of modern transport entertainment to be found along the street. Rickshaws had been invented in Japan in the late 1860s and were first brought to China by a French entrepreneur, who sponsored their appearance on the streets of Shanghai on March 24, 1874. As recent foreign inventions that were largely unsuitable for the streets of most Chinese cities, rickshaws and

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bicycles (the first commercially successful foot-pedaled bikes, velocipedes, dated from the 1860s) were extremely rare in China. Nonetheless, within months of the horse-road’s completion, pullers were hauling rickshaws along the length of the Suzhou horse-road, while a few adventurous locals pedaled the same course. The celerity with which rickshaws appeared on the street in Suzhou highlights the central role of Shanghai in the spread of modern material civilization throughout China. By virtue of its close proximity to the larger treaty port, the Suzhou horse-road was connected to a truly international technological network. From its very beginning, the street became a showcase for imported transport and industrial technology, as well as Shanghai street culture. During the Republic, the lives of impoverished rickshaw pullers attracted the attention of many urban social reformers and became the subject of social surveys, reportage literature, and, most famously, Lao She’s novel Rickshaw. Through this examination, rickshaw pullers became powerful symbols of class oppression in contemporary Chinese society. The rickshaw, by requiring backbreaking human labor, became, as Hu Shi noted in 1926, a sign of the backwardness and callousness of “Eastern civilization” versus the West, “automobile civilization.”105 These negative associations, along with fears that rickshaw pullers constituted a new dangerous urban underclass, were quick to develop. Yet, in 1896, on the occasion of their first appearance, rickshaws remained a new, quick, and, as yet, ideologically unsullied modern convenience. The early rickshaws used in Suzhou remained unwieldy contraptions. With a tall, sharply pitched seat set on a sturdy iron frame with iron wheels, they were known more for speed than comfort. (Improvements such as a lighter frame and rubber tires, first solid and then pneumatic, which increased the smoothness of the ride and the vehicle’s overall appeal, did not arrive until the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century.) Nonetheless, the twenty-one rigs initially imported from Shanghai in 1896 proved extremely popular, their numbers quickly increasing until there were 500 working the road by 1900.106 It may seem tempting to interpret this proliferation of rickshaws as constituting something of a revolution, but this was hardly a step toward Zhang Zhidong’s vision of improved transport fostering commercial and industrial expansion. The lack of a carriage road had previously made European land transport technology impractical both outside and inside the city wall, yet the completion of the horse-road initially did little to change this situation. In light of the Suzhou horse-road’s attenuated one and a half mile course, which effectively led nowhere, the street was inconsequential as a venue of transportation. Similarly, horse carriages and rickshaws remained unimportant as means of transportation as long as they remained confined to the horse-road and made no significant impact on transportation needs within the walled city. (On account of the narrow streets, horse

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carts were not allowed to operate within the city until 1927. For similar reasons, even smaller-sized rickshaws were not allowed to work the city streets until 1921, with most gaining entry in 1924.)107 Their overwhelming popularity stemmed from their value as recreation. In fact, as entertainment they had inestimable value—not only in terms of the pleasure they provided, but also in terms of unforeseen corollary effects. Instead of provoking an immediate revolution in local transport and industry, the improved street and modern vehicles that ran upon it provided new forms of entertainment and conspicuous consumption, or gave rise to innovations in older, established ones, such as prostitution. Opium dens, wine houses, and other businesses offering sensual entertainments appeared along the horse-road when it was barely under construction, but it is unclear when the first brothel opened its doors. In any case, houses of pleasure soon achieved a prominent position within the social and physical streetscapes. As Shenbao reported in 1899, since the opening of the treaty port, the horse-road had grown into a forest of brothels and earned infamous renown as a favored assembly place for underworld figures. Recently, it had even attracted some of Shanghai’s more colorfully named toughs, including “Cloudy Reputation,” “Oily Mouth,” and “Paragon of Virtue,” who had rented properties in the area and become the proprietors of small bordellos and combination opium dens/brothels.108 Legally savvy entrepreneurs attempted to extend the pleasure quarter into the still undeveloped (and lightly taxed) Japanese concession to avoid paying the special horse-road brothel levy. (The Japanese authorities looked askance at these businesses and seem to have taxed them back to the horse-road or the city.)109 Other enterprising “shameless traitors” had opened a theater offering illegal Flower Drum Song performances, in which a man and a woman would dance and sing sexually charged lyrics chronicling romance and heartbreak while accompanying themselves on gong and drum, respectively.110 Similarly, the North China Herald reported with dismay that the horse-road had become a playground for the wealthy and their favorite courtesans, with horse-carriage rides quickly becoming a particularly favored recreation. It had become common to observe “the gilded youth and painted beauty of Soochow [in a rig] disport[ing] themselves freely” along the short span of the road, sometimes even engaging in competitive races with other carriages.111 This fad for taking horse-carriage rides in the company of courtesans was not a mere Suzhou epiphenomenon; it was mirrored in other southern cities with horseroads such as Hangzhou, where “gilded youth” were enamored of horse-carriage pleasure rides with “specially imported Soochow beauties of the tea-houses.”112 Newspaper writers did not view this revelry with equanimity and unanimously censured the trend as evidence of a troubling and vexingly widespread addiction to pleasure among Chinese. For some, the main issue was the proliferation

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and exhibition of vice. For others, however, the crux of concern was not moral turpitude, but its effects. People’s hedonistic impulses were perverting the proper utilitarian function of roads and carriages. If unchecked, this popular dissipation threatened to undermine the strategic economic development that Zhang Zhidong, the Shangwuju, their supporters, and an expectant public hoped to effect through the construction of the horse-road. As one Shanghai editorialist inveighed, unlike Westerners who built these roads out of their desire to accomplish things with speed, Chinese did so with an eye for recreation. “The majority of Chinese driving in carriages have no purpose. They view horse-rigs as invented uniquely for entertainment. Each time you look at the horse-road, there are people riding about on horseback, sitting in carriages with friends, or gallivanting with courtesans. . . . The horse-road has become a place where you simply must go.”113 Disporting with “no purpose” had ensured that the horseroads were used, yet the editorialist thought it unlikely that the movement of this pleasure-seeking throng through the city might, in itself, serve any useful economic purpose. Combining the delights of speed, sex, conspicuous consumption, and status, horse-carriage rides with favorite courtesans acquired such distinction that by the 1890s the practice had emerged as a novelistic trope conveying a sense of urban sophistication and privilege.114 The horse carriage was soon incorporated into the rituals of the brothel quarters in Suzhou, Shanghai, and elsewhere. The dusk-time flow of carriages bringing clients and courtesans to restaurants, hotels, teahouses, or theaters for their assignations became part of the horseroad’s rhythm. In fact, this daily spectacle came to be seen as one of Suzhou and Shanghai’s unique urban entertainments, and drew onlookers to the street. As one local writer later recalled “the entire street blowing with fragrant carriage dust. . . at twilight when most carriages contained men taking courtesans out for pleasure rides; it was enough to make us mere mortals cry out with admiring envy!” Given that this daily display advertised the wares of particular brothels, bordello owners maintained ornate house rigs so that each time house courtesans ventured out along the horse-road the brothel engaged in a tacit competition with other establishments for status and customers.115 The public identification between carriages and prostitutes was so complete that it seems that in Suzhou, women riding alone in open carriages were wont to be viewed as prostitutes, as they were in Shanghai.116 Late Qing and Republican media, novels, and guidebooks suggest that in terms of textual representations and people’s lived experience, the spread of brothels and flow of horse carriages (and, perhaps, the occasional bicycle, another Occidental erotic prop made all the more alluring by the fact that few women could ride them) along the horse-road affected a general sexualization of the space of the street.117

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Brothels, like any other type of business, were tied to the dominant mode of transport. However, the transformation of transportation within prostitution was much more than a practical matter. In the elegiac mode of many biji memoirs, the city’s splendid brothels and Flower Boats were symbolic of the flourishing and decline of Suzhou as a city. Prostitution had previously been centered in brothels located along canals both in and outside of the city or on the famous Flower Boats plying the canals outside the wall. With the completion of the horse-road, however, prostitution was reoriented along the street, bringing the decline of the allegedly gentle and sophisticated pleasures of the Flower Boats, and ushering in a new style of leisure. As the brothels went, so went the rest of Suzhou: together the bordello and the horse carriage helped mark the horse-road as the center of an ascendant pattern of urban circulation, leisure, and commerce.

Horse-Road Real Estate: Extending Speculation The financial difficulties that had initially plagued the Shangwuju mills continued unabated. After they were rented to Chinese manager-capitalists, they experienced the financial and supply problems, periodic closures, and labor difficulties common to many contemporary textile mills.118 The port similarly failed to meet initial expectations in terms of trade volume or revenue and, as the first customs inspector predicted in his inaugural annual report, never proved to be a great success.119 As the qianzhuang and pawnshops had foreseen, Suzhou was too close to Shanghai to develop as a major port for foreign trade or industrial center in its own right. This predicament effectively nullified the Japanese concession’s raison d’ˆetre and frustrated all attempts by Japanese authorities to foster the quarter’s growth. Commercially, however, the horse-road provided the Shangwuju with nothing less than a resounding (and remunerative) triumph due to its real estate speculation. As Zhang Zhidong had hoped, the surge of Shangwuju and private enterprise was so dynamic that the road did not remain stalled at Pan Gate for long. The initial section of horse-road had been in use for less than two years when the Shangwuju began extending it three miles north to Chang Gate. Officials’ horizons, however, extended even farther. In early 1897, while the street’s social life was still centered around Pan Gate, state officials were already buying land north of the city “with an eye on the coming ‘railway boom’ ” and the eventual further extension of the horse-road.120 The results, however, belied Zhang’s belief that state-planned development under the Shangwuju would result in smooth, cumulative growth. The extension of the road did not, as Zhang had expected, lead to the creation of a string of business areas coalescing into one integrated

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mart running the length of the city. Once the Chang Gate extension had been completed in early 1900, Pan Gate businesses all relocated to the new roadway between the city’s Xu [the southern gate on the western city wall, halfway between Chang and Pan Gates, and one of the main entrances onto the horse-road] and Chang Gates, because it was more easily accessible to the majority of city residents. Up the road, the abandonment of Pan Gate, provoked the appearance of “hosts of carriages and jinricshas, and new buildings rapidly lining its sides, tells of bustle and activity” and increasing land values. The exodus north was so great that by 1901 observers described the Pan Gate horse-road as deserted except for operatives going to and from their shifts at the Shangwuju textile mills. The recently established shops, theatres, opium saloons, and photography salons stood empty. (The area did, however, continue to be a popular residential tract.)121 Previously prime Pan Gate real estate soon dropped 50 to 90 percent in value. By 1907, a piece of land outside of Pan Gate, for which speculators (probably the Shangwuju) had received 1,000 taels/mu when the horse-road was first finished and the development of several foreign concessions had seemed inevitable, could be bought for 100 taels/mu.122 The volatility in the land market debilitated some private holders while it enriched others, yet throughout, the Shangwuju and Yangwuju seem to have enjoyed astounding financial success through their successive development of new properties along the extending route of the horse-road. The state was not the only speculator to turn a tidy profit. In 1899 Sheng Xuanhuai generously donated 50,000 taels to help the Shangwuju extend the horse-road west from the Chang Gate. Though Sheng professed that the donation was merely a public-minded gesture, he did coincidentally ensure that the trajectory of the road extension would serve the Liu Yuan, a celebrated scholar garden and elite trysting spot located four li beyond Chang Gate, which his father (and Shangwuju director) Sheng Kang had acquired as an investment in 1876. The new extension would make the garden more readily accessible to the city’s leisured class and further the site’s development as a resort for the fee-paying public. After the planned completion of the railway (the future station lay in close proximity), the Liu Yuan could soon command a patronage from near and far.123 The Shangwuju emulated Sheng’s resourcefulness when it further extended the horse-road in 1906, bringing it past the railway station just as the Shanghai rail link was nearing completion. Anticipating that the potentially limitless stream of customers provided by the railroad would generate an immediate demand for commercial space, by the time that the governor inaugurated the horse-road extension from Chang Gate to the railroad station in late February 1907, the Shangwuju and other investors were already constructing buildings for a new railroad business/leisure district. Within a few years of the completion of the

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f i g . 6 . Flourishing commercial area along the horse-road outside Chang Gate, ca. 1910. Source: Haku K¯usei, Sosh¯u meish¯o no annaiki, photo 1. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

extension of the horse-road to the railroad station, previously vacant, valueless land had been bought at a premium and built up with houses, which like the street were constructed in an explicitly modern hybrid Chinese-foreign style.124

The Business of Vice: Commercial Benefit or Hindrance? Having spent several tens of thousands of taels on the construction of the horse-road, plus additional sums on the development of the adjoining street front, local officials were heavily invested in the commercial success of the new extension. The directors of the Yangwuju, which received monies from the rental of state-owned commercial buildings, were unwilling to simply presume that the horse-road’s past success would necessarily repeat itself. Instead, they resorted to a sophisticated model of commercial development to insure the bureau’s finances.125 As the construction of the Chang Gate extension was nearing completion, the Yangwuju secretly enlisted the cooperation of an influential veteran of Suzhou provincial government, Provincial Judge Zhu Zhizhen. As an 1867 honorary licentiate from Zhejiang, Zhu owed his bureaucratic position to his family’s service to the Qing, not to his own prowess. He nonetheless proved himself

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an effective, even essential administrator. Serving in various official and unofficial capacities over four decades, Zhu became a permanent Suzhou fixture and commanded a seemingly rare reserve of institutional and moral authority. His personal rectitude won him the directorship of one of the city’s famed classical academies, the Ancient Studies Academy (Gu xuetang). When the academy remade itself an Academy for the Preservation of the Ancient (Cungu xuetang) and joined Zhang Zhidong’s initiative to combat the possible eclipse of Chinese culture by abjuring foreign subjects and readopting a rigorous classical Chinese curriculum in 1908, Zhu was entrusted with overseeing the shift. Over the years, he also worked to lighten the rates for lijin internal customs and other levies to mitigate their negative effects on trade, while yet ensuring that “traitorous merchants” did not evade contributing to the commonwealth. This scrupulous stewardship of public economic matters moved the Yangwuju to seek his help. In a telling demonstration of his devotion to public finance and an illustration of the sexual ethics of the official elite, Zhu supported the bureau’s scheme to use sexual commerce as a basis for horse-road development. He issued an order expelling the brothels of artistically trained elite courtesans, known as “Long threes,” as well as the less costly “One-twos,” to outside the city wall. (These slang terms were used in Suzhou, Shanghai, and other parts of Jiangnan and were derived from dominoes. “Long threes” refers to the three yuan charged for drinking companionship and three more yuan to spend the night. “Onetwos” similarly refers to one yuan for presenting the customers with melon seeds and fruit and two yuan for drinking with guests. Sleeping with a “long three” often required a lengthy and expensive period of betrothal and negotiation with the madam. “One-twos” often had less artistic training and would normally provide sex to any customer with the cash. Despite inflation, the names remained constant.)126 The expulsion order effectively forced the brothels to relocate from their location at Granary Bridge inside the Chang Gate area to the new horseroad extension outside it.127 The guiding logic seems to have been that if the free-spending wealthy men who patronized elite brothels could be attracted to the newly completed horse-road extension/railroad station district, the area would enjoy commercial success. This development capped an astonishing transformation of the horse-road’s original political-economic rationale. Given the overall failure of horse-road industrial development, Suzhou leaders had overcome their initial scruples and quickly embraced all manner of commerce, including the consumption of leisure and luxury, as legitimate and desirable. Now, it seemed that experience had proven that the most attractive and lucrative form of commerce was sexual. It was soon clear that the Yangwuju’s investment strategy had been extremely effective, although financial considerations required ignoring the volume of

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contemporary moral objections to prostitution. As one breathless 1911 newspaper expos´e subtitled “Den of thieves, nest of lust, world of opium” declared, the Chang Gate horse-road contained some eighty to ninety hotels, large and small, all established to facilitate “practices of graft,” such as harboring thieves, smuggling, selling opium, and accommodating illicit sexual relations between men and women.128 Several visitors described being shocked and overwhelmed by the pervasiveness of prostitution. With several dozen cheap brothels dispatching fourteen- to fifteen-year-old prostitutes to line the road to solicit customers by pulling on pedestrians’ sleeves to entice them inside, flocks of streetwalkers roaming the hotels in search of customers, and scores of middling to high-end bordellos, sexual commerce remained a dominant trait, and perhaps, as some maintained, the primary economic activity of the street throughout the 1910s and 1920s. In fact, the public profile of sex work along the street increased throughout the late teens and twenties as prostitution moved beyond the confines of the brothel and came to be centered in teahouses, hotels, and restaurants and other public establishments, not only in Suzhou but in Shanghai, Hangzhou, and other places as well. This “modernized” mode of sexual commerce expanded the store of overtly sexualized space in many cities and reflected the increasingly public nature of Republican-era leisure pursuits and social life, as well as the worsening economic conditions in the countryside that drove rural women to seek employment in the cities, where many ended up working as full-time or casual prostitutes.129 Such notoriety did not hinder area business. On the contrary, a wealth of contemporary sources depict the Chang Gate railroad station area as commercially flourishing, its teahouses full and the street packed with carriages and rickshaws as people wended their way to the hotels, restaurants, brothels, and adjacent shops. Many area traders in wholesale stuffs, textiles, books, and other sundry manufactured goods had, however, grown concerned that the street’s predominantly leisure nature was undermining more licit enterprises such as their own. In 1914, several business proprietors, all members of the developmentminded Suzhou Citizens’ League, petitioned the Chamber of Commerce that the lively appearance of Chang Gate was deceptive. The horse-road was in essence as “deserted and infested with weeds as before” because the level of commercial growth was actually quite low. Reflecting long-standing anxieties regarding the pernicious effects of luxury and the nationalist economic verity that industry and trade provided the only sure means for significant national development, the shop owners argued that the brothels and other horse-road leisure spots contributed little to the city’s commerce. In fact, they maintained, all appearances to the contrary, vice and entertainment actually depleted Suzhou’s store of commercial capital and energy.130 These concerns likely received a sympathetic

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hearing with the Chamber of Commerce, which like the Citizens’ League, espoused modernist commercial development as the best means for civic improvement. However, the petition failed to effect any change in the leisure nature of horse-road commerce or alter the generally laudatory evaluations of its local economic impact. In the meantime, public and state attitudes toward prostitution grew increasingly critical. Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, a burgeoning national abolition movement successfully propagated its message that prostitution was a singular violation of women’s human rights and a systematic social evil interlinked with violence, gambling, opium addiction, and general social disorder. By the fall of 1928, these concerns had moved city and provincial officials, acting in conjunction with civic women’s and business groups, to vet plans for prohibiting prostitution, gambling, and opium, with actual implementation slated for the spring and summer of 1929.131 Many welcomed these efforts as a long overdue attempt to improve local, provincial, and national social health. Others, however, were particularly concerned that the proscription of prostitution might prove economically disruptive. The closing of the city’s brothels did come at some economic cost. The municipal government ruefully admitted that the sizeable revenue generated by the levy on houses of pleasure and other “undesirable” taxes had fostered an untoward dependency on vice and that the prohibition of prostitution would undoubtedly create a drop in city revenue. Yet, a government report averred, the city was resolved to carry out the proscription to enforce social order.132 (Judging from published municipal statistics, probity cost the city some 700 to more than 1,000 yuan out of an average monthly income of 16,772 yuan from direct taxes.)133 More generally, the economic repercussions of eradicating or, more accurately, radically reducing prostitution, which according to one local study was the city’s largest female profession, promised to be significant.134 In a dramatic reversal, in 1929 Chang Gate businessmen, more or less the same group who fifteen years earlier had petitioned the Chamber of Commerce that prostitution and other leisure commerce were not legitimate enterprises, beseeched the government to limit but not prohibit prostitution. The complete eradication of prostitution would, they argued, adversely affect their own businesses and greater city commerce.135 Whether they approved of prostitution’s moral or systemic economic effects, the Chang Gate shop owners now avowed that the enterprise of the entire horse-road area was based on prostitution and that they, as “legitimate merchants,” individually depended on the economic spillover from brothel customers. Their misgivings seem to have been accurate: a newspaper feature written in the midst of the abolition campaign declared, “Due to prostitution, the Chang Gate horse-road thrived as a lively area,” and predicted that this surfeit of activity would cease. In fact, the reporter noted, at

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f i g . 7. Horse-road commercial district in 1930. Source: Suzhoushi difangshi bianzuan weiyuanhui bangongshi, ed., Lao Suzhou: bainian jiuying (Nanjing: Jiangsu renmin chubanshe, 1999), 44. Courtesy of the Suzhou Municipal Local History Office.

10 p.m., several days before prohibition was to take effect, the usually crowded streets were already deserted.136 And seemingly remained so for at least several months, as newspaper articles consistently described the horse-road as “empty,” its business so “depressed” that shop proprietors initiated a campaign to secure relief for commercial rents from area landlords.137 In fact, the resulting commercial doldrums moved some area boosters to propose bringing back some of the more than 280 brothel prostitutes liberated by the abolition movement to work as teahouse entertainers, not prostitutes—in name, at least. It seems that the greater business community, like the Yangwuju before them, could imagine nothing more certain than female entertainment to attract customers to area shops.138 In the words of one guidebook published in early 1930, “the flowers having flown and the orioles scattered, the phoenix goes to an empty nest.” “Since the proscription of prostitution. . . the refined taste [i.e., fengliu, which also means, ‘to have a weakness for women’] of former days has already become a relic,” the eighty odd brothels along the horse-road had all closed and customers had to resort to other venues such as teahouses, restaurants, or the street to engage prostitutes.139 Though not eradicated, the sex trade no longer enjoyed tacit social approbation or legal sanction. Prostitution was, and remained, diminished as a public phenomenon.140 Most importantly, from the perspective of urban development, without the free-spending, homosocial milieu of the elite brothels, prostitution no longer formed the social and economic bulwark of horse-road

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commerce. During the next several years, amid the worsening travails of the rural economy, the disabling effects of the worldwide economic depression, and the deteriorating fortunes of the Chinese silk industry, it was unclear what alternate enterprise might take its place.

Conclusion Zhang Zhidong’s strategy behind the development of the horse-road and siting of the foreign concessions had proven a success in some important ways. The Chinese had used the Japanese presence to further commerce and encourage modern forms of transportation and economic exchange. Officials had learned new technologies to plan, finance, and build the road, and convinced the local population to accept it. Once built, the street facilitated several technological and cultural innovations that transformed the physical face and social life of the city. Indeed, the road was truly a consuming place. As a leisure district, the horseroad’s commerce stemmed from the lively crowds that came to sample, purchase, and consume the street’s store of unique, modern urban entertainments. In this way, the sense of place was perhaps the street’s preeminent commercial commodity. Furthermore, through the Shangwuju’s real estate speculation and successive road extensions, the street actively consumed the surrounding area and transformed the western and northern outskirts of the city into an area of suburbs and markets. But, the area’s rapid development bestowed an ambiguous legacy to Suzhou. In contrast to Zhang’s original vision, the road failed to encourage widespread industrial development. Moreover, the street encouraged economic activity that thwarted moral expectations regarding the extent and nature of positive economic growth. It encouraged both gentry women and courtesans to parade in public, each of whom disturbed the social order in a different way by doing so. It also intensified the plight of Suzhou’s poorest citizens by stripping them of their squatters’ rights to the Qingyangdi and depriving them of the grave sites of their ancestors. While the volatility of speculation and unevenness of resultant development generated great wealth, for the poor and the unlucky, it made life much more uncertain. The Qing struggle to develop and administer the horse-road introduced a significant and highly influential component—indeed, the very archetype—of modern urban space, the improved street and the social activities it supported. As physical artifact, intellectual idea, and socialscape, the horse-road unambiguously connected with the new modern city coming into being. Nonetheless, it remained to be seen what forms of economic and social activities future improved roads would engender, especially once they breached the city wall.

ch a p ter t wo

Arteries and Veins to Nourish the Urban Body In order to construct a new Suzhou, one must start by considering road administration as the most essential question. . . . —1929 opinion piece in Suzhou mingbao1

A

f t e r d e l i b e r at i n g for several months and consulting with the Changzhou, Yuanhe, and Wu xian magistrates, in early August 1911 Governor Cheng Dequan gave his imprimatur to a stunningly ambitious plan to reconstruct the city’s major streets as horse-roads. The scheme was doubly striking because it had not risen through the long-established bureaucratic channels. Neither the provincial nor the xian-level yamens had crafted the proposal. The city horse-road scheme had been proposed by the sixty elite men of the Suzhou City Deliberative Council (Chang Yuan Wu sanxiancheng yishihui), a full half of whom emanated from the ranks of the city’s wealthiest citizens. Elected in 1910 under the limited franchise bestowed by the court as part of the gradual implementation of participatory, constitutional government, these worthies now bore responsibility for city schools, sanitation, public charity, and other collective matters.2 Public works were only a portion of their institutional charge, but in a pattern that would be upheld by all future Republican-era administrations, road administration was their leading, if not primary, preoccupation. Indeed, one admiring observer noted in early 1912 that streets were the single area in which the city council had expended the greatest effort and produced the most significant effect.3 The council did not modestly aim to slightly ameliorate Suzhou’s streets. It aimed to fundamentally transform economic and social life by extending the broad street way, bustling human traffic, and extensive commercial activity of the macadam horse-road inside the city walls. The Shanghai newspaper Shibao declared this ambition laudable, but noted pessimistically that while the measure might be repeatedly proposed and promulgated, there was no money to pay for it. For his part, Governor Cheng agreed that “as the streets in the city are generally narrow and filthy, the conversion of

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them into maloos [horse-roads] would be certainly very desirable. But the outlay for such an innovation would be enormous: were the people equal to the task of raising the sum?” Given the persistent crisis in state finances, the province could ill afford to finance local city-planning ambitions. The costs of any modernization schemes would have to be largely underwritten by the locality.4 However, Cheng’s uncertainty, like the city horse-road project, pertained to more than finance alone. In the fifteen years since the first stretch of macadam had transformed the Qingyangdi, Suzhou state and civic elites had come to appreciate that the potential effects of horse-roads extended far beyond commercial development. During the late Qing and continuing throughout the Republic, urban road building and regulation were strategically deployed to stimulate economic growth, communal social cohesion, and political activism. This chapter examines the political and economic imperatives animating the elite-led struggle to regulate and reconstruct city streets, as well as the popular resistance it engendered. City roads served as far more than transport vectors; they functioned as the premier instrument and site of modern urban life. Yet, as the governor sensed, it remained an open question whether the people of Suzhou were equal to the sacrifice of capital, property, and effort that this civilizing project would entail.

To Construct Horse-Roads Inside the City Contemplating their possibility of success, the city’s self-government advocates professed to be realistically sanguine: “Our Suzhou’s fame in terms of civilization has long been greater than that of other provinces, making cultural change relatively faster than in other places.”5 Despite the elite’s fervent espousal of urbanist ideals, the creation of an urban horse-road network and other hallmarks of improved street order would remain elusive, as financial strictures successively stymied government and civic leaders’ urban planning schemes. Enlightened attitudes also had to contend with the daunting political and material construction challenges of physically reshaping Suzhou to accommodate a network of broad streets. As a result, the modernist-inspired reconstruction of city infrastructure proceeded piecemeal over several decades. The one notable exception to this was during and immediately following the 1927–30 period of municipal government. Created and generously subsidized by the provincial government for the express purpose of rebuilding Suzhou as a modern urban showcase, municipal government allowed officials and city gentry-business leaders the liberty to rebuild and reorder the city’s streets according to modernizing ideals.

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Whether they fully appreciated its magnitude or not, the men of the late Qing City Council and their associates knowingly faced an additional social challenge, for, in the words of an official Suzhou writer, “the current desire to enact local self-government requires the arousal of [the people’s] spirit.”6 From the perspective of the tutelary nationalisms that dominated both the late Qing and Republic, the general populace required the guidance of enlightened leaders, whether members of the central state administration, local businessmen, gentry, or some combination of the three. The readiness of Suzhou’s betters to extend their influence over the entire cityscape was met in some quarters by an equal measure of popular recalcitrance. The tenets of modern street administration would radically transform the Suzhou builtscape, as well as the ways by which people conceived and related to the city. Nonetheless, popular support for improved street circulation in support of economic and social development remained contentious and incomplete. Many residents did not espouse the contention that the street should exclusively serve as a venue for commercial exchange, particularly the sort prioritized by established elite business groups such as the chamber of commerce and the citizens’ leagues. In the course of creating modernist street order and other urban planning measures, questions relating to social class and the hierarchy among commercial uses of roads literally appeared on the street. There petty merchants and city residents challenged the status of the street as a perquisite of elite business interests and contested the economic biases of urban street administration.

Difang zizhi, Local Self-Government By the late nineteenth century, China’s chronic economic travails and the insatiable demands of imperialist powers for special privileges had stoked rampant displeasure with the policy direction and administrative competence of the Qing state. During the first decade of the twentieth century, this mounting dissatisfaction provoked a groundswell of support among reformist gentry and businessmen for a modicum of control over local, provincial, and national affairs. Many reform-minded Qing officials shared these concerns and sponsored a series of parochial civic initiatives establishing civil oversight of urban affairs in hopes that an infusion of elite energies would bolster national modernization. Collectively, these measures precipitated an official Qing local self-government movement and a civil society counterpart, whose ambitions for political autonomy often exceeded the limited scope envisioned by state bureaucrats. As a Suzhou University student proclaimed in the 1903 university annual, “Today the [sic] royal authority is declining, and the [sic] aristocratic politics is getting

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in trouble. At this moment, why would we Chinese people give up a unique chance to stand up by ourselves?”7 The enthusiasm of Suzhou gentry and business elites to assume responsibilities for local governance and oversee economic development was particularly galvanized by the success of the Zhabei roadworks board (established in 1900) in northern Shanghai. Unlike the earlier Shanghai South City board and the Suzhou Shangwuju, the Zhabei board was a gentry-merchant initiative run with minimal official oversight. By establishing a precedent for the local civic control of infrastructure and other essential city services, the Zhabei board and other self-government measures represented, in the words of Shanghai business leader Li Pingshu, a bold attempt to “emulate the local self-government systems of civilized nations” to further self-strengthening.8 The principle of autonomous gentry-business governance was furthered in 1905 when Li and other gentry-businessmen created a unified Public Works Bureau (Zong gongchengju) and assumed formal responsibility for road management, policing, and electric generation for the entire Chinese-administered area of Shanghai. Similar organizations were soon established in Guangzhou, Tianjin, Hankou, and other places. The experience of regulating urban commercial affairs and public works through proto-local government roadworks boards and the new chambers of commerce (the product of merchant innovation and state sponsorship) moved businessmen and allied gentry to become increasingly active in local decision making, so that their emerging social profile shifted to somewhere between the traditional roles of “official” and “merchant.”9 Innovative officials, such as the reform-minded Duanfang who served as Jiangsu Governor, Jiangsu-Zhejiang Governor-General, and a member of the central Constitutional Government Office, also contributed to this process by sponsoring local civil society initiatives and proposing their own. By the early years of the century, calls for increased elite oversight over local city affairs had coalesced with analogous demands for participatory “self-government” at the provincial and national levels to become a centerpiece of the move to rejuvenate the Qing through the promulgation of a constitution. As the provincial capital and home to a large cohort of well-connected men prominent in government, business, and intellectual circles, Suzhou was an early locus of self-government activities in Jiangsu and played a key role in consolidating support among the provincial elite for self-government. Wang Tongyu, a former Hanlin Academy official from Yuanhe xian who cofounded the Suzhou Chamber of Commerce and advocated for the recovery of Jiangsu railroad rights from foreign financial interests, invited his fellow director of the Shanghai Constitutional Government League, the prominent journalist and educator Ma Xiangbo (a founder of Fudan University, he would later serve as President of

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Beijing University), to address a fractious late February 1907 meeting attended by 200 to 300 officials, students, and businessmen. Though not uncontroversial, Ma’s argument that constitutionalism and local self-government would improve governance by granting citizens immediate oversight over the use of funds and general administration in their own cities and provinces struck a responsive chord.10 The momentum fueled by Ma’s appearance pushed Wang’s friend and fellow former Hanlin Compiler Jiang Bingzhang to join several other colleagues and friends in successfully petitioning the governor on March 31, 1907 for permission to convene a Jiangsu Local Self-Government Investigation and Study Society (Jiangsusheng difang zizhi diaocha yanjiuhui). Wang Tongyu and some hundred others joined the society, which established an investigative unit to carry out a census, examine area finances and administration, survey customs and habits, and evaluate local education and trade—all duties that would soon be taken up by local self-government.11 Though Suzhou self-government advocates continued to bemoan the slow pace of change and the frequency of official interference, the official Qing and civil society local self-government movements increasingly converged as the recommendations prepared by the central Constitutional Office were approved by the court and put into effect.12 The set of “Regulations for the Self-Government of Cities, Towns and Villages” promulgated by the court on GX34.12.27 (Jan. 18, 1909) explicitly established the template for late Qing and all later Republican urban government, city planning, and social reforms. (Indeed, the regulations closely resonate with experiments in democratization at the township level in the contemporary People’s Republic of China [PRC].) Under this rubric, Suzhou and other large, important cities were instructed in 1909 to organize a Local Self-Government Bureau (Difang zizhi gongsuo) and a Self-Government Academy (Zizhi yanjiusuo) to prepare for local self-government under constitutional rule. The bureau organized committees to investigate various local problems, conducted a census, and then held the 1910 election for the City Deliberative Council. Suzhou local self-government included men such as city council head Pan Zuqian, a founder of the Shangwuju and a leading member of the chamber of commerce, who had long been active in city affairs. At the same time, it involved younger men, such as Jiang Bingzhang, the vice-chair in charge of area local self-government preparations, and Kong Zhaoqin, a member of the Prefectural and City Deliberative Councils, who would guide city governance and urban planning efforts for the next several decades.13 Jiang, furthermore, helped fix commercial matters as a prime focus of local self-government. Arguing that local governance in foreign nations privileged business concerns as paramount, he convinced the bureau to establish an adjunct body to resolve key commercial problems, such as redressing the

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lack of investment capital, improving the regulation of small scale peddlers and other matters of street administration, and reducing the volume of foreign manufactures sold locally while increasing demand for Chinese national products. Jiang’s efforts notwithstanding, Suzhou business organizations such as the chamber of commerce and the citizens’ leagues, a syndicate of commercial district improvement groups established in 1909, supplemented (and to a great extent supplanted) these official self-government efforts.14 City businessmen viewed parochial city planning and trade concerns as indivisible from their own individual autonomy and greater Chinese national development and, therefore, as too crucial to be entrusted to government alone. The Guanqian Street Citizens’ League, the earliest and most activist chapter, enshrined this outlook in its organizational precepts. Documents related to the group’s founding forthrightly stated that the group’s promotion of local street improvements was sincerely intended to both ameliorate commercial conditions in the immediate vicinity and aid the realization of constitutional government by fostering the practice of self-government.15 Sixteen years earlier Zhang Zhidong had rejected the notion of building urban horse-roads as inordinately expensive and likely to create confrontations with local business magnates. Now these same state and commercial interests deemed the idea essential.16

The Street as a Subject of Political and Social Discourse The burgeoning emphasis on improved roads as a venue for social and economic progress marked a radical shift from previous late Imperial attitudes toward streets and urban infrastructure. In policy and practice, the Qing state had treated road building and maintenance as necessary, though decidedly secondary, undertakings. According to the Great Qing Legal Code, road building and maintenance were the personal obligation of a district magistrate.17 Despite this responsibility, as former local and metropolitan official Huang Liuhong explained in his classic manual for Qing magistrates, A Complete Book Concerning Happiness and Benevolence, road administration was one of a random miscellany of “seemingly minor matters.” (First published in 1699, when Huang may already have been living in retirement in Suzhou, Huang’s handbook offered unusually detailed, practical advice regarding the myriad challenges of local office; it remained in demand—and in print—throughout the dynasty.) Huang counseled that road maintenance, like cultivating fruit trees, forbidding masters to beat servants, prohibiting infanticide, establishing orphanages, or preventing women from visiting temples, attracted official attention only insofar as it helped ensure social peace. He urged officials to exceed minimum expectations by soliciting funds from wealthy public-minded individuals and

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proactively maintaining the integrity of roads and bridges.18 Yet, the limitations of state financial support and the relative insignificance of such “minor matters”—as opposed to “major matters” such as the collection and remittance of taxes, which could determine career success or failure—caused most officials to expend only minimal effort on road building and maintenance. In Suzhou, attitudes regarding the interconnections between local selfgovernment, road building, and other urbanist improvement projects were not only influenced by developments in Jiangnan. Local attitudes also bore the impress of the crucial 1909 “Regulations for the Self-Government of Cities, Towns and Villages.” The process of drafting the city self-government and many of the other regulations produced by the Constitutional Government Office remains unknown; the almost complete absence of relevant documentary materials in the National No. 1 (Ming and Qing) Archives in Beijing prevent us from tracking the various proposals and debates within the Constitutional Commission. However, the individual and collective reports by Zaize, Duanfang, and the other commissioners dispatched to survey political and social conditions abroad in 1905–6 to map the Qing’s own transition to constitutional government provide insight into the prominence given to roadways in the Constitutional Office’s 1909 Regulations. All ruminated on the significance of modern urban planning to economic development and social cohesion, unanimously concluding that improved road administration was one of the signal recent achievements of foreign governments. As their final collective report observed, “New roadbuilding techniques . . . particularly affect the people’s economic situation and public health conditions . . . from ancient times urban areas have expended a large amount of resources on building roads.” For confirmation, one only had to look at “Pompeii, buried some 70 years after the beginning of the Western era, and currently being unearthed by archeologists.” The streets there were covered with stable flagstones and divided into two sides, with a distinction also made between vehicle and pedestrian ways.19 By having inadequate urban roads, China was an exception to the general practice of “[European] urban areas from ancient times” until the present.20 Yet, the commissioners stressed, the current spate of European road improvements was only a few decades old. Tremendous progress could be achieved in a short period if the state, with the support of civil society, committed itself to undertaking an ambitious reconstruction program.21 The prominence of roadways in the 1909 regulations underscored the significance in late Qing modernist thought of urban streets as functional implements and discursive sites. In a variation of Zaize’s observation that roads and sanitation constituted the two main responsibilities of British local government (a remark undoubtedly influenced by Qing familiarity with the street-focused Western

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public health regimes of treaty port cities such as Shanghai and Tianjin), the regulations identified roads as the premier focus of urban sanitation.22 “Road Cleanliness” topped the list of several individual sanitation concerns under item two, “City, Town, and Village Public Health.” For the most part, however, the regulations addressed roads as an infrastructural implement, the subject of item three, “City, Town, and Village Road Public Works,” which focused on the explicit need to ameliorate the built streetscape. While the regulations emphatically declared that street way improvement and management were to be one of the new local administration’s core responsibilities, the text did not elaborate the economic, political, and social paradigms underlying state policy. Luckily, a series of articles published in 1910–11 in the Jiangsu Self-Government Gazette provide a detailed record of the local Suzhou state interpretation of national level policies. These essays, along with the relevant local self-government laws and memorials promulgated by the court, formed the basic curriculum taught in the Self-Government Academies. Run by local officials and “gentlemen” (shenshi), the academy guided select elite students through a state set curriculum for thirty hours of formal study a week over eight months.23 In Suzhou, the students were largely expectant officials, degree holders, and gentry and businessmen from powerful families who had already or would soon achieve prominence in the chamber of commerce, citizens’ league, and other civic bodies.24 Because many essays explicitly refer to local Suzhou conditions, the materials appear to be either original compositions by Suzhou provincial officials or emendations of central government materials. (The level of central government coordination and local autonomy in the production of local self-government propaganda remains unclear.) In particular, they explicate the sociopolitical attitudes the state hoped to propagate among the local citizens in whom the late Qing state invested the responsibility for “augmenting” the capabilities of the local official administration, entrusting them with the future of each locality and the larger empire. The Gazette essays stressed that the significance of local road management, like that of local self-government more generally, stemmed from its contributions to national strengthening. Organizationally and conceptually, urban street management was discussed as a subset of “land transport administration” (luzheng), an “enterprise which affects the nation, and thus explicitly falls under state administration.”25 Echoing Duanfang’s individual memorial regarding the Constitutional Commission’s study trip, the Gazette authors argued that transportation concerns affected the balance between local and central power and thus exerted a decisive influence in determining the overall political structure. Therefore, a decentralized system of local governance that assigned local elites a great deal of liberty in determining and carrying out policy might be feasible for

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a small nation such as England, which possessed convenient transportation. However, from the perspective of the Qing central administration, in a large nation such as China, which lacked an advanced transportation and communications network, such autonomy was impermissible. Central state officials would be unable to supervise and influence local policy with a sufficient level of control.26 Suzhou self-government officials argued that street improvement was urgently needed to address a ubiquitous and profound national crisis. “Our country’s existing roads are without exception narrow and small, short and shrunken. Those which are suitable for transportation needs are rare.” In fact, the inadequacy of existing roads was so grave as to be immediately apparent. While this situation was both inconvenient and shocking, its real significance was political. “When one comes upon a road and finds it impassable, this situation is an indication of the inferior condition of the country’s administrative affairs.”27 Moreover, as fundamental elements of the nation, roadways were, like the greater Qing Empire, subject to the evaluative gaze and coercive power of foreign nations. “Road administration is not merely the basis of a nation’s transport, it is part of world-wide transport. As such, those foreigners who come to our country will look upon our roads to judge whether an enlightened state has trained the people in ways of civilization.”28 Streets assumed a significance that exceeded the geographic confines of the locality and even stretched beyond the borders of the nation to become a synecdoche for Chinese national civilization in the international context. Suzhou local self-government officials made it clear that such sweepingly negative evaluations were not merely projections of foreign prejudice. “Ordered road administration is not merely for the convenience of the residents of a particular city, town, or village; it is what the transport and communications of a nation depend on.”29 Echoing Arthur Smith, Tokutomi Soh¯o, and other foreign commentators, Gazetteer writers argued that the primitive state of urban roads revealed a worrisome lack of public mindedness and national consciousness among the population. At the same time, these particular symptoms suggested a clear course of treatment. Marshaling the financial, social, and political wherewithal to construct modern streets could foster increased social cohesion. A more highly developed communitarian ethic, in turn, would mitigate the propensity of Chinese society to fall into anomie, a pattern that local self-government boosters identified as a fundamental cultural flaw that severely constricted the scope of contemporary political reform. Suzhou officials proclaimed that a renewed commitment to public works projects would engender a common public spirit to animate civic and national

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life. One 1909 essay entitled, “The Relationship between Local Self-government and Road Engineering,” explained: Gentlemen, do you know that our country has two sayings, “Each person sweeps the snow before his gate,” [and] “Don’t be concerned with the frost on some else’s roof.” These two phrases have caused more than a small amount of harm to people. For what reason? Simply because everyone has adopted “everyone for himself ” thinking. And as for those matters of community interest, people say, “Let someone else do them,” and thus no one bothers.

Habitual self-interestedness fostered a destructive complacency that allowed people to view the decay of existing roads and bridges with equanimity. Though the road was a fundamental site of public life, by and large the populace remained insensible to its common interest in maintaining streets. The people, the essayist continued, think, “What do I care for some community interest? Sigh! Who thinks that a person can really shut himself up behind a door and not venture out? If I want to venture a step outside, I must walk on the road.” Similarly, bridges to be crossed were dangerous, the streets were dark, and the buildings of the commercial and native-place guilds (gongsuo or huiguan) that supported many local projects were left unrepaired. In short, “there is no public community space. . . . I want all you gentlemen to keep this in mind while thinking on the meaning of ‘self-government’; it is extremely practical and not mere verbiage, simply meaning that one takes care of oneself, that the people should prepare all manner of community interest activities in the places where they reside.”30 Road building, the same writer continued, encompassed two main purposes: “it directly supported transport, commerce, recreation, and their corollary benefits. More indirectly, the construction process itself produced an activist national citizenry. Roads and other infrastructure did not originate in state funds spent by bureaucrats, but in our Hundred Names, who with one heart and mind combine their efforts to accomplish them. If official monies are exhausted, the rich among the people contribute money while the poor contribute their physical labor. Thus, they should each take responsibility for public works.” The author chastened his sanguine belief in a latent commonality to the public interest by urging modernizers to redress the failings of the Chinese populace. Gentlemen, you are all, no doubt, acquainted with the fact that in nations with civilized institutions, roads are extremely orderly, and so clean and smooth, as to be truly immaculate. Although you may say that this is due to the effective ministrations of the police, in reality it is because the [cultural] level of the general population is high. Each person thinks in terms of the community interest, not self-interest.

And with the result that police regulations were all excellent and popularly obeyed, the people contributed money for community interest causes, and “the

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nation’s institutions advance[d] daily as a matter of course.” Unlike foreign nations, where the instinct for collective social and political improvement was purportedly innate, “our Hundred Names, have heretofore been incapable of sincerely carrying this out.”31 In the discourse of late Qing constitutionalism and local self-government, roads were thus essential performative sites in the creation of new local and national order. They were where Qing citizens, heretofore subjects, were to fulfill new ideals of individual responsibility and initiative for community welfare and thus establish new modes of social life. Streets were venues of essential political and economic exchange leading to the creation of an increasingly economically prosperous and social cohesive community. And as the physical spaces produced by these social practices, roads and the greater streetscape manifested the relative success or failure of new state-civil society formations where they could be openly viewed and assessed by Chinese and foreigners alike. Vulnerability to the contemptuous foreign gaze was, naturally, particularly salient in Suzhou and other treaty ports. At present foreigners all say that we Chinese do not possess community virtue. Is this not humiliating? Is this not shaming? Other things needn’t be mentioned, just the Shanghai concession [an example of the foreign capacity for order that highlighted Chinese inadequacies]. Because Chinese are incapable of maintaining community virtue who knows how much suffering they have endured or how much money they have forfeited!32

The endemic chaos and seeming inability of Chinese society to administer locales so as to produce wide improved streets and ordered public streetscape fed foreign contempt for China as socially and politically backward, which led to the active expansion of extraterritorial rights. As this particular Suzhou official concluded, what other evidence was needed to show that when speaking of local self-government one should stress community virtue—and road order—as the starting point?

Circulation and Urban Arteries For Suzhou’s late Qing modernizers (not to mention, the Republicans who followed), city streets were fundamental for the betterment of societal health, not to mention the integrity of bodily health. “The short road should be extended, the narrow widened, the crooked straightened. And those who walk upon it should not bind their feet. After roads are improved they are like a person’s arteries, transporting blood throughout the human body.”33 Like the road, the people who walked upon it should be whole and improved. Both streets and the body engendered a new structure of urban civilization: improved

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streets were inappropriate venues for bound feet, which in the public appeals by women’s rights advocates, missionaries, and “natural foot” societies represented the oppression of society on women, one of the main causes of Chinese national backwardness. Starting with late Qing local self-government writings movement and continuing through the proliferation of urbanist works during the Republic, city streets were explicitly defined as physiological arteries of the circulatory system. As in the growth and development of biological organisms, these urban street “arteries” functioned to allow for the circulation of the city’s lifeblood (i.e., people and commodities) necessary for the larger organism’s growth. The appearance and spread of this metaphorical allusion to the street as an artery or vein (mailuo) reveals the great depth of the influence worked by European urban imagery and ideology on late Qing urban ideals. In adopting the general concepts of foreign urbanism, Chinese concerned with city economic and social development also appropriated its characteristic somatic metaphors. Chinese traditional philosophy and medicine both emphasize circulation as a positive physical and metaphysical quality. The balanced movement of vital energies (qi) creates a beneficial equilibrium in nature, while regulating the circulation of blood and qi through the body’s vessels served as the key to proper organ function and overall human health.34 As such, the Chinese philosophical and medical conception of veins/arteries easily accorded with the urbanist notion of streets as city arteries. Within the Chinese philosophical tradition, the somatic features and metabolic processes of the human body have usually been viewed as reflections of the cosmic order. Just as the human and cosmic realms were similarly organized by a bureaucratic structure, so the organic components of the human body were “posts” (guan) in “charge” (zhu) of specific functions, creating a somatic bureaucracy.35 This correspondence between the human body and the cosmos notwithstanding, in Chinese philosophical and medical writings, veins and arteries—and the human body in general—were not historically the focus of extended metaphor in social and political theorizing, as in the European tradition. Within European philosophy, somatic and urban metaphors have been central to much political and social theory since Classical antiquity, but the trope of the street as an artery of the urban body is a relatively new innovation dating from the Enlightenment. The explicit depiction of urban streets as bodily veins or arteries characteristic of urbanist writings from the eighteenth century to the present derived from the discoveries regarding blood circulation by Harvey and others, which were applied analogically to the early modern experience of the city as a center of economic vitality and growth.36 The adoption of somatic metaphors to emphasize the necessity of unimpeded circulation for the health, indeed, the very life of urban social and political bodies, signaled a profound shift in the prominence of roads as an essential

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item of social concern. (These characteristically modern European-origined metaphors continue to dominate contemporary urban-planning discussions in China and most other countries around the world.) During the Republican era, this somatic imagery became increasingly commonplace as both Sun Yat-sen and Chiang K’ai-shek promoted road building as a prominent component of the Guomindang (GMD) program of local and national reconstruction. In their writings, experts schooled in the new disciplines of urbanism and city planning, such as Sun’s son Sun Ke, a modernizing mayor of Guangzhou, and the influential Jiangsu reconstruction official Dong Xiujia, spoke of the urban street “arteries” of China’s newly modernizing cities and prescribed methods for improving their circulation.37 Their individual use of urban bodily metaphors might be seen as a distinguishing mark of their U.S. training. However, the theories and attendant metaphors of foreign, particularly American, city planning extended far beyond the small but influential group of returned students. For instance, in a 1933 essay in the Suzhou University journal, one student emphasized the necessity of scrupulous urban road planning because, “It is through the streets that the life blood of municipal trade and traffic pulsates.”38 Nor were roads the sole city structure enlivened by the appropriation of foreign somatic metaphors. Starting in the late Qing and continuing through the Republic, planners also emphasized the construction of city parks and the planting of greenery, that is, urban “lungs” (fei, an expression first widely used by nineteenth-century British and American parks advocates) to assure the health of the composite urban organism by meeting the social and health needs of growing city populations.39 During the Nanjing decade, the centralized state marshaled its newfound prowess to undertake an ambitious program of reconstruction in Jiangnan and proclaimed road construction so essential that “To oppose the requisition of labor for the construction of roads is to oppose the Revolution!” Somatic rhetoric also surfaced in political slogans intended to elicit popular support: “Good roads, like our body’s arteries, promote circulation!”40 Or, as the GMD government’s 1928 “Principles of Urban Administration” exclaimed, “Roads are the blood vessels of the entire city. If the roads are not improved, it is as if the body’s arteries were blocked: the entire city cannot develop.”41 By highlighting the vital function of roads for city and national life, these metaphors reflected the discursive emphasis on street circulation as a social and economic ideal that emerged in Suzhou during the late Qing.

Circulation through Urban Arteries and Social Policy “Our city has at last taken its place among the enlightened cities of the earth and the march of reform has begun. We have policemen and lamp-posts, associated one with the other the world over. Our lamp posts are perhaps as yet

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too young and weak to uphold a policeman while he enjoys his vertical nap, but they are here and that is something.” So, with light-hearted hyperbole, the North-China Herald celebrated the 1903 simultaneous appearance in Suzhou of a new foreign-style police force of 4,000 constables (mainly demobilized soldiers) and that bulwark of public order, state-supported streetlights.42 As the reporter noted, their concurrent arrival on the streets of the city was not mere synchronicity, for the two innovations were functionally linked. Together streetlights and an integrated citywide gendarmerie bespoke a sea change in the state’s commitment to maintain urban order and heralded the augmentation of its local authority. Though the avowal of such a strict regime of street regulation was strikingly novel, many of the particular practices being applied were already familiar in Suzhou. The new city police force and regulations freely adapted the methods of the horse-road constabulary. Deployed largely for the purpose of managing the streetscape, the constabulary had garnered local acclaim for enforcing new sanitation codes, reordering the placement of street-side peddler stands, and directing the circulation of urban traffic, all of which were credited for contributing to the horse-road’s distinctive atmosphere and commercial success. In effect, the 1903 creation of a modern police force represented a significant inroad of the horse-road pattern of social and physical urban order into the city. The new policing system fulfilled expectations by achieving dramatic and immediate improvements in street order. Among its innovations, the force was particularly enthusiastic in carrying out frequent campaigns to disallow or regulate road-side stalls, which sold all manner of goods, to end the road “blockage” caused by traditional modes of street commerce.43 Street peddling may have accounted for a sizeable percentage, if not the bulk, of business activity within the city, yet according to the urbanist notions guiding Suzhou’s reordering, increased capacity for the flow of goods and people would provoke an increase in consumption. This likely occurred. Whether due to the first-hand evidence of its effect or the power of modernist faith, this circulationist paradigm of urban economic development would dominate city planning for the next several decades. Under the aegis of the chamber of commerce, local officials, and other elite modernizers, street selling was to be progressively disallowed in favor of business conducted by more normatively valuable concerns, large, capital-intensive, fixed shop-front enterprises whose commerce was felt to be fed by greater street circulation. The effect of police efforts was so marked that in 1906 the Japanese consul approvingly reported to his superiors, “Recently, due to the strict prohibition by the city police, the open air stalls that previously took up both sides of the streets have been reduced so that there is now twice as much road space as before.” The removal of disorder testified to the development of the local government’s ability

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to create modern urban order, while the consequent opening of the roadways had promoted the freer flow of people and goods throughout the city.44 While not discounting the magnitude or value of real improvements in the flow of street traffic, it is worth querying, these policies were promoting the circulation of exactly what? Except for the recently introduced donkey carts, Suzhou’s unimproved, narrow streets remained the exclusive redoubt of pedestrians and porters bearing all types of human and material burdens. According to the urbanist notions guiding Suzhou’s reordering, increased capacity for the flow of goods and people would provoke an increase in consumption. The fundamental inability of the streets to accommodate more advanced modes of transport despite vigorous police street regulation limited the potential increase in street circulation and commerce. To end the blockage of streets, in early 1907 city authorities approved a measure proposed by a Mr. Hu that capital be collected to establish a small vegetable market, the first of four approved and put in place by the next year. This particular initiative met with the enthusiastic approval of the current Suzhou Maritime Customs Commissioner, an Englishman who endowed these neighborhood planning schemes with a much larger significance. Small things such as removing “hucksters stalls on the sides of the too-narrow streets of the city,” he wrote, “. . . show that an interest is being taken in the people and that advance is the watchword.”45 Sanitation and commercial regulation were motivating factors in many similar contemporary schemes, and were particularly emphasized by the organizations involved in Qing local self-government and subsequent city government. In this case, however, the main goal was improving street circulation in pursuit of commercial growth. As a Shenbao report explained, the newly completed Chang Gate horse-road area was already the most flourishing quarter of the city, but the chaotic array of vegetable stands there hindered proper road administration. The constriction of the street diminished its circulatory capacity and prevented area shops from transacting even more business. Mr. Hu had petitioned that the stalls should be removed to special new market areas to establish a more disciplined spatial, social, and economic order on the street. Hu’s background (other than the fact that he was identified by the honorific given to “gentlemen” of means and education, shen) is unknown. Nor is it clear where the capital to underwrite the markets’ construction would originate, though one newspaper report did suggest that the effort would largely be funded by private contributions, presumably from civic groups such as the commercially oriented citizens’ leagues, and individual gentry and businessmen interested in fostering commercial development through the freer flow of traffic.46 Hu’s proposal highlighted the emergence of an overt hierarchy of commerce within urbanist public policy, particularly in the use of the streets. Individual

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f i g . 8 . Street-side food stands, late Qing. Source: Suzhoushi difangshi bianzuan weiyuanhui gongshi, ed., Lao Suzhou: bainian licheng, 1:30. Courtesy of the Suzhou Municipal Local History Office.

enterprises, classes of business, or types of commercial activity were assigned places of greater or lower importance according to the perceived benefits they offered to the community. The new streetscape was not only an exuberant hubbub of carriages, rickshaws, and people, but also a flourishing commercial quarter. Yet, Mr. Hu and the officials and other local elite who supported his measure deemed the not inconsiderable trade in selling foodstuffs to a large and growing city population an unsuitable form of commerce for this particular streetscape. To some extent, the growth of the Chang Gate horse-road vegetable market marked a resurgence of an earlier long-established pattern of social geography: before the Taiping Rebellion, this area had been the city’s main produce market.47 Previous patterns of urban use, however, provided scant legitimacy in light of the intensifying influence of modernist urban ideals. While police regulation of street order touched upon various quotidian and habitual activities of the entire city population—people had to be instructed that proper uses of the street did not (any longer) include sleeping, conversing,

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threshing grain, or various other non-transport-related functions—commercial usage was particularly affected. Successive attempts to relocate small-scale street merchants, especially vegetable mongers, into special markets away from the street and to force shop proprietors to remove gates, stands, awnings, signs, and any other objects extending into the police-defined circulation corridor of the street had varying—and usually temporary—effects. These new regulations were denounced as invasive and contrary to customary modes of commerce and were contested tenaciously wherever they were instituted. In the Jiangsu city of Zhenjiang, for instance, a 1904 police campaign to regulate vegetable stalls had provoked a strike closing a main market and riots in which the sellers and their supporters sacked and burned the police headquarters, leaving casualties on both sides.48 In Suzhou, following Hu’s proposal, the police had forced city vegetable sellers to relocate to centralized markets established throughout the city. Both the peddlers and the public quickly voiced their dissatisfaction with the new arrangements. Local people complained that the new market locations were inconvenient and did not meet their needs. Many mongers had discovered that business at the new locations was less profitable and had reverted to selling outside the designated market areas, often in their former locations. The police, for their part, had stringently enforced the law and had arrested sellers who violated the new regulations, provoking even more resentment among the peddlers and the general populace. The conflict simmered for several months until the sellers from all the markets converged together in one mass and, bringing all their produce, fish, and meat in tow, stormed the police station with the assistance of a great many supporters. By coincidence, Hangzhou was upended by a similar upheaval within days of the Suzhou melee. In its postmortem on both incidents, Shenbao declared that the two riots disconcertingly confirmed long-standing suspicions regarding the public’s lack of commitment to improved street regulation, commercial development, and political and social reform as a whole. The paper judged that the Hangzhou incident could be attributed to popular resentment toward the taxes that had been imposed in connection with the market reforms, compounded with faulty administration by local officials. The Suzhou turmoil, by contrast, was said to be largely due to the fact that the market system had been the idea of a few elite and had never garnered public support. Though the Suzhou police and other authorities should have made greater efforts to consider the needs and opinions of city residents, neither had been particularly remiss in crafting the proposal nor abusive in enforcing it. Rather, in the estimation of a Shenbao editorialist, the local citizenry had been unwilling to change long-standing routines in the interest of the greater good and modern progress.

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Admittedly, “the desire to change several hundred year-old customs in one day is overly ambitious,” yet the writer noted, considered together, the two disturbances provided a pessimistic forecast for urban and national reform. While the removal of peddlers from the streets and creation of markets had been the centerpiece of urbanist reconstruction, more intractable problems such as the poor state of the streets had been largely neglected. Civic leaders had to find ways of making their minority-generated schemes palatable and, moreover, compelling to the urban mass. Otherwise, street improvement and other aspects of urban progress would be stillborn. More broadly, “the scope of the New Policies [the collective body of late Qing reform initiatives, spanning the drafting of a constitution, the introduction of modern educational curricula, local selfgovernment, and other modernizing programs] is ten hundred times greater than vegetable markets. If each individual reform can be similarly overturned by a mere local fracas, what hope is there of realizing the New Policies as a whole?” As a remedy, this same writer suggested that the police should be more vigilant, but fair, in enforcing progressive regulations. Professing the goodness and malleability of the people as a whole, he noted that if the police could but only capture a few incorrigible troublemakers, the people would be more ordered and able to develop true public mindedness. Observers in the media joined local self-government officials in positing that the denouement of local and national modernization would likely be played out on the streets of Suzhou and other cities.49 The vegetable market riots and other road-related conflicts revealed several unacknowledged but latent biases within the nascent police-enforced street order. Contrary to the universal, value-free ideals of public service, police regulation in support of increasing street circulation promoted some commercial activities while harming others and truly “aggravating” the people. Road administration particularly furthered the agenda of city business elite, whose concerns were often in competition with street merchants. However, road-side stall proprietors were not the only small-scale merchants who found that their customary mode of conducting business ran afoul of modern street regulation. Within Suzhou, it had become an open—and openly contested—question as to whether police regulation of the street was truly for the promotion of commerce and protection of goods and capital, or whether the police-enforced street order was for the benefit of the elite few and antithetical to the needs of business as it was actually practiced. For instance, in a 1909 letter informing the chamber of commerce of a new campaign to remove commercial blockages from the street, the police bureau wrote, “Honorable merchants from the substantial commercial houses thoroughly understand just principles and have not usurped authority as in the

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past [by blocking the street with signs, stalls, and other commercial implements placed in front of their storefronts]. In contrast, small-scale businessmen and ignorant, obstinate people consider only their private interest and do not consider the public good. Recently, this latter attitude has resurfaced and railings, signs, and other objects are being put into the road,” with food establishments being the worst offenders. The chamber of commerce later reported back to the police that it had urged member proprietors to follow the new order and informed them that the police enforcement would be strict.50 As it was indeed. Having issued several orders—all blithely ignored—that proprietors should remove the auxiliary shop counters erected in front of their stores that extended into the street, the police were angered when they arrived to inspect the area and found the situation unchanged. Feeling provoked, they threatened the proprietor of a shop that was blocking a good portion of the street to take the offending stall down by nightfall or face prison. The neighboring shop owners, indignant at what they viewed as mistreatment by the police, immediately closed their shops and struck in protest. According to a newspaper account, many bystanders complained that the police were “arbitrary, unreasonable, and brutish in their actions. They maintain an enormous gulf with businessmen, thus this incident.”51 While the police’s actions may have seemed excessive to bystanders and shop owners alike, it is unclear if the witnesses on the street shared the merchants’ sense that in addition to being imperious, the constables had unrightfully transgressed accepted means of doing commerce. Yet, to the “ignorant and obstinate” merchants who fell afoul of police regulations, including small-scale store proprietors, police ordering of the street constituted an attack on commerce. Indeed, it can be argued that by reining in the activities of small-scale merchants and street vendors, the “motor” of petty capitalism, city authorities actually diminished the volume of contemporary commerce and stunted the urban economy’s capacity for future development.52 Among the different nonelite constituencies jostling for road space, food mongers were particularly vilified as a cause of chaos and danger. As one 1911 commentary from a local magazine put it, “I see that on the large street there are vegetable stands, so coming and going is extremely crowded; if in the future a child were to fall down, how terrible!”53 Throughout the Republic, the various city administrations, with the support of the more established business community and others concerned with street order, attempted with varying success to move vegetable sellers and other street hawkers into specifically organized market areas. While the relevant traffic, safety, and health issues were not inconsiderable, the impetus behind these moves was also highly ideological, being laden with firm belief in the political-economic benefits of increased street circulation, and tinged with class bias. The image of the street seller as a

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wicked, inveterate scofflaw undermining modern street improvements and civic morality became an enduring Republican-era icon of urban social disorder. The vilification of lower-class people as unenlightened enemies of progress exposed the gulf between the city’s state and civic guardians and the citizenry, while also underscoring the enduring challenge of reforming popular commercial practices, even such quotidian activities as food shopping, to accommodate a more modern form of city life. Yet the foremost challenge to realizing improved street order was arguably not popular recalcitrance, but the practical financial and institutional difficulties of replanning and reconstructing the city to maximize circulation.

Opening the City Wall As in late-nineteenth-century Europe, where urban planning advocates had demolished the few surviving city walls in Berlin, Vienna, and other cities to build ring roads in their place, during the first few decades of the twentieth century many Chinese urbanists and civic leaders argued that city walls constricted urban progress and that they should be razed to construct improved roadways, which would lead to modern development. In the space of a generation, city walls were transformed in the popular imagination from useful protective structures into encumbrances that clogged traffic and impeded commercial development. In Jiangnan this public reassessment was provoked in 1906, when Shanghai area gentry petitioned the state to demolish the city wall and build a ring road. Though local officials were initially enthusiastic, the opposition of conservative gentry (some of whom feared that the removal would upset the flow of beneficial terrestrial energies, fengshui) inspired a more moderate solution to the city’s transport bottleneck, and in 1909–10 new gates were cut into the city wall.54 Inspired by the seemingly positive effects on Shanghai transport and commerce, Suzhou booster groups such as the chamber of commerce and individual neighborhood citizens’ leagues soon began to militate for the creation of new city gates or the wholesale demolition of the Suzhou city wall. These champions of economic growth particularly spoke of the need to add new gates along the western and northern flanks of the city wall adjoining the horse-road: a new entrance south of Chang Gate would help ease congestion at the main point of entry and exit, while an additional point of egress between Chang and Xu Gates would allow people direct northern access to the horse-road and railroad station and thus avoid the need for roundabout travel. Public safety was often cited as a key supporting concern, as in a 1924 letter from eighteen business proprietors that requested that the chamber of commerce recommence lobbying for the construction of the new gates:

Arteries and Veins to Nourish the Urban Body / 91 On the afternoon of the fourth day of the first moon of the lunar new year traffic was blocked. The blockage caused a woman clasping a child to fall from their vehicle and ceaselessly cry in pain. Witnesses attest that the turnover of this vehicle caused several injuries and was more serious than past incidents. Although it seems that no one dies, who knows if they received a fatal injury and died later? We can delay no longer the construction of two additional city gates, which will allow traffic to flow much more freely.

The main justification for the new city gates (and other improvements), however, was economic: as the same letter emphasized, traffic congestion formed a stranglehold on horse-road businesses. Better road administration provided the only means of solving the area and the greater city’s commercial doldrums.55 Given the relative ease with which new city gates could be added—as opposed to full-scale demolition, which was rather onerous—opposition was often untenable, for it seemed that enormous benefits would accrue with minimal cost and effort.56 In 1914, the city council therefore gave its enthusiastic support to a plan to fund new gate construction by selling undeveloped city land. In actuality, the rate of progress proved to be much slower than anticipated. City gate-construction plans were tentatively set—and then delayed—several times.57 The realities of straitened governmental resources and the reluctance of area businessmen to bear the high cost of removing the enormous volumes of brick and earth, as well as assorted concerns regarding the possible negative effects on fengshui or commerce in other city areas, and consideration for the historic value of a structure that had defined the city for centuries, kept the perennial proposals for new gates and wall demolition from being realized.58 (In addition, sporadic warlord violence such as the 1925 Jiangsu-Zhejiang civil war and the burgeoning strife between the GMD and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] during the late 1920s sparked a brief revival of appreciation in Suzhou and elsewhere for the protective function of city walls.)59 Construction of Jin Gate, a new city entrance to the south of Chang Gate, broke ground in 1921, but the project was quickly halted due to lack of funds. Dedicated financial and logistical support from the Chang Gate horse-road and central city citizens’ leagues allowed the public works bureau to finally “open the gate to relieve the blockage to commerce” in 1924.60 By late 1925 a number of leading literati were expressing virulent dissatisfaction with the new gate. Narrow, low, and ill-sited because it did not connect directly to major streets, Jin Gate had not proven to be an optimal remedy for traffic woes. Yet, their complaint did not stem from transport concerns. These disgruntled gentrymen argued that the siting and name of the gate were both unlucky, so much so that its opening had helped provoke the 1925 Zhejiang-Jiangsu civil war that had threatened Suzhou. While this theory was derided as illogical superstition,

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its propagators were extremely influential. Given the disastrous consequences attributed to the gate’s ill-chosen name, the choice of its replacement became a vexed issue. Police Chief Yuan Xiaogu recommended that it be called “An” (quiet, peaceful) Gate. When combined with the character ping of Ping Gate, the resultant word, ping’an (peace) would be propitious. Jin Gate Citizens’ League leader You Baoqiu, however, opposed Yuan by noting that Suzhou people pronounced an (quiet) like an (clandestine, hidden). (In standard Mandarin, the two words have different tones and are therefore distinct.) Suzhou already had enough unlicensed prostitutes (anchang), You complained. If the gate were named “an,” there would be even more. You counterposed that the opening be called “he” (harmony) because the combination with ping, heping (peace), would again be propitious. Yuan echoed You’s objections by pointing out that the pronunciation of he was close to that of huo (disaster) and that the name was therefore unacceptable. Upon the recommendation of the city’s citizens’ leagues, a new city entrance endowed with a more propitious siting, orientation, and name, New Chang Gate, was built in early 1926. (“New Chang” was recommended as a euphonous and logical choice.) Jin Gate was left unused and blocked up.61 Republican officials and civic boosters argued that road improvements should be funded publicly so as to be an expression of the local citizenry’s Republican public-mindedness. Given the intractable difficulty of securing sufficient public funds, whether through local taxes or public subscription, this ideal was not always achievable and the other two “new” city gates built during the Nanjing Decade were products of elite largesse. In a time-honored expression of filiality, Bei Runsheng, a scion of the prosperous merchant family that owned the famous Lion Forest (Shizilin) scholar’s garden, underwrote the building of a bridge and road as a memorial to his late parents. That project, in turn, allowed for the completion of a northern city entrance directly across from the railroad station, which had been begun and then suspended in 1921. (In the very timely manner of an urban developer, Bei also wasted no time in purchasing the properties adjoining the future street, a strategy that a newspaper approvingly described as “to everyone’s profit.” The city would benefit from having direct access to the railroad station and Bei would profit handsomely from the plots’ increased value following the opening of the gate.)62 Ping Gate, named after one of the original ancient city gates that had been walled up since the early Song, opened in 1928. More novelly, during the 1927–30 interregnum of provincially subsidized municipal government, Jiangsu provincial funds allowed for the construction beginning in 1929 of another city gate: a new New Chang, which was built to expunge the blemish of the Jin/New Chang Gate imbroglio over superstition from the modern cityscape. The new gate was enlarged, moved

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farther south to better connect up with the inner and outer city street network, and reverted to the name Jin Gate. (Both New Chang Gate and the original Jin Gate were walled up when their replacement finally opened in January 1931.)63 Celebrations marking the opening of newly constructed roads or city-wall gates were among Suzhou’s largest and most lively Republican-era public spectacles. These civic carnivals acclaimed road administration as the consummate act of modernization and oftentimes attracted crowds in excess of 10,000.64 On the occasion of its 1928 dedication, Ping Gate and the immediate surrounding area were festooned with slogans heralding the gate’s projected political-economic effects, including “The People’s Livelihood has a Road,” “The Starting Point of Self-Government” (a form of local self-government had been restored in 1923), and “Congratulations on the Flourishing of City-North Commerce and the Renovation of Suzhou Urban Administration.”65 Given the occasion’s significance, the municipal government arranged for native son Zhang Yipeng, a senior Republican state legal official and committed Suzhou civic leader, to address the holiday throng. In an echo of the late Qing Jiangsu Self-Government Gazette, he remarked that that only those who never left the confines of their house or never ventured onto the street could be indifferent to the new gate and its consequences. Zhang’s homily explored the gate’s revitalizing effect on city commerce and ended by emphasizing the role of roads as a venue and road administration as an occasion for “thinking of the public good” and “considering public finance.” Wisely combined, the two could produce social cohesion and progress within the city and beyond, such that “I hope that we Suzhou citizens . . . can in the shortest period possible become a people enriched by the rule of a [permanent] Constitution.”66 As in the late Qing, the city road was a uniquely protean milieu where it was possible to conjure the formation of modern urban society and a politically and economically advanced Chinese nation. The 1931 reopening of Jin Gate was similarly marked by Republican festivities and eulogies to the modern excellence of the new gate and the progressive fortitude of the population: “In truth one could say that with today’s opening of Jin Gate Suzhou is opening a door to reconstruction and development.”67 However, Jin Gate provided an even more didactic and permanent representation of the congeries of political ideals intertwined with road administration. Built in a generic “Roman” style with crenellated ramparts, rusticated stone facing, lacey Lombard arcs, Roman arches with keystones, and metal torch lamps, the gate had the appearance befitting an idealized medieval Romanesque European city wall or a castle from a fairy tale or art history book. This architecture provided a means for urban modernizers to overcome what they perceived as a baneful historical deficit. As the contemporary European, American, and Chinese scholarly

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f i g . 9 . Commercial celebration at Jin Gate in 1934. The structure’s Romanesque design represented the historical legacy of urban citizenship in Greece, Republican Rome, medieval free, and Renaissance cities as interwoven within the fabric of contemporary Suzhou civic life. Source: Suzhoushi difangshi bianzuan weiyuanhui bangongshi, ed., Lao Suzhou: bainian jiuying, 16. Courtesy of the Suzhou Municipal Local History Office.

consensus proclaimed, European civic culture was the fountainhead of modern freedom and republican government. Whether for the civic ideals or their historic emblems Chinese republicans had no recourse but to turn to the European city, for they were alien to Chinese cities. Over the centuries, European cities had vigilantly maintained their independence and spawned many present-day nation-states. Chinese cities, by contrast, had originated and remained under the firm administrative grip of the Imperial state.68 Jin Gate’s archetypal, if generic, European form provided a means of citing the historical legacy of urban citizenship in Greece, Republican Rome, medieval free, and Renaissance cities and manifesting it as interwoven into the fabric of contemporary civic life in Suzhou.69

Popular Perceptions of the Street While the absence of contemporary survey data makes it impossible to accurately gauge the level of popular support for late Qing and Republican road administration, anecdotal evidence demonstrates that a broad spectrum of

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the educated public enthusiastically espoused its political-economic tenets. For instance, in remarks that echoed those of the late Qing Constitutional Commissioners, a Suzhou University student considering the improvement of Suzhou and other cities in 1920 wrote, In studying a city’s history and geography, we see that its intercourse is closely associated with its prosperity or delineation [sic]. Yet, in recent times, owing to our interest in improving our factories, mines, railways, and other things of commercial interest, we have neglected our city streets and as a result, we now have poor intercourse in our cities, and our streets are as those of Western countries in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. Our country contains many cities, and if we desire to have them prosperous, we must make many improvements and certainly one of the most important is to improve our streets.

Given the pressing need for improved city streets and the extensive network of unhealthful and antiquated canals running throughout the city, the student encouraged Suzhou to follow the lead of Shanghai and Hangzhou by filling in its canals. (This would, in fact, be one of the favored means of creating improved street during the later Republican and early PRC periods.) The city could simultaneously solve several hindrances to urban circulation by demolishing the city walls and using the material to make broad, level street ways. Most significantly, this greater attention to street order would transform Suzhou to a higher level of urban civilization.70 The following analysis of Suzhou street conditions from a 1927 city middle school journal expressed complementary sympathies. Seemingly written by a middle school student, the essay demonstrates the extent to which urbanist ideals had infiltrated public discussion, such that it informed the outlook of adolescents and young adults. Considering the best course for reforming Suzhou’s urban affairs, this student author duly recommended redressing the deplorable physical condition of the streets and the negative effects of street disorder: The Suzhou streets are as narrow as canals. When we use the roads we feel uncomfortable because frequently roads are so crowded as to be impassable. Lively places are naturally even more so. However in the morning even relatively quiet places are extremely crowded, why? There are three reasons. Number one: narrowness of the road. Number two: The rickshaws and bicycles that rush forth without cease as if driven by wind or lightning. The third reason is naturally those all day small vegetable markets! The counters of this rank of peddlers are all set up on both sides of the road taking up two-thirds of the street.71

Echoing the urbanist mantra of the state, gentry-business elite, and other civic boosters, he averred that reforming street order promised to simultaneously discipline the population, instill the virtues of public-mindedness and selfcontrol, stimulate economic life, and thereby remake Suzhou into a model modern city.

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Most city people did not write such specific, articulate statements regarding the extent of their personal support, opposition, or indifference to road improvements. Nonetheless, many did leave a record of their practical dissent. During the late 1920s and 1930s, owners of property lying along the course of road enlargement and improvement projects continually protested that state compensation levels were woefully inadequate, such that they were unjustly deprived of their rights as property owners. The vehemence of such protests, notwithstanding, the completion of city road improvement projects were consistently celebrated by large crowds of city residents as triumphs of Republican progress. In addition, the constancy and enduring variety of controversies over street use illustrated that improving circulation was only one among many values attached to the streetscape. In 1924, for instance, after having inspected the night beat outside the city wall, Mr. Zhao, the city Chief of Police, found that his passage back into the city was blocked by masses of people sitting out and sleeping by the side of the road. The congestion was so great that one could not ride in a rickshaw; even walking seemed difficult for one had the feeling of being completely blocked. Concerned that this situation greatly harmed transportation, on his return to police headquarters, Chief Zhao ordered that each precinct take steps to end the practice of late night sitting and sleeping by the side of the street. The effects of this particular effort were likely minimal, for it was left to each precinct to find an appropriate means to exhort the people into compliance. No sustained effort seems to have been initiated.72 Nonetheless, the incident provides a significant insight into the signal importance of street circulation as an organizing principle of the emerging modern, regulated Suzhou and the fundamental conflict between this urbanist prerogative and the common street culture of many urban common people. During warm evenings, on the streets within and outside the city it was common to see commercial brokers and the proprietors of small shops sitting with business associates or family members at tables outside their shops until quite late, or in some cases, even making up a bed and sleeping the entire night at the roadside. Hot weather and cramped quarters, especially among the lower economic classes, produced similar uses of the street in other urban areas of China—and the United States and Europe, as well. In fact, this pattern of street sociability, which Zhao hoped to forbid as a hindrance to commercial circulation, was a product of commerce. For many small proprietors, not to mention hired shop workers and artisans, the shop space commonly served as their place of residence as well as work. Given the fact that most of the building was given over to the commercial enterprise, any dedicated living quarters were often quite small. Cramped living space was the lot of many; even middle-class families such as Bao Tianxiao’s could not afford exclusive family residences and

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had to rent individual rooms or a suite in a house while sharing cooking and other facilities with other tenants. The housing inhabited by the working poor was invariably more limited and mean. Reportedly the cheaper Suzhou housing stock could rival the miseries of Shanghai’s infamous “pigeon-hole” cubicle accommodations.73 Thus it is likely that for a substantial segment of the Suzhou urban population, the liberty to use the street as living space was considered both customary and necessary, particularly during the sultry summer. Under the regime of modern Republican urbanism, however, use of the street for socializing and sleeping violated the imperative that roads serve as conduits for circulation supporting economic exchange above all else. As the newspaper reported, the blockage “had particular relevance for transportation,” though the practice of socializing and sleeping outside does not seem to have broken any particular law or local regulation. Nor was there any explicit suggestion that this behavior posed a possible breach of the social peace or public safety.74 Given the fact that no explicit regulations had been broken and that the offending behavior was widespread among the populace, he recommended that the police resort to extralegal measures to eradicate the practice and redress the possible negative effects of “blockage” on urban transport.75 As the appointed representative of the state, Chief Zhao was vigilant in protecting the overwhelming state and elite civic interest in fostering an ever-greater and freer volume of street circulation, despite the de facto opposition of citizens. Whether due to force of habit, economic necessity, convenience, or sociability or, more negatively, ignorance, perverse obduracy, or lack of civility and public-mindedness, the Suzhou populace continued to value and use the streets for nonlicit social and commercial purposes.

Conclusion Conflicts over the structure and use of the urban streetscape constituted one of the main causes of public unrest in early twentieth-century Suzhou. As such, the details and outcome of particular incidents of “road rage” were subject to intensive public scrutiny and debate. To late Qing and Republican modernizers, however, these local contests possessed more than parochial significance. As a privileged venue for urban commerce and site where the population was both subject and party to the formative rituals of modern citizenship, the street manifested the disciplinary order of urban society. In fact, the symbolic resonance of the city’s streets extended far beyond the boundaries of Suzhou. Urban roadways came to be viewed as material indexes of Chinese national modernity, as well as a primary site of its creation. The city’s streets therefore exhibited the full range of urbanist accomplishments and shortcomings.

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The abiding disorder of Suzhou’s roadways revealed the depths of popular intransigence and local economic malaise, yet the street also provided a crucial conjunction of need and place to remold unruly city folk into progressive, civic-minded citizens and stimulate business. The capacity of roads to generate economic development by increasing the movement of people and goods made street regulation in the service of untrammeled traffic flow an axiom of commercial growth. This policy may have aided some of the highly capitalized shops run by members of the chamber of commerce, citizens’ leagues, and other civic development boosters who felt that their business was being stymied, if not stolen outright, by nearby street stalls. Somewhat ironically, this commercialist directive may have diminished the volume of local business. Peddlers and other small-scale entrepreneurs conducted a sizeable percentage of city commerce and sustained a vector of possible commercial expansion, yet their activities failed to promote progress toward the modern capitalist future envisioned by elite. Similarly, the daily life and leisure claims of many common people to the streets ran afoul of the economic and civilizational aspirations of business and government interests. Police and other innovative regulatory powers provided a means of attempting to reconstruct popular thought and action, in conjunction with the street way, as essential components of a new metropolis. The functional and symbolic implications of improved roads may have made Suzhou’s streets the most significantly modern element of the cityscape, yet they were hardly the sole city location to be reconstructed as a keystone of urban progress. The struggle over the meaning and use of roads was replicated throughout the city. The modern urbanist regime that revalued and reconstructed the city according to a novel calculus of nationalism and economics transformed the entire physical, intellectual, and social spans of urban space. The remaining two sections of this book examine how the contest between state, business, and popular prerogatives over the form and use of the developing modern city also encompassed Suzhou’s uniquely rich fabric of ancient buildings and monuments.

chapter three

Renovating the Structures of Academic Ritual and Learning

I

n a 1 7 8 9 va l e d i c t o r y , Jiangsu Governor Min Eyuan extolled the newly refurbished Suzhou Prefectural Confucian Temple as,1

. . . Lofty and spacious, sublime and gigantic, it is the premier school of the Southeast. Our esteemed dynasty studies the ways of the ancient and emphasizes civil matters, revering Confucian erudition. And the learning of Suzhou men is foremost within the four seas. Those scholars who study at this school hit the mark in their writings on government. . . .2

At one level Min offered a simple physical description. The temple was a walled park of massive structures. Grand, sharply sloped tile roofs crowned pavilions several spans wide and deep, all of which were dwarfed by the main ceremonial hall, the one hundred by seventy foot Pavilion of Great Achievement (Dachengdian), in appearance perhaps the most stately building in Jiangsu. Smaller shrines, monumental stelae mounted on stone tortoises, and a garden of ponds, pine groves, and lawn surrounded the temple.3 Min’s panegyric, like the complex’s appearance, also resonated with the Prefectural Temple’s singular historic, social, and political prominence. As the ceremonial arch at the western approach heralded, behind these walls was the “Preeminent Way from Ancient Times to the Present,” which a complementary arch to the east lauded as possessing “Morality Peerless in Heaven or on Earth.”4 When initially built in the eleventh century, this temple had transformed the state’s sponsorship of Confucian learning and ritual by novelly combining a Confucian shrine with a state-supported Confucian academy. The resulting institution became an indispensable ritual and academic center for the state bureaucracy and was soon emulated throughout the empire, as were its successive

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f i g . 1 0 . Map of the Prefectural Confucian Temple. The Pavilion of Great Achievement is the third structure south of the northern wall within the eastern (r.) compound. Source: Cao Yunyuan, Li Genyuan et al., eds., Wuxian zhi (Suzhou: Suzhou wenxin gongsi, 1933), tu: n.p.

emendations of Confucian ceremonials. By perpetuating the memory of Confucius, “Teacher to 10,000 Generations,” through solemn sacrifice, the temple affirmed the Imperial state’s moral legitimacy. As the official Prefectural School (Fuxue), the Fuxue ensured the future of the state by educating men in the Confucian classics as preparation for government service, a task at which it excelled. Governor Min’s boasts that Fuxue students “hit the mark” and that local learning was “foremost within the four seas” were fully substantiated: the temple buildings were the avenue through which Suzhou men dominated the Qing civil service exams and consequently obtained enormous political influence and power for themselves, their kin, and the entire city. This chapter demonstrates how the temple’s physical appearance and social identities shifted during the later Qing, when it was revitalized as a local and national institution in the

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f i g . 1 1 . Suzhou Prefectural Confucian Temple Western Ceremonial Arch, ca. 1910. The inscription on the arch reads, “Preeminent Way from Ancient Times to the Present.” Source: Haku K¯osei, Soshu¯ meisho¯ no annaiki, photo 4. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

f i g . 1 2 . Front of the Pavilion of Great Achievement, Prefectural Confucian Temple, ca. 1910. Source: Haku K¯osei, Soshu¯ meisho¯ no annaiki, photo 5. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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vanguard of modernizing education. Chapter 4 continues the story and examines Republican-era initiatives to revitalize or reject the temple and its historicity as fundamental or inimical to the creation of a modern society. These two chapters make up the second section of this book. Taken together, they explore the vicissitudes by which the city’s most long-lived and prestigious state organ served as a physical and institutional site for social and political reform.

The Tutelary Dragon and the Imperial Civil Service Exams Given the intensely competitive nature of the exam system, Suzhou’s record of exceptional individual and communal success was uncanny. The first level of the Qing civil service exam comprised three qualifying exams: by passing the xian, prefectural, and Courtyard Exam (Yuanshi), a “junior student” (tongsheng) achieved the status of shengyuan, a symbolic entry into lower gentry status. More importantly, as a shengyuan one qualified to sit successive examinations for the higher degrees that were necessary to fulfill the dominant cultural ideal of serving as a government official. The Provincial Exam (Xiangshi) awarded the juren degree, while the Metropolitan Exam (Huishi) in Beijing bestowed the jinshi, the highest scholarly degree and, by the late eighteenth century, a prerequisite for receiving a state appointment. This exam was normally followed by the Palace Exam (Dianshi). Held in the presence of the emperor (or, more commonly, his surrogate), this final competition confirmed the Metropolitan Exam, ranked all finishers, and awarded top finishers with special honors. The coveted title of zhuangyuan went to the man who placed first and assured a prestigious initial appointment, thereby increasing the prospect of achieving high office. During the Qing, twenty men from Wu, Changzhou, and Yuanhe xian became zhuangyuan. This number constitutes some 17.5 percent of the zhuangyuan from throughout the empire and 40.8 percent of those from Jiangsu province. (The number increases to twenty-six if one includes men who hailed from the other six xian within Suzhou prefecture.) In all, an astonishing 600 Suzhou men received Qing civil jinshi. In both the number of zhuangyuan and jinshi, Qing Suzhou was unmatched by any other locality.5 This success enabled Suzhou men, as officials, to wield an almost inordinate influence on state policy—a level of authority that contemporaries admired with respect and envy, and that modern writers have justly described as “hegemonic.”6 This power was so exceptional that local people attributed it to extrahuman intervention. According to popular fengshui lore, the city landscape was a sleeping dragon, a supranatural being that animated the city’s natural and human-built environment:

Renovating Structures / 105 The street [Sleeping Dragon Street (Wolong jie), which ran from the city center to the southern city wall] is a dragon’s body with the Northern Pagoda as the tail, the Confucian temple as the head, and the Twin Pagodas as the claws with which it grasps the best morning qi. The two wells in front of the Confucian Temple Main Gate are eyes. The adjoining land is the brain. . . .7

Land was not mere geological earth but an animate environment. Streams of energy, often identified as dragons, beneficent and powerful creatures ubiquitous in Chinese culture, ran through the earth and affected the land and people at the surface. Topography offered a guide to the location and nature of these streams. If properly manipulated and incorporated into the siting and building of a structure, these dragons could exercise a positive influence on the inhabitants of the structure. During the Song, a geomancer informed the Suzhou Magistrate Fan Zhongyan that the land possessed superior fengshui and that the progeny of the family that inhabited the site would pass the civil service exams for countless generations. Being a public-minded official of great probity, Fan realized that the possible advantages to the larger community outweighed those to his family. According to a late-seventeenth-century account, he reasoned, “What could be better than using my own family’s good fortune so that all the scholars of Wu may enjoy benefits without end?”8 Instead of building his family residence, he constructed the Confucian temple in 1035 CE. The cultural currency of this legendary deed was such that as even the local Nationalist government, opposed as it was to superstition, claimed that the native talent of its sons and the influence of the dragon’s brain had allowed Suzhou’s cultural accomplishments to remain outstanding from the Song to the present.9 Because dragons also symbolized the emperor, this role was particularly apropos, for the temple cultivated the intellect and wisdom that enabled the emperor to rule over his realm. Like the emperor, who rewarded Fuxue scholar-official alumni with individual favors and extended special dispensations to the entire locality, the sleeping dragon dispensed positive influences upon the scholars housed above and thus bestowed cumulative rewards upon the entire city.10 The centrality of the tutelary earthbound dragon to the site’s identity was reflected in the street’s names. Originally called “Big Street,” in the wake of the building of the Confucian temple, the street was called “Sleeping Dragon Street” for most of the late Imperial period. During the late Qing its official name was changed to Hulong jie, that is, “Protective Dragon Street,” or “Attend Dragon Street” the latter of which commemorates the welcome and escort along its course that prefectural and county officials afforded the Qianlong Emperor during his Southern Tours. (Widened and extended, the street is now called “People’s Road.” The primal force of one age replaces that of another.)11

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Despite their pervasiveness, geomantic ideas did not enjoy universal acceptance. In fact, geomancy was officially disdained by the Qing state as heterodox superstition. Magistrate Fan’s public gesture aside, during the Imperial era key urban infrastructural decisions in Suzhou seem to have been solely based on profane calculations relating to commerce, transportation, and social stability, not fengshui.12 Nonetheless, fengshui ideas exercised formative influence on the popular and literary imaginations. Geomancy provided a common imaginative framework, which true believers and skeptics alike deployed to depict the interrelations between the human and natural realms of the city. At times the existence and profound effects of dragon energies on the city were plain for all to see and could not be denied, even by self-proclaimed critics. Writing in the first half of the 1860s, local diarist Shen Shouzhi confessed that small alterations to the built environment had wreaked such evident harm to the city’s exam success that he had forsaken his usual skepticism. I don’t place much stock in fengshui sayings. However, there are certain things you cannot slander [or deny]. Our Suzhou’s resplendent success on the civil service exams is unmatched by other provinces. . . . This dominance peaked during the Qianlong (1736– 1795) and Jiaqing (1796–1820) reigns. At the 1811 exam, the zhuangyuan came from Hubei but the second and third place finishers, as well as those topping the second and third class cohort lists, all came from the three Suzhou city counties [Wu, Yuanhe, and Changzhou xian]. Within the city, Hulong Street is more than ten li long [and forms the dragon’s body], while the Prefectural school serves as the dragon’s head, and the Northern Temple Pagoda is the tail. This affects the fengshui of the entire city. Local lore has it that the street is not suitable for tunneling or digging for fear that the dragon vein would be harmed.

These popular scruples had not constrained state bureaucrats. During the midDaoguang (1821–50) reign, the tough law and order administrator Gui Zhaowan was distressed to find the state shrine to god of war Guandi, which was located on the Hulong Street dragon vein a few li north of the Prefectural Temple, so dilapidated and filthy as to be unfit for offering worshipful incense.13 At Gui’s behest, the surrounding area was rehabilitated as part of the temple renovation. Two nearby wells were dredged and sunk lower, and wooden balustrades were built around them for the convenience of area residents drawing water. The well water replenished, local exam success dried up. As Shen described it, the number of men passing the provincial and national levels gradually decreased until the nadir of 1850, when no Suzhou candidate passed the Metropolitan Exam. Despite his proclaimed skepticism toward fengshui theories, he duly concluded, “The source of these failures can be traced to dredging the wells, which harmed the dragon vein.” Alarmed that their entr´ee to state official status and power was endangered, local literati beseeched that the offending wells be filled in. Xian and provincial officials were unmoved, and the noxious wells remained.

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Local scholarly efforts bore fruit nonetheless: after the 1850 debacle, eight Suzhou men became jinshi before the Taiping army occupied the city in the fifth month of 1860.14 Had Shen noted it, this recovery of exam success might have undercut his newly affirmed faith in fengshui. Yet whether intentional or not, Shen did not acknowledge these successes. Instead, he looked forward to when Suzhou would no longer be “occupied by the bandits [Taiping forces]. . . to wonder whether anyone will discuss this matter [i.e., filling the wells] once the city is recovered.”15 His rumination on the fate of the wells and the restoration of integrity to the dragon vein was more than idle reverie. These matters would determine whether the Fuxue, and with it, the Qing state and its bureaucracy, would be reconstituted as before, and whether Suzhou and its elite might regain their previous positions of prominence.

The Temple in Historical Inquiry At first glance, the vision of the temple as the head of a slumbering subterranean dragon differs so radically from Min Eyuan’s depiction of a celebrated state institution housed in inert, albeit grand, architectural structures that it seems to describe a different place. Yet, as Shen Shouzhi demonstrates, the noumenal and architectural imaginings of the site were intimately related. Slight structural changes could harm both the supranatural dragon and local prominence within officialdom—with deleterious consequence to the greater Suzhou community and, possibly, the empire. These varied descriptions of the temple coalesce into a multitextured understanding of the setting, its functions, and symbolism. By considering the connections between different aspects of the site such as the temple as political institution, the monumental wooden architecture of temples, sacrifices to Confucius and other moral worthies, fengshui, the civil service exams, the larger Qing state, and Suzhou’s standing within the empire as a city of scholar-officials, we can begin to appreciate how late-eighteenth and early nineteeth-century elites inscribed themselves into the landscape, and, more generally, how the material and built environments simultaneously reflected and affected the workings of the Imperial state and the significance of Neo-Confucian teachings in Suzhou. The temple could also be understood as both a product and a producer of knowledge. As a result of its physical location, historicity, political functions, and cultural significance, the Confucian temple was implicated in many of the intellectual and institutional changes that were transforming the existing city into the novel hybrid of modern Suzhou. As a result, the temple featured prominently in several different imaginings of the city. Each of these visions of the temple epitomizes the different place and function of the temple as a physical and metaphorical site within different regimes of power.

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Unlike roads, which stand as the archetypal modern urban space and symbol par excellence, in the narratives that we will examine in this chapter, the Confucian temple served as a major site for assessing the spaces of “China,” “urban China/Suzhou,” and the seemingly transcendental notion of “Chinese civilization.” For each commentator, the temple symbolized an essential identity between the state, culture, society, and nation.16 This hermeneutic equivalence of state-culture-society-nation drew upon the Imperial Confucian discourse of wenming (culturalism, civilization), as well as the congeries of modernist concepts of “Civilization,” “Society,” and “Nation” circulating throughout East Asia in the early twentieth century. Though firmly and enduringly fixed in the geography of Suzhou, the symbolic domain of the Prefectural Temple extended far beyond the physical bounds of the city. Its varied linkages to institutions, ideas, and places near and far attest to the nature of urban space as a cumulative, multivalent construct of interconnections across time and space. It is no accident that of all the structures in Suzhou, the temple was a common focus of Chinese and foreigners concerned with the Chinese state and Chinese civilization—past, present, and future.

The Temple in Suzhou Qing and Republican-era maps and written descriptions depict the temple as a grand assemblage of imposing pavilions and ornately detailed gates. As arresting as this panorama of visual complexity may have been, it paled in comparison to the site’s complexity as a sociopolitical artifact. The temple was simultaneously an icon in its roles as an architectural structure, bureaucratic institution, and urban site. Yet to appreciate the range of the temple’s social significance, it is important to realize what it was not. In late Qing Suzhou the Prefectural Confucian Temple was neither one of the oldest nor most architecturally interesting structures in the city. Nor did the activities at the temple directly affect the lives of most townspeople—though its aggregate effects did. The yamens of the governor, prefect, and country magistrates, the offices of prosperous large-scale silk merchants, the huge Xuanmiao guan Daoist Temple, and the city’s exclusive brothels could all vie for these distinctions. Nor was this the only Confucian temple in the city. The three xian seated in the walled city maintained two temples of their own. (Yuanhe and Changzhou xian shared one.) While all three temples shared essential ritual and social functions, the Prefectural Confucian Temple was the most prominent as an institutional and architectural buttress to the Qing state’s authority. While the essential nature of the temple as a government institution dedicated to Confucius remained constant through the centuries, as a political institution

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the Fuxue reflected the changing concerns of Confucian scholarship, statecraft theory, and the state bureaucracy. In similar fashion, despite the almost continuous existence of the temple as an institution and the physical survival of older materials that were reused in various restoration projects, there had actually been numerous historical temples. Fires, decay, and destruction, or initiatives to improve the site caused the temple buildings to be built and rebuilt, moved, reconfigured, added, or discarded. The landscape also altered as the temple expanded and shrank in accord with the institution’s importance and the demand for land within the Suzhou city walls. At its greatest extent during the Imperial period, the complex extended over an area of 154 mu, drawing comparisons between “the profundity of its ponds and gardens” and “the heroic magnificence of its academic program.” By 1931, however, it had shrunk to the significantly reduced though still considerable area of seventy mu.17 The educational and ritual functions of the temple were distributed between the two, eastern and western, compounds. The western complex housed the Prefectural school (Fuxue), which accepted some thirty new civil degree students every three years, offered lectures on the classics, and held occasional essay competitions to help prepare students attain the level of shengyuan. To the east was the ritual complex of temples and smaller shrines. In addition to the grand Pavilion of Great Achievement, there were nine other shrines variously dedicated to other sage teachers, famous ministers, Suzhou Confucians, and local people celebrated for their personal virtue or filial piety. Many of these shrines were originally erected on the initiative of Suzhou gentry to honor people connected with the locality and had been located outside the temple complex. Later these had been appropriated and removed to the Fuxue grounds by the provincial administration to bring even parochial figures of worship under state oversight. The accommodation of these local shrines within the temple complex consolidated its position as the physical center of Confucian moral ritual and bespoke the stridency of state attempts to win or co-opt the sympathies of Suzhou powerbrokers. A hybrid institution, the temple simultaneously served the moral precepts ingrained in the order of the cosmos and human society, the political needs of a continent-sized empire, and the social demands of the local elite. All three of these functions coalesced in the temple’s most august ritual celebrations, the semiannual spring and autumn sacrifices to Confucius and a host of other worthies, which were held on the first ding day of the second and eighth months (usually February–March and September–October) at the Pavilion of Great Achievement. Several days before the sacrifice, a large tent with a zinc roof was erected over the dais in front of the pavilion. The government students chosen to serve as musicians and ritual dancers would then practice

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to perfect their prescribed roles lest any deviation destroy the integrity of the ceremony. On the morning of the ding day, long red candles set in front of the shrines and bonfires on tripods within the courtyard would infuse the dawn with the brilliancy of mid-day. With the company of high provincial civil and military officials arrayed in court dress standing in attendance, the celebrant, usually the governor, would invoke the spirit of Confucius, O Confucius, how great you are, first in prescience and knowledge, peer of Heaven and Earth, teacher to ten thousand generations; the appearance of the unicorn foretold your good fortune. With harmonious music we invite you with the sun and moon so bright, the Heaven and Earth clear and still.

The celebrant would then enter the temple, where a bull, three sheep, and three pigs were set out as sacrifice in front of the spirit tablet of Confucius, while pairs of sheep and pigs lay before the spirit tablets of twenty-one other sages. In addition, silk, salt, pickled meats, incense, candles, wine, and vegetable offerings would be presented by acolytes while the celebrant knelt, prostrated, and offered incense. Afterward, he would stand in the center of the hall, invoke Confucius’s spirit, and then exit the pavilion. The assembled dignitaries would then perform the nine prostrations of a full kowtow, bringing that particular offering to an end. The celebrant’s five successive oblations would be punctuated by four interludes of ceremonial dancing and music performed on the dais outside.18 In addition to sustaining the balance of the cosmos, the ritual provided officials and local leaders, including some without scholar status who desired to serve orthodox religious ideals, a strategic opportunity to meet and socialize.19 Given that central government officials depended heavily on gentry support, money, and extrabureaucratic initiatives to run their jurisdictions, while local elites stood to profit from good relations with officialdom, the occasion was potentially beneficial to both sides. This sociological aspect of the sacrifice was very much in keeping with the import of the rites themselves, for they honored rulership and authority. The rites were a symbolic affirmation of the Qing state’s benevolent rule and cultural orthodoxy, a crucial concern for a dynasty of “foreign” Manchus ruling a mainly Han Chinese population. Yet ritual behavior was also seen as eminently practical. As a frequently reprinted Qing government manual explained, From time immemorial, making sacrifices to gods and conducting warfare against enemies have been considered the two most basic functions of the state. The ceremonies of the spring and autumn sacrifices to Confucius . . . have permanent significance. If the district enjoys a bumper crop and the six obligations of human conduct are properly observed in society, when the sacrificial animals are offered and drums and bells are sounded during the ceremony, the spirit of the sage will be pleased with the offering and

Renovating Structures / 111 will bestow blessings on the people. . . . The climate will be auspicious, the harvest will be bountiful, and the people will enjoy peace and tranquility.20

And the presence or absence of peace and tranquility among the people was the ultimate testament to the political and cultural legitimacy of those who gathered at the temple and the Qing state they served. Even the American missionary Hampden Du Bose, despite his antipathy toward the sacrifices as superstitious heresy, corroborated this Qing vision of the social function of Confucian ritual, declaring “No one can witness the scene [of the Pavilion of Great Achievement Confucian sacrifice] without being impressed how deep the roots of these venerable cults have penetrated into the national heart.”21 The confirmation of credulous Du Bose notwithstanding, during the mid-nineteenth century, recent events had provided ample cause to question both the legitimacy of the celebrants and the efficacy of the sacrifices in fostering popular allegiance to Imperial authority. The long history of occasional social unrest and rebellions large and small demonstrated that the Qing state, Confucian learning, and the temple that served them both all garnered the enmity of many foes. When Suzhou was occupied by the forces and followers of Hong Xiuquan (the Taiping Heavenly King) from 1860–3, the temple bore the brunt of the Taiping rejection of the Qing state and Confucian moral authority. The Taiping Uprising was animated by the unique proto-Christian religious and social vision of Hong, the self-proclaimed son of God and younger brother of Jesus Christ, who aimed to expel the Manchus and establish a divine earthly realm. As the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom consolidated power over conquered areas, it actively suppressed “heterodox” teachings, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, and Daoism, and promoted Taiping-style Christian worship in their place. Therefore, after Taiping forces seized the city on the thirteenth day of the fourth month of XF10 (June 2, 1860), they ravaged numerous “heretical” temples, though spirit tablets, despite being major objects of ritual devotion, were judiciously spared. Purportedly, the soldiers were reluctant to incur the wrath of spirits, including Confucius, by destroying their tablets.22 As the paramount local shrine of Qing state heresy and training ground for the demonized Manchus’ civil bureaucracy, the Prefectural Confucian Temple was not exempted. The Taipings left only the crossbeams and posts of the Pavilion of Great Achievement standing.23 The Suzhou Statecraft scholar and director of the Fuxue’s institutional progeny, the state-supported Ziyang Academy, Feng Guifen recounted, “This was a huge catastrophe, the magnitude of which had never occurred in the previous 800 plus years. The danger to our Way at this time was extreme.”24 Despite their differences, the Taipings and Qing officials both recognized the temple as an essential component of the Imperial state.

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Therefore, the guardians of the Qing state were quick to initiate the rebuilding of the temple and the revival of their Way. When the Qing Provincial Governor Li Hongzhang retook Suzhou in late TZ–2 (1863) two-thirds of the prewar population of one million people had either fled or died.25 The initial death and destruction of the Taiping campaign against the Qing defenders was exacerbated by fires attributed to the evacuating Qing troops.26 Any further damage inflicted by the Taiping occupation was overshadowed by the desperate violence between the trapped Taiping forces and encroaching Qing troops during the campaign to retake the city. In the wake of these successive cycles of mass killing and destruction, the recaptured cityscape and surrounding rural communities became burned-out charnel houses. The landscape was so transformed, littered with the strewn corpses of the dead, that even the fundamental distinction between solid land and flowing water seemed unclear. The waters assumed a solid earth-like appearance as bloated, decomposing bodies choked the canals.27 Faced with myriad urgent rebuilding projects to meet the surviving populace’s immediate physical needs and to reestablish commercial and social life, Governor Li and other state officials, along with famous local scholars such as Feng Guifen, Gu Wenbin, and Pan Zengweis, professed that the reconstruction of the Prefectural Temple must be a top priority. (Ding Richang, who became Provincial Governor shortly after the city’s recapture, likewise declared that rebuilding the Wu and Changzhou-Yuanhe xian temples would be the first act of his administration.)28 The reconstruction effort commenced in early TZ–3 (1864) and was finally completed in TZ–7 (1868) at the enormous cost of several million strings of cash. Despite the fact that not all the commissioned ritual implements—some 805 ritual vessels for offering sacrificial oblations, 245 musical instruments to perform the ceremonial music, and 120 pairs of hats and gowns to be worn by musicians and ceremonial dancers—were yet ready, over 100 officials and local scholars gathered nonetheless to perform the state sacrifice to Confucius for the first time since the spring of 1860.29 The scholars respectfully admired the temple and school and were moved by the sight. They hope that remembering the Sage [and his teachings] will become the dominant custom. Indeed, if the people’s hearts are rooted [in Confucian teachings], how can they be improper?30

Whether the new temple would help effect a popular upsurge in the observance of Confucian doctrine remained to be seen. At the same time, despite the brutal suppression of the Taiping, the temple and the primacy of Confucian teachings remained vulnerable to the predation of yet another group of Christian sectarians, American evangelists.

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Foreign Missions and the Fuxue Although foreign residence within the walled city was controversial, by the mid-1870s American Presbyterians had succeeded in buying a plot of open land in the Southern Garden, an area of rice paddy adjacent to the temple, to construct a European-style house, probably the first Western residential structure and perhaps even the first Occidental building in the city. The literati protested once the compound walls delineating the property started to go up. They objected that a Western structure would interfere with the Confucian sacrifices and destroy the temple’s excellent fengshui. Possibly remembering the scholastic drought triggered by Daoguang period well-digging, they feared for the success of Suzhou scholars on the exams and, hence, the political, economic, and cultural prominence of the city within the empire.31 Such concerns were not unique to Suzhou. A similar case had rocked Hangzhou during the summer and fall of 1873. Shortly after a group of American Southern Presbyterians had built some multistory houses on Emei Hill, a spate of disastrous fires and disease outbreaks plagued Hangzhou. Geomancers and much of the local population blamed the tall Occidental buildings, which had disrupted the fengshui. By standing near the provincial treasurer’s office, the foreign residences were said to have particularly injured the provincial treasury and people connected with it. Indeed, the provincial treasurer had recently suffered the death of a son, which was popularly attributed to the impairment of the provincial treasury’s fengshui. This tragedy had caused many people to nervously question whether some disaster might soon befall the treasury or the greater provincial economy. To avoid further danger to the city, potential harm to the entire province, and the spread of unrest, a group of Hangzhou gentry bought the disputed land and pulled down the offending buildings. The missionaries, meanwhile, acquired another plot in a less-sensitive spot.32 In Suzhou, it is also possible that literati objected to the fact that the building would house foreigners, whose right of abode and right to establish commercial enterprises in the Chinese interior would remain disputed until the end of the dynasty. The 1895 Shimonoseki Treaty greatly expanded the notion of extraterritoriality by establishing the right of Japanese and, hence, all other foreigners to reside anywhere within Suzhou—and, thus, all other treaty ports. Qing officials, however, did not readily accept this interpretation. Occasionally the Chinese authorities or politically active businessmen and literati would publicly protest that foreigners, with the notable exception of the mainly American missionaries running local schools and hospitals near the city center, could only live or own businesses in the official concession area beyond the southern city wall. In 1896, local authorities attempted to enforce Zhang Zhidong’s efforts

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to limit foreign residence to the concession areas by evicting Japanese who had rented buildings inside the city and arresting the landlords and guarantors, as well as harassing the American head of a shipping concern at his residence. Following upon Governor-General Zhang Zhidong’s successive orders of March 1896 and 1897 prohibiting the sale of Shanghai private property lying outside the concessions to foreigners, during the summer of 1897 the local Suzhou and Hangzhou authorities forbade the Chinese to sell land outside concession areas to foreigners lest this provide a foothold for the expansion of foreign influence and lead to the outright seizure of Chinese territory. Until the late Qing, Suzhou landowners who sold land to Japanese nationals were occasionally thrown in jail.33 Foreign residence near the temple may have been judged objectionable because it raised the possibility that imperialist powers might interfere with Qing state ritual by lodging claims over the neighboring area. Objecting to Japan’s attempt to establish its concession directly west of the city wall, in 1895 Zhang Zhidong argued that proximity to the city’s Altars of Heaven and Earth and the absolute necessity that these state ritual sites remain under Qing administration disallowed the area as a foreign-ruled district. Given the steady expansion of foreign concession areas in Shanghai, he thought it quite likely that foreign powers might seek to enlarge their concessions or demand enclaves within the walled city. Either instance would pose an unconscionable threat to the sanctity of Qing ritual practice.34 It is also possible that the root of concern lay with the structure, which was no doubt strange looking and perhaps even seemed inappropriate for habitation. For their part, the missionaries had foreseen that the construction of foreign buildings might cause concern and had prudently chosen to live in Chinese houses until the mission was well established and they could secure their own land.35 While it did not incite riot or panicked flight as in 1895, the appearance of Western buildings near the temple did ignite protests among some of the most powerful people in the city—if not the entire province or nation. The landowner who had sold the land was thrown in jail and, as in the 1873 Hangzhou case, local authorities held a series of meetings with the American consul-general, who traveled several times from Shanghai, to discuss a solution. Finally, after the previous landowner had already spent some time in jail, the disputed parcel was traded for another plot in a less-sensitive area of the city.36 Venerated by the literati for its religious, academic, and political functions, the Prefectural Confucian Temple was to be protected from the indignities or possible harm resulting from close proximity with a foreign religion and disruptive foreign buildings.

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The Temple and Chinese Civilization: An American Missionary’s View Perhaps at some level local literati were also anxious to shield their temple and their Way from the foreign missionaries and their doctrinal scorn. During the late nineteeth century, several Protestant missionaries took the opportunity to visit Jiangnan’s most famous Confucian temple, a center of the state cult of nonChristian worship, and published articles on it. While these accounts conveyed lively curiosity and, often, scholarly knowledge about their subject, even the most sympathetic, not surprisingly, betrayed theological and intellectual criticisms of Confucian worship, literati culture, and the state bureaucratic system. On the whole, Christian proselytizers did not share the literati estimation that the temple’s massive structures reflected the majesty of Confucian moral teachings and social order. Rather, they perceived the Fuxue as a clear sign of the perversity and inferiority of Chinese society and civilization. The Pavilion of Great Achievement was the focus of a travelogue by John L. Mateer, the American superintendent of the Presbyterian Mission Press in Shanghai, which appeared in the September–October 1875 issue of the Protestant missionary journal The Chinese Recorder. Arguing that missionaries “enjoy the beautiful in life, and partake of its spiciness just as much as anyone,” Mateer penned what he described as an entertaining and instructional sketch of an excursion that he and his companions, four adult missionaries and their children, had taken from Shanghai to Suzhou. On their first day of sightseeing, they left their boat anchored in a canal outside the city wall, entered the city, and made their way to the Suzhou Prefectural Confucian Temple. In front of the temple is a considerable lawn, laid out and regularly planted with evergreens, but overgrown with weeds. Passing from this lawn through two or three courts and gateways, we came to the main court, and beyond it to the main temple. The buildings are of considerable size and in good repair. We were surprised, therefore (besides experiencing sundry other sensations), at being met, as we neared the entrance, by a most offensive odor. Reaching the door, some of our party were repelled from entering; even woman’s curiosity was overcome. Once within the hall the smell was horrible: not causing feelings of faintness, nausea, or of suffocation from close mustiness, but a nasty, pungent smell which almost strangled us. . . . One of our party on turning away actually gasped for breath. . . . Our principal vision was of a lofty hall, dark, dreary, deserted; devoid of image or ornament; and filled with a compound of emptiness, gloom . . . and the rushing and screeching of hundreds of bats. The floor was literally covered with the dung of the latter, from which we could almost see the rank smells exhaling. . . . We turned away from the scene with mingled feelings of thankfulness, sadness, pity, surprise and disgust. Connect with the ideas suggested by the above description, the fact that anyone

116 / i n “ t r a d i t i o n ’s” t e m p l e who should attempt to destroy or injure this repulsive, apparently deserted temple, would meet with direst vengeance, and we have a sadly vivid picture of the moral condition of the Chinese.—Indifferent, proud, empty, sunken in the gloomy waste of moral darkness and sloth, and so completely wedded to their superstitions, that they with indifference allow their religions to become as polluted with absurdity, witchcraft, cruelty, and vice, as is this temple—a temple in their wealthiest city, dedicated to their great sage, moralist and lawgiver—with filth.37

Anyone who has come upon large numbers of bats in their lair can appreciate the accuracy of Mateer’s description of the stench, as well as his companions’ revulsion. Yet there was more at work in his essay than a singular attempt at mimesis. Read as an edifying entertainment, Mateer’s stated objective, the piece could be judged to be successfully informative and amusing. Far from appreciating the reconstructed temple as a testament to the Qing’s resilience after almost succumbing to the Taiping Uprising and other contemporary rebellions, or as a demonstration of the fortitude of Confucian tradition and scholarship, Mateer found evidence of the emptiness of Confucian worship and belief as a non-Christian teaching. One could imagine the predominantly American and Western European missionary readership of The Chinese Recorder being somewhat shocked at learning of such physical and moral filth in Suzhou— of all places. Contrary to Mateer’s claim, Suzhou was no longer the richest city in the empire. Protected by Western forces during the Taiping Rebellion, Shanghai had transformed into the regional center of commerce and industry. Nonetheless, for many foreigners and Chinese alike, Suzhou remained one of the preeminent cities of the empire—a cynosure of Chinese civilization and wealth. Although handicraft industries were relatively slow to rebound, after the rebellion the landlord class quite successfully reestablished control over the lands that provided the wealth to support the sumptuous pleasures of gentry life.38 Mansions and gardens were rebuilt. Thus in 1875 when Mateer and his companions traveled to Suzhou, it was once again an opulent southern city. Lampooning such a cosmopolitan city as backward, dirty, and ignorant only underscored the need for Christendom’s evangelizing mission. To Mateer, the temple and, by extension, China were both heathen, absurd, and filthy. In actuality, the piles of dung in the temple, which Mateer viewed as unambiguous evidence of Chinese depravity and the empire’s current ills, were viewed by Suzhou residents as a medicinal substance that promoted good health. Suzhou people not only used the bat waste. It was a celebrated and valuable local commodity that sold so well that one needed to reserve some of the limited supply a year in advance. Dried bat droppings, known as “luminous grains” (yeming miao), had a wide range of therapeutic uses, which included treating measles

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and acne in women, inducing abortion, improving bleary eyesight, sedating children, and neutralizing underarm odor.39 From the viewpoint of Suzhou residents, the malodorous piles of bat excrement, like the temple, fortified the health of society. Mateer’s easy cultural arrogance and the conclusions it supported may offend, but his choice of the Confucian temple and its rites as both a symbol for China and a determining feature of Suzhou was most perceptive. Cultural and institutional changes would be reflected in the temple building and its ritual uses. Instead of being morally or socially bankrupt, as Mateer saw them, Confucian ideals and the Qing Imperial state were remarkably tenacious and creative, achieving a series of political, social, and technological transformations that duly affected the appearance, institutional functions, and cultural meanings of the temple.

Confucius and His Temple in a New Age On GX31.8.4 (Sept. 2, 1905) the Qing Court issued an edict announcing the termination of the civil service examinations. Zhang Zhidong, Yuan Shikai, and other senior ministers had pressed for abolition because they feared that the continuation of the civil service examination system, which was based on a classical curriculum that had essentially been set in the Yuan dynasty, would deter the Qing state’s attempts to reform and modernize education. Schools would still teach the classics, but additionally would offer science, social science, foreign languages, and other modern foreign subjects deemed essential for national strengthening. Not only did this announcement terminate the Prefectural school’s 800-year-old raison d’ˆetre, it also sundered the institutional linkage between Confucian learning and state service. Contrary to what one might expect, as a result of these changes the Fuxue did not fall into obsolescence. Rather, it attained a higher official status than at any other time during its 800 years as a state institution. It was revitalized as an urban center dedicated to the propagation of learning and Confucian pietism, serving a broader section of the city population than in any previous period. These innovations not only excited contemporary controversy, but finally proved to be such a radical departure from mundane views of the temple and its importance, past and present, that they have been largely excised from historical discussion. To recapture the magnitude of the institutional transformation of the temple and its place within Suzhou, it is best to look back to the late Qing from the present. From the vantage point of late-twentieth-century PRC historiography, the Fuxue remained a critical symbolic site. As invoked in the 1994 Suzhou City Gazetteer, the most recent addition to the millennium-old tradition of

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comprehensive Suzhou local histories, the Fuxue served as a metonym symbolizing the decline of the educational system and the enfeeblement of the Qing state. By the late Qing, the Prefectural School and the [two Wu xian and Changzhou/Yuanhe xian] Xian Schools were moribund, and grew worse every day. There were no students at the school, only periodic exams of shengyuan. With the infiltration of Western studies, progressive literati abandoned the civil service exams and calls for the adoption of Western studies raised to a fever pitch. After the 100 Days Reform [1898], the Prefectural and Xian Schools finally became historical relics to be put on display.40

Despite a core of historical accuracy, this passage more accurately represented late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Marxist and Han nationalist inflected assessments of the late Qing, which was often depicted as a period of unmitigated disaster and betrayal, than of the actual events. As for passing into obsolescence as “displayed historical relics,” the Fuxue and its provincially supported allied school the Ziyang Academy (Ziyang shuyuan) may have been senescent, but they were hardly enfeebled as educational institutions. Not only did they continue to recruit men into state service for the duration of their existence, they served as sites for fundamental pedagogical innovation and the transformation of Confucius into a popular national figure. Far from falling into obsolescence, in the early twentieth century the Fuxue emerged as a vital, reformist state political and educational institution. Scholars of Qing education have long noted that the tasks of teaching and fostering scholarship fell on private academies, while the official government schools focused on preparing shengyuan for the civil service exams. This exclusive institutional mandate moved one late-nineteenth-century missionary to caustically observe that the Ziyang Academy, which had been housed in the western temple compound at its founding in KX 52 (1713) and subsequently moved to land connected to the Fuxue, was essentially a “testing center” and not a “real” college.41 It would be more accurate to say that testing and constant essay writing were the dominant pedagogical methods. Relatively few students, many of whom lived outside the city, regularly attended academy lectures. Instead, students mainly traveled to state academies to deliver assigned biweekly essays or to compose timed themes on site, of which the best 500 would be ranked and the top entries awarded cash prizes. In the later nineteenth century over 1,000 advanced students would gather twice a month at the Ziyang Academy to write essays. The awards, which ranged from $1 to $15 Mexican dollars, provided some scholars without resources a crucial means of financial support. The fortnightly Fuxue essay competitions regularly attracted several hundred to a thousand participants as late as 1897.42

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The abolition of the exams and the resulting end of the Prefectural Temple as a school for civil service candidates were the most dramatic late Qing changes to the role of the Fuxue as a state institution of higher learning, yet these were neither the earliest nor the only controversial alterations to the site’s educational functions. While the most prestigious private academies such as Shanghai’s Southern Quintessence Academy revived classical studies and were maintained as bastions of traditional elite learning and status until the dynasty’s end, progressive Jiangsu provincial administrations made the Fuxue one of the earliest sites in Jiangnan for innovative modern state education. In the fall of GX28 (1902), shortly after the Qing court passed regulations mandating the creation of new-style public schools featuring curricula of foreign learning, several buildings were erected in and around the western portion of the Fuxue to house a high school and middle school. The Ziyang Academy disbanded as a classical academy and became the Ziyang Examiners’ School (Ziyang xiaoshi guan), a new-style study hall that offered instruction in mathematics, Chinese classics, French, English, and social science to students who pledged to enter government service upon graduation.43 It is unclear whether the students at this new school also pursued the civil service exams as an additional means of entering government service and achieving social status. Unlike the civil service exams, which gave scholars the liberty to pursue studies at a location and pace of their own choosing, the new modern school system required that one commit to a fixed and continuous course of study to complete the degree, and the period of study provided no academic or career benefits unless completed.44 Students who completed the curriculum however, incurred the dual obligation/opportunity to enter state service. Therefore, even before the final suspension of the civil service exam system, the Ziyang Examiners’ school provided an alternate entr´ee to a government career. This new trajectory, in turn, facilitated political reform by providing men trained in modernist learning to staff the government bureaucracy as it was reorganized along foreign lines in an attempt to create a modern state apparatus. In GX 30 (1904), the reformist governor Duanfang secured the services of one of the foremost advocates of contemporary foreign learning and pedagogy, Luo Zhenyu, to reorganize the school anew according to the most advanced methods of Japanese education. Luo had acquired his expertise through his study of agricultural reform: he had lectured extensively on recent Japanese works on modern farming methods and had subsequently founded a Japanese-language school to help propagate the circulation of Japanese agronomic scholarship. This experience, in turn, led him to be chosen as a member of an influential 1901 educational mission dispatched by Zhang Zhidong and Liu Kunyi to study Japanese schooling. Upon his return, Luo began to publish the influential Jiaoyu

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shijie (Education world, published 1901–5), China’s first journal dedicated to modernist educational reform. Luo first repaired the Ziyang Academy’s buildings, which had fallen into disrepair, built new ones, and expanded the site by occupying the former military drill field north of the Prefectural Temple. He then erected a new compound wall to set the new school apart from the various institutions from which it had sprung and thus endow it with a distinct institutional and physically autonomous identity. The reorganized institution, the Jiangsu Provincial First Normal School (Jiangsusheng diyi shifan xuexiao), expanding upon the curriculum of the Ziyang Examiners’ School, offered courses in biology, chemistry, and physics, in addition to social science, math, Chinese classical studies, and foreign languages.45 Although this curriculum was largely unrelated to Confucian teachings, Luo instituted his own methods to emphasize the importance of Confucius and his teachings as the nationalist, cultural basis of Chinese education. As he recounted a couple decades later, Although society was not on a rampage like today, the sprouts [of contemporary troubles] were already present, so at the school I erected a tablet wishing the Emperor long life and a spirit tablet [or image, the context is unclear] of Great Sage Teacher Confucius. On the first and fifteenth days of the lunar calendar I led all students in the nine prostrations of the full kowtow.

In addition to suppressing the “sprouts” of social disorder, Luo explained, ceremonies honoring Confucius represented nothing less than the future of “National Studies.”46 Normal School officials hoped that by embracing Confucius as their model, students would be inspired to dedicate themselves to ameliorating China’s national travails. To implement his plan to reorganize the Ziyang school along the advanced lines of modern Japanese curricula, Luo engaged leading scholars such as Wang Guowei, who taught ethics, and thus continued the compounded legacy of the Ziyang Academy and Prefectural Temple as institutional paragons within Chinese letters. Other choices, however, highlighted the radical differences between the traditions of Fuxue and Ziyang Academy scholarship, and modern education and learning. Luo entrusted the decisive post of head instructor to his long-time collaborator, the Japanese educator and sinologist Fujita Toyohachi (Kenpo), who, arriving in Shanghai in 1897, was part of the first wave of Japanese advisors to various educational, political, and police reform projects in China during the “Golden Decade” of Japanese-Chinese relations at the turn of the century. In Shanghai, Fujita had worked as Luo’s right hand, variously serving as a translator of agricultural and educational texts, a teacher in Luo’s Japaneselanguage school, the Dongwen xueshe, and Luo’s liaison to Japanese scholars and officials.47

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The large influx of Japanese instructors and expert advisors in the late nineteenth century had made Japanese teachers familiar in many places in China. Yet, as Bao Tianxiao recalled, in the late 1890s he had viewed the experience of studying under a Japanese teacher as a great novelty. Despite the establishment of the concession in the Qingyangdi, which Bao described as seeming distant and isolated from the rest of the city, there was little intermixing between the Japanese concession residents and walled Suzhou. Therefore, when several Japanese Pure Land Buddhist monks dispatched by the Kyoto-based Higashi Honganji (Eastern Amida Buddha Vow Temple) order arrived in May 1899 and established the Japanese-language academy where Bao and his friends briefly studied, it qualified as a grand political and social occasion.48 Sect leaders from the main China-branch temple in Shanghai, the Japanese ambassador and Suzhou consul, members of the concession administration and business community, Suzhou prefects and magistrates, and local gentry convened for pomp and speechifying. Speaking on behalf of the two other Higashi Honganji missionary teachers, head monk Matsubayashi Takazumi offered the eulogy: China and Japan are close, interdependent neighbors, occupying the same continent and writing with the same script. At present, China has been experiencing great difficulties. . . . If it doesn’t soon open to outside influences, it will be unable to self-strengthen. Japan, from the Tang when Confucian and Buddhist teachings were brought [from China] to the East, has preserved and instituted these teachings. Nonetheless, in recent years we have transformed and established ourselves, as events attest.

For China and Japan to not foster their linguistic and cultural intimacy to promote Chinese development would be tantamount to squandering a guaranteed solution to the Qing’s travails and portend disaster for greater East Asia. As Matsubayashi’s remarks made clear, the monks’ presence resulted from the 1895 victory, which undeniably testified to the effectiveness of Japanese selfstrengthening. The emissaries of the Higashi Honganji were a Japanese Buddhist analog to European and American Protestant missionaries and were active in the Jiangnan area from 1876 through World War II. Though the Japanese monks never achieved the Protestants’ power and influence, they modeled themselves after their Christian counterparts by conjoining proselytization with modern educational initiatives. The monks offered Suzhou “followers of Confucius” entr´ee to the superior (Japanese) Pure Way of Buddhism through Japanese-language instruction, as well as auxiliary subjects such as English and mathematics that provided additional means of propagating the Buddhist Law and improving society. Japan, in the wake of Perry’s intrusion some thirty years before, had suffered from a malaise of national spiritual and technological weakness similar to

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that currently plaguing China. “Yet fortunately all levels of society accepted the Buddhist dharma and mind.” Buddhism, foreign languages, and modern scientific learning, had cured Japan’s ills and, the Honganji promised, would remedy the Qing’s as well. In offering this joint spiritual and scientific remedy to students in Suzhou, the four Suzhou Higashi Honganji missionaries were not merely following their own individual or institutional vocation; they were also fulfilling Japan’s avowed “national charitable enterprise.” The Meiji Emperor had recently charged the order to expand its corps of twenty-odd China missionary teachers and extend its mission of religious and cultural uplift beyond metropolises like Shanghai, Nanjing, and Hangzhou to such still benighted areas as Suzhou.49 As the now dominant partner in a millennial old “intimate relationship” Japan was beneficently assuming the role of cultural tutor previously played by China. It offered up its essential moral teachings, which though largely introduced from China had been better preserved and further developed in Japan, and advanced technical expertise for the benefit of its increasingly beleaguered and backward western neighbor. This reversal of the long-established Sino-dominated cultural and political hierarchy quite likely made Fujita’s presence as head teacher overseeing a Japanese-derived curriculum at what had formerly been one of the empire’s most prestigious Confucian academies odd or even menacingly offensive to some literati. Given the strength of hackneyed stereotypes characterizing the Japanese as dwarfs and feckless imitators of Chinese culture, to say nothing of more recent local political and economic antagonisms, the tenure of Head Teacher Fujita and of a dozen other Japanese instructors may have suggested that China’s intellectual and territorial integrity lay under siege.50 The academic reforms undertaken during Luo’s leadership also transformed the school’s standing as an area institution. When he arrived, there were 320 students enrolled in the Ziyang new-style study hall. However under the revised curriculum, the Normal School only accommodated some sixty full-time pupils, along with lecture, physical education, and short-term students. In addition, whereas admission to the Ziyang Academy and Fuxue had been the special perquisite of Suzhou area literati, the new school was open to students (by entrance exam) throughout Jiangsu. The reduced enrollment, exacerbated by the enormous increase in the potential applicant pool, made the new Normal School more elite than ever, but in an entirely new and unfamiliar way. Initially, the transformation of the Fuxue’s allied institution, the Ziyang Academy, from Confucian classical academy to a modern school promoting Western learning seems to have excited little, if any, local protest. However, once it became clear that the institutional restructuring of the school threatened their traditional prerogatives of privileged access to state education and subsequent

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entry into government service, the Suzhou gentry vehemently protested.51 Their opposition pushed Luo to abandon Suzhou in 1906, yet this did not effect a reversion to the past. No longer the preserve of the Suzhou area elite, the Fuxue was being transformed into a provincial political institution that would serve a broader section of the Suzhou and Jiangsu public. Luo’s idiosyncratic inclusion of ceremonies honoring the emperor and Confucius as a regular part of the new curriculum anticipated the immediate future direction of Qing state educational policy. Changes in school curricula and the suspension of the Confucian-based exam system did not indicate that the state had abandoned Confucius, numen and Sage Teacher. On the contrary, while the state-defined Confucian curriculum was no longer the main prerequisite for state service nor the central focus of education, the Imperial state remained a Confucian institution, the very structure and legitimacy of which were inextricably based on the transcendental truth of the Confucian tradition. Despite radical changes in institutional practice, the Qing renewed its commitment to the pedagogical and political primacy of Confucian teachings, particularly in its efforts to create a national mass education system: the Qing state exalted Confucius as a patron and role model for modern learning. Students were urged to emulate Confucius’s ambition and dedication to better society by serving the state. Yet, whereas Confucius’s search for a state where he would be given the opportunity to employ his learning to reform government and society had been in vain, students enrolled in the new schools were instructed that the Qing state was not only worthy but eager to employ their new learning. As with the traditional Confucian curriculum, preparation for state service was explicitly designated to be the ultimate purpose of their education. Students were urged to commit themselves, recipients of Imperial beneficence, to the renewal of the Great Qing Empire, which would be remade as a powerful modern nation-state. The late Qing exaltation of Confucius gave the new educational curriculum of largely foreign subjects—biology, physics, chemistry, social science, advanced Western mathematics, and foreign languages—a Chinese nationalist, cultural basis. As history-laden institutions dedicated to the memory of the Sage Teacher Confucius and other prominent moral teachers, these temples represented reserves of sacrosanct political, cultural, and moral authority. The cultural and political resonances of these temples were amenable to a variety of purposes, such as local literati pretensions to status on the basis of the city’s scholarly life or attempts to gain favor by fraternizing with officials. However, as official state institutions, Confucian temples were viewed by the state as proprietary properties. Indeed, Chinese Imperial states had long looked to Confucian temples, as both literal and metaphorical “sites of memory,” that could be used to

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support policy goals, accommodate social and political change, or strategically respond to dire challenges.52 After all, here, through the strict performance of sacrifice in the grand temple complexes lying in every major city, state officials demonstrated the moral legitimacy of their exercise of civil power. In times of crisis the emperor and his officials, in time-honored fashion, would retreat to the sanctuary of the Confucian temples to broker a symbolic accommodation of new policies while simultaneously affirming that the dynasty remained true to fundamental moral principles. During the late Imperial period, no crisis challenged the ideological legitimacy of the Confucian Imperial institution more than late Qing educational and political reforms.53 In fact, the challenges were so great that the court several times made recourse to Confucian temples to reconcile Confucius and the millennia-old tradition of Confucian moral philosophy with modern foreign learning, reformist educational institutions, and the restructuring of the Qing state.

The Public Celebration of Confucius’s Birthday As an initial step in this process, the court promulgated a set of comprehensive school regulations on GX29.11.26 (Jan. 13, 1904) that redefined Sage Teacher Confucius and the temples honoring his memory as modern pedagogical institutions. Henceforth, the twenty-eighth day of the eighth lunar month (generally late September–October of the Gregorian calendar), which had been traditionally designated Confucius’s birthday, became a state school holiday celebrating learning, national cultural uniqueness, and dynastic loyalty for private and public institutions alike. (The date was changed to 8.27 in XT2 (1910) with the standardization of the Chinese lunar calendar.) The new holiday served as a modern academic analog to the Confucian sacrifices, while significantly altering the temple’s ritual use. On the comparative political level, the celebration demonstrated the Qing’s enthusiasm for following Meiji Restoration Japan in emulating nineteenth-century European nations in creating national culture and monarch-centered public holidays. As the Japanese and Chinese courts appreciated, in Europe these “invented traditions” had bolstered the supremacy of the state and popularity of royalty in the face of the rising tide of republicanism and other more radical political currents by dignifying both with the imprimatur of hallowed custom. This popularization reflected the convergence between the concepts of “state,” “society,” and “nation,” as the nation became the dominant framework for social and political movements, which increasingly focused on mass participation. As part of this process, nationalistminded elites of all political orientations energetically promoted mass political indoctrination through the invention of national “traditions” and symbols. The

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new Confucius’s Birthday holiday, which prominently featured invocations for the health of the emperor and the dynasty, not so subtly attempted to cultivate a personalized identification between the court and Confucius—hence, China’s politics and culture as a whole. The same regulations established a tacit equivalence between the Sage and the current dynasts by declaring the birthdays of Empress Dowager Cixi (10.10) and the Guangxu Emperor (6.28) school holidays, as well. (The former was a particularly rich instance of historical irony. During the Republic, October 10 would be celebrated as National Day in commemoration of the 1911 Wuchang Uprising that launched the Xinhai Revolution.)54 At the level of ceremonial practice, the new holiday instigated the gradual popularization of Confucius and the temple as national symbols. Though the Sage’s birthday had been noted among scholars, it had not previously been celebrated as a popular or official government holiday. State ceremonials honoring Confucius had been limited to sacrifices attended by a small, select group of central government officials, powerful gentry, and government students. The revised birthday celebration, by contrast, involved the general population of public and private school students in markedly secular nationalist rites. The new school holiday was not a free vacation day. Rather, students were to attend academic assemblies at which they paid respects to the national flag (the nascent cult of which was also a recent innovation based on foreign models), paraded, listened to exhortatory lectures on Confucius and his teachings, and, most likely, paid a visit to the Confucian temple, as well. In Suzhou, at least, this last point seems certain as it was already the area custom. Local students and scholars had been in the habit of visiting Confucian temples to pay their respects on the Sage’s birthday since at least the mid-nineteenth century and continued to do so until the end of the dynasty—and most likely, beyond.55 Now, however, students came as part of a state holiday program. This shift brought a larger, more diverse group of students to the temple grounds for ceremonial activities. In late-nineteenth-century Suzhou, men attained the status of shengyuan, on average, at the age of twenty-four. However, because less than 7 percent succeeded in passing the juren exam, the vast majority remained government students all their lives.56 Thus, the crowds of government students who performed the dignified ceremonial dances accompanying the sacrifices were mainly adult men ranging from their mid-twenties to very elderly. Late Qing public school students, by contrast, included children, toward whom the courses were aimed, and young men who had previously studied in classical academies and now hoped to advance within the new educational system. For instance, the sixty students who enrolled at a “high school” precursor of the Provincial Normal School in 1903 were all between sixteen and twenty-three years of age.57

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The Confucius’s Birthday celebration explicitly redressed state fears regarding student behavior and political sympathies. Government students were, in the state’s eyes, infamous for venting their displeasure with Qing policy or the administration of the exams by rioting and sometimes even destroying spirit tablets from state shrines, as they did in Suzhou in early 1904.58 This perennial concern was exacerbated by the fact that the new cohort of modernized school students lacked the years, if not decades, of political indoctrination that had been the lot of government students preparing for the civil service exams. Whereas the traditional state Confucian curriculum duly emphasized loyalty to the monarch and service to the dynasty, the relative dearth of Confucian studies in the foreign-derived syllabus alarmed the Empress Dowager and others who already viewed the student class as infected with subversive heterodox ideas. These included Christianity, familiarity with which had spread widely due to the influence of missionary schools. The potential for sedition was judged to be so great that students enrolled at the Ziyang Examiners’ School were required to forswear joining any “depraved sect,” such as a secret society or a Christian church. Despite the court’s fears, the new educational system initially depended on readily available foreign textbooks, including missionary ones. Teaching materials used in Suzhou included Christian-themed essays on “The Good Shepherd,” “The Religions of the World,” and “The Wisdom of God Displayed in the Lower Animals.”59 In addition to fears that the curriculum might precipitate disorder, there was a general sense that the exotic foreignness of Western learning might either undercut or somehow be incommensurate with Chineseness. The birthday holiday represented the state’s attempt to infuse the new curriculum with the Confucian dedication to learning and state service while also domesticating “foreign” learning as “Chinese.” By creating special holidays and public ceremonies to indoctrinate the young in nationalist ideology, the Qing state assumed a more prominent, active role in mass political education. Until this point, the cornerstone of Qing state political indoctrination efforts had been the fortnightly declamations of the Sacred Edict, a homily exalting such virtues as filial piety and loyalty to the state that was inspired by a set of maxims by the Kangxi Emperor. According to the dictates of the law, the Edict was to be read out at a city temple or some other public place on the first and fifteenth of every month.60 By the mid-nineteenth century, official declamations had fallen into desuetude in some areas, while in others the rite had become peremptory and of seemingly little consequence. After appearing to have lapsed, government performances of the Edict in Suzhou were revived by the distinguished retired civil and military official Wu Dacheng, who regularly preached it (reportedly, with little eloquence) as late as 1898.61 Despite its degraded status and irregular performance, the Edict continued to attract

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powerful local advocates. In 1902 Jiangsu Governor Enshou reprinted a popular gloss on the Edict to encourage its performance out of especial concern with student insubordination. The Suzhou education bureau shared the governor’s enthusiasm and continually allotted monies to pay a Sacred Edict lector through the end of the dynasty. However, the frequency of official declamations does not accurately gauge the Edict’s significance as a mechanism for social indoctrination. It was frequently performed by storytellers throughout China as popular didactic drama. In fact, Wu Dacheng and Enshou’s enthusiasms notwithstanding, the Edict was likely more influential in popular culture than in elite learning. Recalling his experience of vying for government student status in Suzhou in the early 1890s, Bao Tianxiao complained that the test section on the Edict was by far the most bothersome. As the Edict text was not taught in most academies and not tested on the Xian or Fu exams, one had to specially memorize it for the more senior Courtyard Exam.62 In addition to testifying to the vitality of Qing state reformism, the creation of patriotic school holidays partook of a more general expansion of political education directed at nonelites. Many of these initiatives were privately supported by state administrators and civic leaders. Cumulatively, these efforts gave the state Confucian ceremonies many civil counterparts and heralded the overall transition to mass-focused politics. For instance, in 1905, a speech society that sponsored talks on progressive topics at the city gates was founded by a group of local officials and gentry; two of whom had learned about European speech societies while in government service abroad.63 The public celebration of Confucius’s Birthday represented an unprecedented expansion of government-sanctioned public space. Temples and their compounds provided a rare form of public space in late Imperial cities, where divisions of class, courtyard walls, ethnic and native-place identities, family networks, and creed created complex social and physical urban geographies. Temples were therefore used by urban residents for a wide array of activities, including state functions, public charity, marketing, pilgrimage, politics, and leisure. As an official state complex, the Confucian temple did not afford unfettered civic access like the immense Xuanmiao guan complex in the middle of the city. It nonetheless served as the key site for the public assembly, education, and association of the literati elite. The proliferation of ceremonial sites throughout the city diluted the standing of the Confucian temple as the paramount location for state Confucian ceremony. Aside from individual initiatives such as Luo Zhenyu’s Confucian ceremonials, theretofore the Prefectural and Xian temples had been the centers of state Confucian ritual, yet now every single school was to hold Confucius’s Birthday assemblies. Regardless of their individual efficacy, the assemblies furthered the reinterpretation of Confucius as a popular political

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figure by presenting the state’s ideological program to a broader audience at several sites throughout the city. The assemblies also augured the advent of a more participatory mode of popular education and politics: in contrast to official state preaching of the Sacred Edict or even the orations at the city gates by the new speech society, both of which largely relied on an audience passively receiving moral instruction, the state Confucian celebrations were designed to physically involve the students in ceremonial actions that would hopefully create a deeper impression than even the most sacrosanct Imperial rhetoric.

The Elevation of the Confucian Sacrifices In the midst of implementing a new educational system and planning the political reforms that were aimed to culminate in the granting of a constitution, the court retreated once again to the Confucian temple. The Qing Court Annals record that on GX 32.11.14 (Dec. 29, 1906) the Empress Dowager Cixi sent the Grand Secretariat an edict that declared that the dynasty, in a gesture of piety and humility, was formally elevating the sacrifices to “Confucius, supreme sage whose virtue makes him peer of Heaven and earth, paragon for all generations . . . to the grade of Great Sacrifice.”64 This shift resonated with the Qing’s earliest political actions and spoke to the difficulties of ruling a vast empire as a minority people. The sacrifices to Confucius had been celebrated as a mid-level Superior Sacrifice since Ming Jiajing 9 (1530). Recognizing that the spring and autumn sacrifices confirmed the worshiper as a correct political ruler in the Imperial Confucian tradition, the Manchu leadership had deployed the rite as a mark of their ideological and moral legitimacy from the very beginning of the conquest. Recent work has shown that past scholarly emphasis on the inevitable Sinicization of all foreign conquerors has been overdrawn. Manchu particularity and identity as a separate people remained an important concern and social reality during the entire Qing period. Nonetheless, the adoption of Chinese Imperial sacrifices and dynastic names marked a conscious, largely strategic appropriation of Han notions of kingship. In Chongde 1 (1636), the year that Huang Taiji, the head of the newly renamed Qing (clear, bright) house, initiated his “Great Enterprise” of conquest against the beleaguered Ming, he ordered the construction of a Confucian temple in Shengjing and celebrated the sacrifices there.65 After the successful completion of the conquest, the Qing leaders, now emperors of China, continued to lavish much attention on the rites to Confucius. Reverential performance of the rites would effect favorable harvests, ensure social peace, and more. Though the success of the conquest established that the Qing had indeed possessed the Mandate of Heaven, the exacting performance of

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long-standing Imperial ritual demonstrated the continued legitimacy of Manchu rule over the mass of Han Chinese. Given that the state had continuously extolled the Confucian sacrifices for several hundred years, why then was there such an abrupt change in the ritual order in 1906? The official explanation was that this was not a radical departure. The Ministry of Rites Court Letter argued that Emperor Qianlong’s reverential offering of the sacrifice, by surpassing that of other generations, had implicitly already raised the ceremony to a Great Sacrifice. The current change thus qualified as a delayed recognition of a long-established but tacit reality. The letter and the precedents it cited as evidence of the rite’s already august status (namely Emperor Yongzheng’s Sacred Edict and Emperor Qianlong’s personal offering of the sacrifice) conservatively denied that any innovation was at hand. Instead, the court claimed that it was simply following the wishes of Imperial ancestors who had been faithful to the ancient Way of Sage rulers. In the end, this denial only underscored the fact that the elevation of the sacrifices was meant to meet a markedly modern problem. By replacing long-established institutional and symbolic supports of aristocratic privilege and power, these educational and greater political reforms seriously challenged the substantive and symbolic foundations of dynastic power, such that they tacitly questioned the need for a monarchy at all. Given the magnitude of these changes, the Qing state invoked Confucius, the quintessential patron of learning and government, as the ultimate author of the educational reforms necessary for political and greater societal modernization. That is not to say that the conspicuous exaltation of Confucius in education was uncontroversial, even within state educational circles, where one might expect the promotion of monarchy and veneration of the Sage to be accepted a priori. As Luo Zhenyu noted, after leaving the First Normal School in 1906 he continued to strongly advocate the performance of Confucian ritual as pedagogically significant. Despite being successfully adopted, his proposal that each xian appoint an educational administrator to offer sacrifice at the Confucian temple as “the first step toward the preservation of National Studies” won him the reputation as an “ultraconservative simpleton” within the National Education Bureau.66 Nonetheless, by conspicuously linking the suspension of the civil service exams and the propagation of a modern educational system to Confucius and his temples, the Qing provided unimpeachable evidence of the national and Imperial bases of educational and greater political reform. According to Qing sumptuary regulations, the right to build a roof with tiles displaying the distinctive Imperial yellow was exclusively the privilege of the Imperial clan or those to whom special favor had been granted. As a result of the elevation to Great Sacrifice, the Suzhou Prefectural Confucian Temple and

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similar shrines throughout the empire were adorned with new Imperial yellow roofs. This physical rebuilding gave material expression to the discursive reconstitution of the temple, Confucius, and his teachings as fundamental national properties.67 Somewhat paradoxically, the Confucian sacrifices reached their apogee of ritual significance at the very moment when the aristocratic prerogatives traditionally advocated by state Confucianism were increasingly challenged by widespread calls for more inclusive, popular modes of governance. Indeed, over the next few decades this nascent popular (and soon overtly Republican) political ethos would reform the temple and other physical components of the city. Soon the temple would bear its yellow-tiled roof as an institutional property of the Republic that overthrew the Imperial political system and many of its intellectual and social hierarchies.

Conclusion Having dominated the southwest quadrant of the city for almost 900 years, the Prefectural Confucian Temple remained an enchanted bastion of moral learning and political power. The complex’s massive, stately structures reflected the Fuxue’s august position as an innovative center of Confucian ritual and education and as the most successful state academy of the late Imperial period. These activities had made it a critical institution for the city and the empire as a whole. These achievements were also reflected in the temple’s alternate, numinous identity as the brain of the tutelary dragon that fostered Suzhou’s academic and political hegemony. Starting with its immediate reconstruction after the Taiping interregnum to reestablish the Qing state and Confucian morality, state officials successively utilized the temple to spearhead social and political reforms. As such, Qing officials and elite literati protected the temple and their Way from any possible violation at the hands of foreigners, including American Protestant missionaries: far from viewing the recently restored temple as a sign of Chinese dedication to Confucian precepts, these evangelists saw it was an embodiment of Chinese perversity and atavism. The literati could not, however, defend their temple or their Way from the Qing state’s panoply of modernizing reforms, which threatened the exclusivity of their claims to the temple, its learning, and, hence, the security of their social privilege. Far from being obsolescent, as Mateer and twentieth-century Chinese historians have claimed, during the late Qing, the temple was revitalized as a center of cutting-edge educational reform. These changes were not uncontroversial, not least because the novel Japanese-derived curricula and presence of Japanese teachers at what had been one of Jiangnan’s most celebrated Confucian academies raised concerns about the national integrity of state education and

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the primacy of Confucian learning. At the same time, the Fuxue served as a venue for the popularization of Confucius as the national patron of modern learning through the introduction of ceremonials marking the Sage’s birthday, which made the temple a truly public monument for the first time in its history. The radical nature of these transformations, however, was masked by the court’s invocation of Qing dynastic precedents and invented traditions, which presented political and educational reforms as in keeping with fundamental Imperial precepts. Yet, the conventionality of these shifts was belied by the temple’s new roof of Imperial yellow tiles, which despite its hoary significance, provided a stunning visual sign of the Fuxue’s and Confucius’s novel roles within the Qing’s revolutionary new policies. The temple’s tenure as an instrument of radical state reform was cut short by the Xinhai Revolution, which Suzhou joined without any resistance on XT2.9.15 (Nov. 5, 1911). The revolution’s easy success suggests that the state’s strategic use of Confucius and his temple to promote civic loyalty to the Qing house had produced negligible results. Despite this apparent failure, Confucius and his temple retained their potency as iconic national sites. During the Republic, however, the temple lost its popular enchantment: no longer a mainstay of the central state or a source of educational and political innovation, it was no longer the dragon’s brain. Rather, the Fuxue became a site for resolving the contradictions between the Republican era’s modernist iconoclasm and culturalist nationalism.

chapter four

The Building of Modern Chinese Culture In remembering confucius, one remembers China’s particular historical essence. . . . Our average fellow-countryman is simple and honest. Should he in the conduct of life forget that which makes him Chinese, the ramifications of this educational failure would be very great. How could this not attract the derision of foreigners? Today we gather to remember Chinese culture’s great hero, Confucius. —Wu xian County executive Wu Qiyun, speaking at the 1934 Commemoration of Confucius’s Birthday.1

T

h e e s ta b l i s h m e n t of a Chinese Republic on January 1, 1912 prompted the abdication of the Qing dynastic house in mid-February. Ignoring political realities, the guardians of the child emperor affirmed the moral legitimacy of the Imperial institution until the very end. In its last official act, the court defiantly declared that it was relinquishing power in righteous deference to the will of the people, not due to its overwhelming military and political defeat.2 Despite this face-saving locution, over two millennia of Imperial culture and governance, having been found inadequate by the supporters of revolution, were brought to an end. During the first decade of the twentieth century, the constitutional and other reformist movements had helped stir anti-Imperial passions. By 1912, even some Qing loyalists concurred that state Confucianism had retarded political and social modernization, while many revolutionaries saw Qing state Confucianism and the hierarchical social principles professed by Confucian moral philosophy and statecraft as inimical to modern Republican values. Nonetheless, given Confucianism’s deep impress on society, the new Republican state could not, even if it wished, completely discard Confucian cultural and scholastic traditions. Furthermore, it did not care to do so. Confucianists and many critics alike recognized that to do so would indiscriminately jettison many of the historical achievements and social ethics that constituted China’s national distinctiveness. However, they were divided on how to treat the moral philosophy that had

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been a cornerstone of imperium, or on what to do with the temples where four successive dynasties had demonstrated their legitimacy. In Suzhou, this conundrum was exacerbated by the particular starkness of the Fuxue’s loss of purpose and prestige. No longer an institutional mainstay of officialdom or a tutelary patron to area fortunes, the temple had also ceased to be a vital force in educational reform. By the revolution, the Provincial First Normal School had, continuing on the path set by Luo Zhenyu, developed into a fully independent physical and institutional entity. This transformation left the temple exclusively a center for Confucian state ritual, the value of which was now dubious. Nonetheless, the temple, though bereft of a clear or consistent state function, remained a crucial physical and symbolic site in the construction of contemporary Suzhou political life during the Republic. In fact, the Fuxue and its past were at times rejected as antithetical, and at times embraced as essential to modern progress by both Republican governments and the public. In both cases, the temple remained a touchstone for Chinese and foreigners alike to assess the relevance of the Confucian and overall national past in the making of a modern city and nation. The paradox of the Fuxue’s symbolic heft in the face of its actual institutional obsolescence testifies to the abiding power of place and the depth of contemporary concerns regarding the vitality and national authenticity of Republican culture, politics, and urban life.

Confucius and State-Defined Nationalism during the Early Republic During the revolution, anti-Manchu and anti-monarchist passions moved Republican troops to raze a few Confucian temples, Nanjing’s being the most notable. In September 1912, however, the Republican government opted to retain Confucius as a national cultural hero and ruled that his birthday should continue to be celebrated as a school holiday, which the Suzhou schools did on October 7 (which that year corresponded to the traditional lunar calendar date).3 Then, on September 29, 1913, the Provincial Governor informed the Wu xian magistrate Zong Jiami that the department of education had definitively revived the Confucius’s Birthday holiday. Students were to pay respects to Confucius, while the Prefectural Temple was to fly the national flag as a sign of reverence. Whether the display of the flag was meant to honor Confucius or the nation, or whether there was any substantive difference between the two was unclear. The Republic furthered the late Qing emphasis on mass political indoctrination through the deployment of hoary cultural symbolism and creation of invented traditions, which were revised to reflect the dictates of Republican political and social ideology. According to the contemporary ideological formulation, the birthday holiday was meant to extol the Republican principles of the new

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state and the learning of the great “Sage-Teacher” as complementary means of reforming the Chinese nation.4 Despite this new modernizing agenda, state Confucianism continued to generate controversy. In the national press and government from 1912 to 1917 there were debates as to whether Confucianism should be established as the national religion, or whether the temples should be demolished and the sacrifices suspended or banned.5 Devotees reportedly continued to offer the Spring and Autumn Sacrifices, though these seem to have been private observances without official sanction.6 The complete lack of relevant documentary evidence suggests that during the initial two years of the Republic, anti-Imperial, pro-Republican passions, fueled by the novel experiment with representative, democratic government, caused a halt to state-sponsored sacrifices in Suzhou. Then in September 1914, as part of his unsuccessful bid to restore the monarchy with himself as emperor, President Yuan Shikai resurrected several Qing-era Imperial rites, including the Spring and Autumn Great Sacrifices to Confucius.7 Given the Republican amalgamation of the city area into Wu xian, the Prefectural Temple, now renamed Wu xian Temple, had become the sole Confucian sacrificial site. As in the Qing, the ceremony was closed to the general public and solely involved government officials. During the Qing, the ding sacrifices had been held as a matter of course and were generally observed without comment in the press. During the Republic, whether as a result of their semianachronistic nature or the press’s growing tendency to provide exhaustive coverage of governmental activities, the sacrifices and other educational activities at the temple were considered newsworthy.8 In any event, the sacrifices and the Confucius’s Birthday celebrations were no longer paramount among locally observed state ceremonials. New holidays were created to honor Republican leaders and mark significant recent events. Such nationalist displays grew ever more numerous as the tumultuous 1910s and 1920s afforded a growing number of patriot martyrs and episodes of national humiliation, many of which were solemnly observed with newly established holidays of dolorous remembrance. By 1929, the calendar was crowded with a full complement of uniquely Republican festivals and memorial days to mark the 1911 revolution, the establishment of the GMD Nanjing Government, the anniversaries of Sun Yat-sen’s birth and death, National Day, Martyrs of the Northern Expedition, International Worker’s Day, May Fourth, May Thirtieth, and March Eighteenth, among others.9 The revival of Imperial state sacrifices proved controversial. Politicians and educators fretted that it was unseemly for the stewards of a modern academic curriculum steeped in the laboratory and social sciences to worship a spirit on behalf of the state. Many Chinese (and foreigners, as well) blamed the Imperial political and social system for China’s weakness relative to Japan and the West

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and singled out Confucius for particular censure. Sacrifice devotees unsuccessfully attempted to alter the debate by characterizing the issue as a question of religious freedom and cultural practice. Much popular commentary in the press, however, continued to denigrate the ceremony as feudal and superstitious. Debate also swirled around specific questions of deportment and ceremony, such as whether Republican officials, like their Imperial predecessors, should be required to prostrate themselves as one would before an emperor. In accordance with state ceremonial innovations, which attempted to foster a more Republican spirit by introducing the handshake and other more egalitarian formal customs in place of Imperial ritual gestures, three bows were substituted for the kowtow in the Suzhou Autumn Sacrifices of 1916.10 In Suzhou, however, such innovations did not hold. Whether due to personal Confucian sympathies, reactionary politics, or other factors, by the 1920s Suzhou officials had retreated from efforts to reshape the ceremony as a normatively Republican rite. Newspaper reports from the early 1920s characterized the Suzhou Confucian sacrifices as “extremely solemn,” meaning that the rituals followed Qing ceremonial practice. The sacrifice participants did not bow. Instead, they performed the nine prostrations of a full kowtow.11 This return to retrograde Imperial norms of reverence ran counter to the general opprobrium toward Confucius in intellectual and media circles. In the cultural politics of the 1920s and 1930s, such gestures reinforced the widespread characterization by leftist commentators of Suzhou as a preserve of feudal anachronism—and Shanghai as the font of modern virtue.12 As Suzhou entered the May Fourth Movement (a period of intense cultural ferment, iconoclasm, and antiimperialist agitation in the late teens and early 1920s), local students demonstrated, like their counterparts elsewhere, against imperialism and in support of a new culture of “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy.”13 To some, the continued state reverence for Confucius seemed markedly out of step with contemporary currents, causing one 1919 Shenbao wit to query whether the Confucian faithful might not, in fact, be feeling a bit desperate: Confucius’s birthday goes by every year. But this year the celebrations were particularly lively, like days of old. Could it be that the majority of Confucius’s followers have only now started to understand [how to] “Respect Confucius?”14

On the whole, the press seems to have been indifferent or hostile to the state’s energetic promotion of Confucius and his temples as meaningful symbols in a Republic. As a rival Shanghai daily darkly noted, [Confucius’s] teachings succeeded in reforming society. It [sic] was, therefore, a powerful factor in those days. The same doctrine is, of course, now unsuitable for the people of our days. This is not a fault peculiar to Confucius. We should, however, do everything

136 / i n “ t r a d i t i o n ’s” t e m p l e we can to remove those who make use of this occasion for their personal benefit because they are a real danger to progress.15

While the Shanghai progressive press represented the beliefs of many New Culture Movement supporters, the media did not necessarily provide an accurate representation of the attitudes of ordinary people toward the Confucian Tradition or the temple. Tourism, as a mass phenomenon, provides a more nuanced picture of the ways that people interacted with the site, as well of the range of popular opinions regarding the temple’s importance or irrelevance as a national cultural site.

The Confucian Temple and Tourism Suzhou and its environs had been popular with travelers for centuries. However, it was only during the first three decades of the twentieth century that the city developed as a mass tourist destination. With the 1906 completion of the rail link to Shanghai, the journey to Suzhou shrank from two and a half days by canal houseboat or overnight by steam launch to a mere two hours. The city immediately became popular with Shanghai people of varied social classes for day excursions or longer getaways. The increased volume of pleasure seekers fed corollary investments in new hotels and travel services, as well as less capital-intensive innovations such as professional tourist guides and massmarket Baedekers. These developments, along with later improvements in rail travel and the introduction of long-distance bus service during the 1930s, further established the city as an accessible and affordable vacation spot. In addition to Chinese visitors, significant numbers of Japanese and other foreign tourists, some 500 to 600 per month in 1931, “followed on each other’s heels” from Shanghai and Nanjing, especially in the spring and fall.16 The cosmopolitan variety of tourists was reflected in the range of lodgings: by the early 1920s travelers could choose from among more than fifty hotels, which offered a range of “Chinese,” “Japanese,” “European,” and “American” plan lodgings, with the best rooms costing two to five yuan per night. The large alien influx also prompted local officials to worry about conflicts between locals and foreigners—and the possibility of unwelcome diplomatic incidents. They reassuringly concluded that Suzhou people had grown so accustomed to foreigners that they were capable of observing all sorts of outlandish foreign behavior with equanimity.17 The rise in domestic and foreign tourists prompted Chinese and foreign publishers alike to produce an increasing number of Chinese and foreign-language guidebook titles. I have been able to examine some twenty-seven guidebooks

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(including revised editions) published between the 1890s and the onset of the War of Resistance in 1937: seventeen are in Chinese, seven in English, and three in Japanese. The majority are entirely devoted to Suzhou and offered numerous possible itineraries, recommendations as to the better hotels and brothels, where one might buy silks, books, and curios, or in-depth discussion of the historic and cultural significance of important monuments. The rest are comprehensive regional or national guides that include only brief descriptions of major monuments and transportation links. While the individual pleasures and interests of the travelers whom these guides may have served are lost to the past, the texts do reveal the range of travelers’ presumed interests, demands, and expectations, as well as the writers’ notions of where one should go to have a valuable tourist experience. Judging from these guidebooks, travel literature, and magazines, most Chinese and foreign tourists went to Suzhou to savor the city’s beauty and its “ancient,” “old,” or “traditional” cultural qualities. Certainly these were three of the most commonly deployed words that travel writers used to describe and praise the city and its pleasure spots. Nonetheless, a comparison of recommended destinations and the commentary provided for individual attractions reveals significant distinctions among the touristic tastes of Chinese, Japanese, and other foreign travelers, presumably due to differences in cultural background and ability to understand and communicate in Chinese. For Chinese travelers and perhaps the few foreigners with the requisite language skills, Suzhou offered a host of particularly urbane, traditional pleasures. One could choose from among several restaurants that had been celebrated for a century or more: at the Songhelou near Guanqian Street one could order dishes that the Qianlong Emperor had enjoyed while visiting Suzhou in the eighteenth century. Or there were teahouses, about which one guidebook explained, “Suzhou people excel at pleasant conversation. Most of the tea houses are places for relaxing, thus the teahouses are of better quality than those of other cities.” The same book emphasized that Suzhou people were equally fastidious in their standards for local opera or storytelling (pingtan or shuoshu): Suzhou had the best storytelling in the country. Male travelers wanting more intimate entertainment could (before 1929) visit brothels where “Suzhou beauties”’ “pearly laughter and jade fragrance” hearkened back to “prosperous scenes of old.” Unlike Shanghai and other cities, where the elite class of artistically trained courtesans had largely disappeared, celebrated Suzhou brothels continued to feature “Long-threes” to entertain clients.18 The main draw for Chinese and foreign visitors alike was, however, presumed to be the city’s unique array of celebrated scenery and historic sites. Even the most laconic travel book waxed lyrical about the delights of the famous literati classical

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gardens, old-style architecture, and canals. (Emphasizing the canals as a city hallmark—and an increasing novelty in China’s modernizing cities—Chinese and foreign guidebooks inevitably invoked the city’s European sobriquet and proclaimed Suzhou the “Venice of China.”) The Confucian temple was the singular exception to this general convergence of touristic interests. While all the Japanese- and English-language guides recommended the Wu xian Confucian Temple as a major tourist site, only three of the seventeen Chinese-language guides suggested that the Confucian temple was worthy of attention. The large temple complex did not even appear on the city maps included in most Chineselanguage travel books or merit a passing mention as one of the city’s many miscellaneous historic monuments. Even if we accept the guidebook hyperbole, which claimed that there was so much to do and see in Suzhou that “once in the western portion one forgot the east,” the absence of the Confucian temple from Chinese travel guides and its presence in foreign ones reveals important differences between foreign and Chinese attitudes toward travel and the place of dynastic sites within the modernizing Republican city.19 Whereas Japanese and English travel books emphasized the temple’s role as a ritual center where Imperial states had reverenced Confucius, Chinese-language guides gave scant attention to these facets of the temple’s history—if they mentioned it at all. Of the three Chinese-language guidebooks that did discuss the temple, two gave passing reference to the sacrificial pavilion’s scale and history to concentrate on a distinctive trace of the dragon sleeping beneath: mint growing near the main gate had the shape of a dragon’s head. Called Dragon Brain Mint, it was a popular gift during the Qing. The influence of the dragon was affirmed by the fact that the plants reportedly changed shape if moved to a different site.20 Only one guide demonstrated an attachment to Confucian piety. The author, an elderly Confucian scholar, recommended that visitors should acknowledge the presence of the Sage’s spirit and offer a humble bow at the beginning of their visit.21 The failure of the Prefectural Temple to qualify as a Chinese tourist attraction did not indicate that Chinese travelers were uninterested in or harbored overwhelming hostility toward their Imperial past. Suzhou’s “traditional” qualities were the city’s biggest tourist draw, just as “modern” entertainments such as nightclubs, movie theaters, and large public parks were among Shanghai’s highlights for contemporary vacationers. Several famous graves, stops on the Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Tours, and sites of storied acts from the past two millennia were among Suzhou’s more popular travel destinations. These places, linked to the Imperial past through the individual stories and deeds of individual emperors, faithful scholars, and beautiful concubines, were mostly celebrated as embodiments of political, cultural, and moral greatness. As such, they were

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of a different order than the temple, which for its 800-year existence had been an academic and ritual bulwark of the recently deposed Imperial system. The temple’s identity as a major Imperial institution and as a cultural locus for what many contemporary Chinese derided as “ancient” or “feudal” society made the Prefectural Temple singularly unappealing to Chinese tourists. As such, the Confucian temple seems not to have offered an attractive or usable past to most Republican-era Chinese tourists and was bypassed accordingly. Perhaps the most telling example of this deficiency was provided by a 1931 field trip guide for elementary school teachers entitled Let’s Go to Suzhou. Written with the aim of instilling progressive-minded Republican patriotism in the young, the book recommended bringing students to literati gardens, historic sites, and markets to teach students about the city’s economic, political, and cultural history, as well as its current modernization. The temple was markedly absent from the list of recommended sites. Despite its political and cultural functions—or, more likely, expressly because of them—the temple was adjudged to be irrelevant or inappropriate for the nationalist education of contemporary school pupils.22 The temple’s degraded standing in the public imagination revealed the limited effectiveness of state nationalist pronouncements and ceremonials honoring Confucius in forming popular nationalist sentiments.23 Foreign tourists and authors, by contrast, did find the temple and its past compelling and, above all, useful for the insights it provided into the state of China past and present. This was particularly the case with Japanese travel writers.24 The relative sophistication and thoughtfulness of their analysis vis a` vis other foreign-authored works may be partly due to the fact that Japanese writers, unlike European and American visitors, possessed firsthand experience of the Confucian tradition as a part of their cultural background. The marked discrepancy between the general Chinese indifference and unanimous Japanese interest manifested by travel writers reflected the respective institutional and cultural histories of Confucianism in each country. Crucially, before the mid-nineteenth century, in Japan there had been no centrally controlled school network and no uniform government-set curriculum. Though central to Tokugawa (1603–1868) education and still an essential part of the academic system reformed during the Meiji Restoration, the Confucian classics had never exerted as controlling a presence in Japanese educational curricula as in China. In significant contrast to the anti-Confucian iconoclasm of many contemporary Chinese intellectual and political currents, during the Meiji and, to a lesser extent, the Taish¯o periods, Confucianism had been seized on as a useful modernizing tool. As a result, in Japan Confucianism was not saddled with the ignominy it suffered in China. On the whole, Japanese accounts of the temple reflected the general place of Confucianism in Japanese society and culture, past and present.

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The Temple and Chinese Civilization: A Japanese Journalist’s View In the spring and early summer of Taish¯0 10 (1921), the tenth year of the Chinese Republic, the celebrated Japanese writer Akutagawa R¯unosuke traveled through China as a special correspondent for the Osaka Main¯ıchi shinbun, which published his Jiangnan travelogue in serial installments in early 1922. In itself, this was hardly unusual. As a popular author of fiction and essays on contemporary culture in Japan, Akutagawa was an ideal choice for a newspaper editor seeking a diverting, well-written feature. His reports, which were also carried in the Japanese-language press in China, became something of a cause c´el`ebre among Japanese expatriates in China. His assignment, two multi-installment China travelogues, was a staple of magazine and newspaper publishing during the Taish¯0 and early Showa reigns. In fact, it would be difficult to name a major early twentieth-century Japanese writer who did not make a trip to China and then publish an account of his or her travels. Curiosity, cultural ties, and Japan’s growing control of Manchuria, along with the established formal colonies of Taiwan and Korea, fed a seemingly insatiable public demand for Asian mainland reportage. Like many prominent authors, Akutagawa’s China itinerary included an excursion to Suzhou. As a celebrated metropolis of wealth, commerce, and high culture, Suzhou was an almost obligatory stop for any Japanese traveler venturing south of Beijing. Compared to many of his compatriots, Akutagawa was a sensitive, even sympathetic observer of China. Nonetheless, his Suzhou dispatches were among the most sardonic of his trip. He truly seems to have despised the city from the moment he entered it perched precariously on a donkey. After disparaging the streets, he turned to censuring the temple, and concluded his dyspeptic tour with a bored dismissal of Suzhou’s “Flower Boats”—formerly celebrated as an epitome of urban sophistication and pleasure, their lackluster charms offered yet more evidence of inexorable decline. Setting out to wistfully seek the storied places of China’s past, Akutagawa instead found a contemporary dystopia. Suzhou revealed why in the end China was less admirable than Japan. For centuries Suzhou had embodied the sublimity of Chinese culture, yet in the present Suzhou was unhealthy and decrepit, as clearly manifest by the primitive condition of the streets.25 Akutagawa chose the Prefectural Confucian Temple as the primary site exhibiting Suzhou’s ambiguous modernity: We rode to the Confucian temple around sunset on our tired mules. Grass grew up between the cracks of the flagstones on the road that led towards the temple. Above the mulberry field adjoining this deserted road we could see the off-white of the Duanguang temple’s dilapidated pagoda.26 Each story of the pagoda was overgrown with ivy or grass. . . . At that moment my heart was both sorrowful and happy, or so I would describe that sense of dusty eternity.

The Building of Modern Chinese Culture / 141 Happily, that shadowy sense of eternity was not betrayed in the slightest sense. . . . After we dismounted from our mules outside the gate, we walked on the grass that grew precariously in the road. Among the shady oaks and cedars was a pool where Nanjing duckweed floated on top. . . . Although rebuilt in Meiji 7 [sic] this place erected by the famous Song official Fan Zhongyan was the first Confucian temple in Jiangnan.27 If you think of this, doesn’t it seem that the building’s dilapidated state indicates the dilapidation of China? But to me, a visitor from afar, the ruin of this place creates a poetic longing for the past. Should I sigh or be happy?

After paying the door keeper twenty pieces of cash, Akutagawa entered the compound. He found the ritual instruments and vessels lying dusty and unused. He then climbed the stone stairs of the central sacrificial hall. As the main pavilion of the temple, the Pavilion of Great Achievement was of an imposing, grand scale. The dragon stone steps, the yellow walls, the wooden placard inscribed with the temple name written in light aquamarine colored Imperial style calligraphy—after I scrutinized all this I peeked into the dim interior of the pavilion. Then from the tall ceiling there came a rustling sound like falling rain. At the same time, a stench unlike any other assaulted my nose. “What’s that?” I immediately stepped back. . . . “Those are bats; they nest in the ceiling.” . . . .judging from the abundance of excrement visible there must be many bats. . . . My thoughts changed from poetic reflections on the past to a scene by Goya.28

The bats set Akutagawa off on a reverie on cultural nationalism. Akutagawa overcame his revulsion and personal dislike for bats to ponder the fact that bats are traditional Chinese symbols of good fortune. In fact, he wrote, the pervasiveness of the bat as a beneficent presence in Chinese iconography led him to wonder if during the Edo period the Japanese too had esteemed bats. Yet even if the despised bat had previously been exalted, Japanese social attitudes were quite different now. The Japanese had become so infused with Western culture that if they had previously viewed bats as benevolent symbols, they now, he sardonically noted, associated love of bats with Baudelaire’s Romantic poetry. Despite his intimate knowledge and concern with national tradition, from all of Japanese high culture he could only remember one line from a single haiku that related to bats. Moreover, he immediately associated the dank scene with an iconic art image, and it was not Japanese. Rather, he envisioned the temple as one of Goya’s fantastic grotesques. Akutagawa’s penchant for self-conscious irony endowed the moment with double-edged complexity. Despite his knowledge that bats were a Chinese icon of prosperity and his correct suspicion that the Japanese might think the same were it not for the pervasive influence of Western culture, he could not but view the scene as a sinister portent of Chinese depravity.29

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(Not that this necessarily disagreed with him. Akutagawa’s writing often savors grotesquerie and revels in depravity.) Akutagawa’s reactions were strikingly similar to those of the American missionary, John Mateer. Both presented the temple as a metonym for China and juxtaposed the pavilion’s august ritual function with its swarm of odoriferous tenants to comment on the cultural origins of China’s political and social woes. However, their conception of this cultural predicament and its cause differed greatly. For Mateer, the debased state of the temple and China as a whole stemmed from the ultimate falsehood of Confucian teaching and worship as a non-Christian system of belief. For Akutagawa, the temple highlighted contemporary China’s inadequacies vis a` vis its glorious past and the present-day puissance of other nations, particularly Japan. Furthermore, the ramshackle pavilion revealed that in forsaking such a key element of historical vitality as Confucianism, China suffered from a lack of national cultural and social integrity, which was both a symptom and cause of its overall malaise. Other Japanese visitors had made similar comments when visiting Suzhou. For instance, in 1910 the Yokohama Commercial News (Yokohama B¯0eki Shinbun) correspondent Sat¯0 Zenjir¯0 had noted “with a sigh of regret” that the Qing management of the temple demonstrated the current degraded state of Confucian learning and morality, which resonated with the nation’s overall decline.30 Akutagawa’s diagnosis of the cultural origins of China’s lassitude was closely tied to his dual perception of the temple, as a building and as a political institution, as being simultaneously ancient and modern. Unlike Mateer who commented with seeming na¨ıvet´e that the antique, though in reality quite recently reconstructed, buildings were in good physical condition, Akutagawa viewed the complex as a culturally informed observer literate in classical Chinese. He knew that the pavilion structure was recently rebuilt; yet he also viewed and assessed it as ancient. The seeming contradiction between these perspectives highlights the fact that Akutagawa assessed the temple by means of two radically different modes of seeing. On the one hand, he engaged in a strict materialist reading of the structure, locating its character, age, and significance in the integrity of the building’s physical material. At the same time, he understood the temple according to a traditional discourse and practice of seeing and interpreting sites in China and Japan. Called pingdiao in Chinese, this is an historical-emotional reading of place. One looks at a site, usually a ruin or relic, and is moved by its historical and literary associations. (The poignancy of such remembrance is such that pingdiao is also the term used for paying homage to the dead.) In this way even a relatively new structure can be viewed as ancient due to the weight of historical associations. According to this elegiac habit of seeing, the temple

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was ancient, its past resembling that of the nation it symbolized, China. And in the present both were decrepit. Despite the asperity of his contempt, Akutagawa’s encounter with the temple provided him with an intense, if poignant, pleasure. Echoing the opening passage of the Analects, the purported record of conversations between the master and his disciples, in which Confucius exclaimed that the arrival of like-minded “friends from afar” who shared one’s love of learning was an occasion for great joy, Akutagawa struggled to discern the state of his own mind and decide his status as friend or foe: “But to me who comes from afar, the ruin of this place creates a poetic longing for the past. Should I sigh or be happy?”31 The trope of longing for the past and ruminating on past glory while gazing at ruins, especially those of the past Imperial capitals Luoyang and Chang’an (current-day Xi’an), was well established in the Tang and Song literature familiar to educated Japanese and Chinese readers. However, a complex, emotional reaction to the rotting past is hardly unique to East Asian culture. The Euro-American celebration of ruins had its roots in eighteenth-century NeoClassicism and the general admiration of Rome and Greece that had developed since the Renaissance. The newly ascendant taste for ancient buildings was buoyed by nineteenth-century Romanticism and the related cults of nationalism and anticapitalist/antiurban agrarianism. Akutagawa’s melancholy love of ruins belied the particular influence of literary romantics and aesthetes such as Ruskin and Morris. Their cult of ruins had indelibly marked contemporary European social thought and informed Japanese public taste, as well, through the influence of Western literature, art, and art and architectural history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like Ruskin, Akutagawa’s sympathy for the ruined past was coupled with a denigration of the present. In light of Japan’s imperialist encroachment onto China, it might be more accurate to compare Akutagawa’s critical perspective to that of European enthusiasts of the classical heritage such as Lord Elgin, or Near Eastern Orientalists such as Lord Curzon and T. E. Lawrence, whose appreciation of the past fed their scorn for the decidedly inferior present. Whatever the origin of historicist and aesthetic influences on Akutagawa, in his depiction of his experience of historical frisson, both the building and, by metaphorical extension, China were ancient. In fact, nothing in Suzhou was modern, explaining his extreme dislike for the place. Akutagawa, ever the keen reporter, noted that the “ancient” temple had actually been recently reconstructed. His focus on the building’s actual lack of material antiquity was in keeping with the ideology acquired through the Japanese late-nineteenth-century adoption of Western art and architectural history, which increasingly viewed the physical age of an object as one of the main

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factors contributing to its historicity. Whether in Europe, the Americas, or Asia, such academic notions have often served to mythologize the modern nation by glorifying its “ancient” past. Indeed, from its earliest incarnation, Japanese art history focused on the particular excellence of Japan’s national arts. Starting in the 1880s, figures such as the American Ernest Fennellosa and his Japanese student Okakura Kakuz¯0 carried out the first research on Japanese art using Western academic methods.32 They praised Japan’s “traditional” arts and aesthetics as a superior alternative to contemporary Western art, which had captured the imagination of many Japanese artists and members of the public. By the turn of the century, a groundswell of concern for the integrity of Japan’s cultural heritage and the example of historic preservation legislation recently enacted in Western Europe had resulted in new laws such as an 1897 regulation protecting “ancient” Shinto and Buddhist temples. Significant legislation for the protection of historical sites, scenic spots, and natural wonders was passed in 1919, while a law for the preservation of “National Treasures” was passed in 1929.33 The growing fascination with Japan’s ancient culture also helped excite interest in Tang and Song dynasty Chinese architecture and sculpture, which had exerted a profound influence on Japanese building arts for a millennium. Starting in the late Meiji period and continuing through the Second World War, many Japanese writers, archeologists, and art historians traveled through China to research the architectural and fine arts monuments of China’s past. Among this group were It¯0 Ch¯uta and Sekino Tadashi, whose pioneering and still fundamental scholarship on Buddhist sculpture and religious architecture helped establish the study of architectural history at Tokyo University. Like Akutagawa, they traveled to China from afar and were moved by the ancient relics that they saw. Like him, they were also disappointed. As the latter-day tourist, Akutagawa repeated and helped popularize what was then already a decades-old criticism common to Japanese travelers in China: one saw a lot of pagodas in China, but they were not authentically old. They had all been rebuilt.34 (Of course, the same was true of many celebrated, ostensibly ancient buildings, especially wooden ones, in Japan. At the time that Akutagawa wrote, some of these replicated structures were, and indeed continue to be, preserved as national treasures. The most famous is T¯0daiji, the Great Temple in Nara, an archetype that provides much of our knowledge of Tang dynasty architecture.) Antedating Akutagawa (and perhaps even providing the inspiration for his later commentary), in 1907 It¯0 had noted that all of southern China contained only one single surviving architectural monument from the Six Dynasties, while none at all remained from the preceding Tang dynasty.35 (This assessment was disproved by later fieldwork.) A year before Akutagawa’s journey, Sekino essentially repeated It¯0’s earlier remark in summarizing his own research,

The Building of Modern Chinese Culture / 145 Due to the military chaos of revolutions and invasions of foreign enemies from ancient times to the present, the protection [of buildings] has been unsatisfactory. As a result, wooden architecture predating the Ming has all fallen into decay. Only structures built of stone and tile have not fallen into ruins.

As in Akutagawa’s reflections on the Suzhou Confucian Temple, however, Sekino used the lack of ancient wooden architecture to draw a sharp distinction between China and Japan, past and present. He continued, Japan still has some thirty to forty 1,000 year-old wooden architectural structures and 300 to 400 structures which date to 800 years ago. Yet in such a large country as China, in the scope of my research I have not seen any remaining [wooden] structures over 1,000 years old. Structures over 500 years old are extremely scarce.36

Explicitly a simple comparison of national preservation practices, this passage implicitly, and rather damningly, contrasted the long-standing stability of Japan with the ostensibly endemic chaos of China. In Japan a history lacking in invasions, though not warfare, had sheltered venerable, culturally significant buildings and structures from destruction. Many ancient buildings had therefore been able to survive up to the present, when they were preserved and acclaimed by the state and society as national treasures. By contrast, the material remnants of China’s civilizational achievements had been successively ravaged throughout centuries of social and political upheavals. The creation of a Republic had not ameliorated this situation. In fact, the national contrast had become even more pronounced in the present. Unlike Meiji and Taish¯0 Japan, where the central state exerted increasing influence over national life and demonstrated its power by vigorously promoting an ideology glorifying social stability, Republican China did not possess an effective, truly national government. Warlords ruled much of the country and vied with one another and the central state for supremacy, subjecting any surviving ancient buildings to the superior destructive force of modern armaments. As Akutagawa noted, this cumulative plunder had effaced the China of his imagination: “The ancient China which I had expected to see previous to traveling to China had been largely destroyed, particularly in the south where the continual rise of revolutions seems to have taken an especial toll on ancient architecture, which has been obliterated.”37 Akutagawa’s reflection on the decrepitude of the Tongzhi-era Suzhou Confucian temple therefore amounted to much more than the melancholy reverie of a writer who reveled in decay. Akutagawa’s report drew on an already established discourse: the decay of China was mirrored in the compounded, synchronic rot of its material and spiritual civilization. The temple not only revealed the decline of a once great civilization,“from ancient times to the present” the state of the temple also manifested the contemporary

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indifference with which the Chinese cultural inheritance was viewed and managed by the Chinese. Indeed, perhaps he, as “a visitor from afar,” where Chinese tradition safely remained a cultural fantasy and not experienced as an ambiguous inheritance or potentially crushing burden, felt more “poetic longing for the past” when facing the temple than did most contemporary Chinese. The force of Akutagawa’s writing on the temple as apologia for imperialism was demonstrated by its inclusion in a volume of travel writing edited by the literary critic Kimura Ki in 1940. In the preface, Kimura expressed his hope that the writings he had selected for the anthology would influence public opinion as had the novelist Natsume Soseki’s 1910 account of his travel through Manchuria and Korea, Man Kan tokoro dokoro [Here and there in Manchuria and Korea], which helped create public support for the development of Japan’s South Manchurian Railway, the mainstay of Japan’s colonial enterprise in East Asia. Kimura lauded Akutagawa and other writers for providing the knowledge necessary for the Japanese people to first understand and then “solve” their nation’s contemporary “China Problem.”38 Left tacit, if only because the conclusion was so foregone as to be readily apparent, was the fact that any eventual “resolution” would necessarily require Japan to exercise political and cultural tutelage over Asia. Akutagawa’s rhetoric and Kimura’s use of it clearly demonstrated how the production, content, and influence of late-nineteenthand early twentieth-century Japanese knowledge of China mirrored the functional relationship between Western Orientalist scholarship and European and American imperialism.39 China was Japan’s Orient and the Confucian temple a monument to Oriental decay.

The Temple and the Guomindang The establishment of the Nanjing government in 1927 and the successful completion of the Northern Expedition in 1928 rejoined (if only nominally) most of China under one central authority for the first time in over a decade. The GMD state seized the opportunity afforded by this newfound unity to carry out a concentrated campaign to modernize China’s social and economic life. In addition to emphasizing aggregate national-level industrial, educational, and infrastructural development, the party implemented several policies that aimed to challenge traditional societal structures, extend government control over local society, and thus increase its ability to modernize the nation from the grass roots. To this end, the Nationalists carried out a sustained assault against the religious structures of local society and initiated a sweeping campaign against “superstition,” a tag by which GMD rationalist modernizers denounced a broad spectrum of spiritual and customary beliefs and practices as impediments to progress.

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Suzhou officially entered the GMD fold in the spring of 1927 when the Northern Expedition entered the city and established a local GMD revolutionary government. Within days, party cadres had closed “one of the best temples for offering incense” on the grounds that “superstitions,” such as consulting spirits and beseeching gods for intercession, were incompatible with Sun Yat-sen’s “Three Principles of the People.” Whether motivated by Republican disdain for “ignorant superstition,” economic self-interest, or some combination of the two, the state also seized control of temple and monastery assets: Suzhou authorities levied new taxes and mandated that Buddhist and Daoist institutional properties be subject to registration and oversight as to their proper use. The stringent nature of GMD regulation of local religious affairs sparked widespread discontent and even some protest among religious and the laity. Nonetheless, GMD cadres remained resolute. By early 1928 it already seemed clear, a local reporter noted, that the mysterious and profound aspects of religious belief were out of step with contemporary societal trends and that the state was imposing taxes on popular religious institutions with an eye toward their prohibition.40 At first Confucian temples and the ceremonies commemorating Confucius’s memory were major targets of the GMD’s modernist iconoclasm. On February 21, 1928, the Nanjing government’s educational authority abolished the Spring and Autumn Sacrifices to Confucius, explaining, Confucius lived in the Zhou Dynasty . . . his character and learning have from that time been respected by all later generations. Yet because [he stressed] respect for the ruler and loyalty to the throne, his teaching was the exclusive asset of the imperial system, which used him as a model teacher. When actually compared with modern thought such as the principle of freedom and Guomindang ideology, [Confucius’s teachings] are quite irrational. . . . 41

To observers like the Suzhou satirist Fan Yanqiao, the significance and astonishing speed of this change testified to the unique capacity of GMD party structure and discipline to effect fundamental cultural and political transformation. The Confucian Sacrifices have a history of more than one-thousand years. The May Fourth Movement had the slogan, “Topple the House of Confucius,” yet the sacrifices did not go into decline. [Then the] People’s Revolutionary Army carried out the Northern Expedition, and the sacrifices were hastily discontinued and abandoned.42

However not everyone followed the state’s lead in forsaking the sacrifices. Despite the change in policy, the Spring and Autumn Confucian Sacrifices continued to be celebrated in the Pavilion of Great Achievement—albeit in straitened circumstances. When the participants arrived at the temple for the spring 1928 sacrifice, there were no current government officials among them. Instead, three distinguished Qing jinshi degree holders active in city affairs, Wu Yinpei (tanhua,

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the jinshi who ranked third on the exam, of 1890), Kong Zhaoqin (jinshi of 1903), and Jiang Bingzhang (jinshi of 1898); members of the chamber of commerce, the Suzhou Society for the Protection of Graves, and other civic groups; and, apart from Wu, leaders of Suzhou’s late Qing local self-government initiatives officiated in a private capacity.43 The group of celebrants was similarly small at the autumn 1928 ceremony, at which Wu and Jiang were joined by another Qing jinshi. Fan Yanqiao’s contemporary account parodied the social isolation and gravitas with which the three solitary worshippers carried out their forlorn vigil: They arranged their own travel expenses in order to climb on top of the sacred pavilion, bowed as usual, and though there was no sacrifice they had gathered offerings. They also lacked a rotten sheep’s head [referring to both an offering and an unworthy person with an official title] and an old official with long stiff whiskers, not to mention that specially slaughtered cow. They only had “sing so.” (In Suzhou the smallest candles are called “sing so” because they only last long enough for you to “sing so.”). . . . Others didn’t dare participate lest sarcastic smart remarks be thrown at them behind their backs like bricks. Confucius sighed with deep feeling and these three Suzhou artifacts just scraped their insect skulls against the floor. . . . The future [of the sacrifice] was unclear.44

But not extinguished. Despite the dishearteningly inelegant surroundings (“The tiles that read ‘Morality peerless in Heaven or on Earth’, etc., are all missing from the two ceremonial arches.”) and overwhelming popular disinterest, a dedicated corps of elderly scholars upheld their honor as “shrewd and capable” Confucians by continuing to honor their ritual obligations. This dwindling coterie of Imperial degree holders and former government students, on occasion joined by students they engaged to perform the ceremonial music and dances, faithfully performed the sacrifices through the fall of 1930—and presumably for some time thereafter.45 The suspension of government patronage and stridently anti-“feudal” tone of many Nationalist pronouncements did not, however, signal an end to state’s long-standing avowal of Confucius as a national hero. (Reflecting the adoption of European social science, the Imperial period was uniformly described as “feudal” in the late 1920s.) The GMD recognized the symbolic value of Confucius and his thought in support of key state aims, such as the promotion of social order and respect for state authority, improvement of education, and popularization of state-defined cultural nationalism, as a means of consolidating popular support for the regime as a whole. On October 6, 1928 the Nanjing government ordered all educational institutions to mark Confucius’s Birthday by convening school-held assemblies to promote Confucius’s thought among the young.46 In November, the Nationalist state banned the worship of Daoist popular deities, nature gods, city gods, and many other figures as part of its campaign against superstition.

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At the same time, the GMD announced that apotheosized Chinese historical figures, such as Confucius, and key religious teachers, such as Buddha and Laozi, were exempt from this rationalist prescription. The state deemed that their moral and cultural significance were largely beneficial and therefore worthy of respect.47 Regardless of the official position on Confucius, the temple seems to have continued to exercise little hold on the local public imagination as a moral or nationalist shrine. (The GMD’s endorsement of the school-based Confucius’s Birthday commemorations exacerbated this process by designating that the schools, not the temple, now enjoyed state sanction as the site for rites perpetuating Confucius’s memory and learning.) The temple’s creeping irrelevance was readily apparent to Confucian stalwarts such as the elderly custodian of the sacrificial vessels and instruments, who in 1930 declared his gathering dread that the practice of paying respects to Confucius at the temple on his birthday—if not the sacrifices—would soon be forgotten.48 In this Suzhou was not unique. The Republican state was more effective in creating new monuments and public buildings, such as the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Halls (Zhongshan jiniantang) built in Suzhou and many other cities in the early 1930s or Sun’s grand Mausoleum in Nanjing. However, this marked lack of public enthusiasm (and occasional expression of hostility) toward Confucian temples seems to have characterized only those areas firmly held by the GMD Nationalist government. In his study of Republican Harbin, Jay Carter demonstrates that Confucian temples in the northeast served very different political and cultural purposes. The Harbin Confucian Temple was not even built until 1929, the year after the Nationalist government had abolished the Confucian sacrifices in areas under its control. The Harbin temple served as a popular symbol and performance site for the assertion of Chinese nationalist sentiments against the legacy of past Russian influence and the growing menace of Japanese hegemony.49 Bereft of any state function for the first time since its founding 800 years before, the Suzhou temple, like Confucian temples throughout the country, essentially became a surplus government building and an urban planning problem, albeit an enviable one. Confucian temples were part of the urban fabric in every major city and town—theoretically any place that had been at least a xian in the Qing administrative hierarchy would have a temple. Some, like Suzhou’s, sat on sizable tracts of undeveloped and now quite valuable urban land, providing local governments a rare opportunity to redress or set city-planning goals. In addition, the prospect of demolishing the local Confucian temple may have held some appeal as a symbolic and practical means of mitigating the influence of feudal superstition in contemporary life. Following the suspension of the state sacrifices, local governments inundated the Jiangsu provincial government with

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inquiries as to whether the former temple buildings should now be demolished and the land put to more practical use. In light of the potential ideological and practical complexities, the Jiangsu government demurred for several months until the central government had definitively resolved the matter. Citing recent historic preservation legislation and Confucianism’s national significance, the central government declared that the temples were historically and culturally significant. They were to be preserved and, in keeping with Confucius’s cultural role, adapted for use as libraries, gymnasiums, or other educational uses.50 Such discussions were not absent in Suzhou. Nonetheless, as Fan Yanqiao noted, Confucius and his temple were actually far safer than local conservatives feared. The slogan “Topple the cannibalistic moral-ethics system!” is plastered high at every street corner. But this cold hunk of flesh [Confucianism] is hard to get a grip on; I fear the present activism is but an unanticipated enthusiasm. . . . And . . . there are also some people with mouths drooling who want to turn [another compound pavilion] into a kindergarten, but that old pipe dream’s just talk.51

Despite the current opprobrium, Confucianism remained a formidable cultural presence. The temple’s 800-year history had endowed the institution and its buildings with such permanency that they could not be easily disposed of or altered without controversy. The local government initially chose to bypass the opportunity to reuse the complex and left it empty.

Urban Planning and the Abandoned Temple The imposition of systemic city planning under the municipal government (1927–30) provided local decision makers with new administrative techniques and regulatory powers to rework the physical space of the city to achieve economic, social, sanitation, and other goals. As a result, the city pursued urban planning and social welfare initiatives with unprecedented vigor and imagination and revisited the question of putting the temple site to new use. Though this burst of activity was due to several structural factors, not least of which was the substantial financial support that the municipality received from the provincial government, the specifics can be attributed to the fact that municipal government included a new type of state functionary, a municipal engineer. The Municipal Engineer, Liu Shiying, brought a cosmopolitan outlook, newly developed foreign technologies, and novel professional experience to his charge of planning Suzhou’s urban development. In early twentieth-century Europe and North America, city planning was largely viewed as an adjunct of architecture (and military science, especially in European colonial possessions). The

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professions of municipal engineer/planner and architect were both new to China and became firmly established during the Republic. Previously, expert building design and construction had been the province of master builders who had apprenticed with other masters and often learned the precepts of key Song and Qing building manuals. The profession of architect was a by-product of the treaty ports. Foreign architects, attracted by the opportunities afforded by the explosive growth of colonial concessions, began to seek commissions and even establish offices in Shanghai, Tianjin, and elsewhere in the late nineteenth century. Finding that the market demanded expert Chinese assistants, foreigners established the first architectural training programs in Tianjin in 1895 and Shanghai in 1904.52 While architectural training continued to develop in China, usually under foreign auspices, many ambitious students from elite families began to pursue architectural studies in Europe, the United States, and Japan. Liu Shiying was a Suzhou native from a public-minded family with such a commitment to fostering modern educational enterprises that they had sponsored one of the city’s earliest schools for physical education. (Early twentiethcentury nationalists viewed physical education and recreational athletics as essential means for, quite literally, invigorating the body politic.) Liu pursued his own distinctively modern education by training as an architect at the Tokyo Senior Technical School. Upon graduating in 1920, he returned to Shanghai, where he and his fellow classmate, the future architectural historian Liu Dunzhen set up one of the first Chinese-run architectural practices, Huahai jianzhu shiwusuo. Liu Shiying returned to Suzhou in 1923 to lead the architectural education program at the Suzhou Provincial No. 1 Technical School, one of the earliest architectural training courses established and run by Chinese professionals. In 1927 when the Technical School architecture program joined Central University in Nanjing, he moved with it but soon returned to accept the position of city planner in 1928. (After he left Suzhou in 1930, he went on to a long career in private practice and teaching.) As one of the local government’s key leaders trained in the theory and practice of urbanist science, Liu helped transform Suzhou into a recognized showplace for the progressive benefits of municipal administration and comprehensive city planning.53 After inspecting the Fuxue in 1929, Liu reported that despite the plot’s large size and prominent location it was divided from the surrounding city. Less than a year after the official suspension of the Confucian ceremonies, the compound, Liu noted, already bore the marks of long-term desertion: “The interior is not badly damaged, but the area in front of the Pavilion of Great Achievement is full of brambles, with cesspits everywhere.” He advocated reintegrating the inactive temple into the cityscape to make maximal use of the land and imposing buildings. In a characteristic Republican-era city improvement gesture, Liu

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proposed that the municipal government remake the temple complex into a public park. The promotion of public parks had, like the enthusiasm for horse-roads, first become popular among late Qing urban elites inspired by the innovative plans of Shanghai and other treaty ports. Further popularization of foreign urbanist ideas and, perhaps most critically, the enumeration of parks as one of local government’s core responsibilities in the Qing’s 1909 self-government regulations had helped enshrine the creation and management of public parklands as a key focus for Republican city planning. The Chinese parks movement, like the U.S. and European counterparts that inspired it, advocated parklands as institutions for popular reform. Greenspaces could serve as salutary “lungs” for crowded cities and provide venues for healthful, edifying recreation as an alternative to gambling, opium addiction, vice, or other activities that detracted from the level of urban civilization. Liu enthusiastically declared that if the temple compound were combined with two semi-private public gardens, the Azure Waves Pavilion (Canglangting) to the east and the Plant Garden (Zhiyuan) to the west, the resulting ninety-acre area would be a “superior park.” By almost doubling the city’s urban parkland, the Confucian temple park would significantly expand the municipal government’s ability to meet the leisure and cultural needs of the city populace. The city’s one municipal park, Suzhou Park, had immediately become a major center for leisure and entertainment when it opened in 1925, so much so that in 1927 government, business, and cultural leaders sponsored a comprehensive redesign and reconstruction project to better meet the volume and range of popular use. Even so, residents’ demands continued to tax its capacity. Considering whether the temple buildings could be put to any appropriate use, Liu recommended that the main sacrificial pavilion be renovated as an Antiquities Exhibition Hall, an idea that met a long-standing desire among civic leaders that the city’s park should include a permanent space for cultural exhibits to promote mass education and social uplift. The venue was particularly apposite for the display of general antiquities because the state had recently declared that the Sage’s spirit tablets, though no longer sacrificial objects, were historic artifacts deserving preservation and respectful display within Confucian temples. By way of closing his report, Liu somewhat archly noted that his scheme for a Confucian temple park had the added virtue of showing some modicum of respect for national traditions: “this would allow Venerable Confucius, commemorated throughout civilization, to not be ill at ease amidst weeds and cesspits.”54 Nonetheless, the Sage might have been surprised to find his temple recast as an alien institution, a museum. Limited public displays of precious cultural objects had been a well-established component of literati connoisseurship for centuries.

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Permanent museums had been introduced during the mid-nineteenth century by foreign missionaries for exhibits propagating Western sanitation and technology. By the early twentieth century, Chinese modernizers in Suzhou and elsewhere had adopted museums for their own similar purposes, making the museum display a favored means for presenting contemporary science, social science concepts, explanations of state policies, and interpretations of national history to urban populations. From Liu’s perspective as municipal planner, the Confucian temple complex could be rehabilitated as a Republican civic institution dedicated to Suzhou urban culture, old and new. The pavilions and artifacts on display within would showcase the Imperial past, while the public park and exhibition halls would represent and help perfect the culturally hybrid Republican present. Like many of the ambitious city-planning measures proposed by the Suzhou Municipal Government, the Confucian temple park-museum was stillborn. Whether for lack of funds or shifting priorities, there seems to have been no further serious discussion of the project. Any plans for transforming the site were curtailed by the suspension of municipal government in May 1930 and the resumption of county government, which lacked the financial resources and concentrated urban area focus of the previous administration. Then on July 5, 1934, in an opening flourish of the newly declared New Life Movement, which aimed to rejuvenate the nation through the inculcation of traditional virtues, the GMD Central Committee revived the commemoration of Confucius’s Birthday.

Confucius’s Birthday and the New Life Movement The Sage’s birthday (now August 27, as the GMD transposed the lunar calendar date 8.27 to the Gregorian calendar) had previously been celebrated by school children and government officials. The party now declared it a general public holiday: local branches of the GMD, army units, police, social organizations, and schools were to hold special programs, while common citizens were encouraged to display the flag.55 Even Christian mission schools, which theretofore exempted themselves from the near blasphemy of commemorating the memory and acknowledging the spirit of a “pagan” moralist, were now obliged to observe the day. As the writer Fan Yanqiao commented, “This is called ‘losing propriety and finding it among the barbarians.’ Wow, could Confucius ever have had dreams this good?”56 In contrast to the National Educational Administration’s characterization six years previous of Confucius’s teaching as “quite irrational” and contrary to “the principle of freedom and Guomindang ideology,” the GMD leadership now promoted Confucius and his thought as entirely consonant with contemporary

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politics and society.57 Official slogans suggested for the revived ceremony now presented Confucius as a Feudal Republican: “As politician, Confucius promoted the people’s power!” The celebration of the past would revive China’s past vigor: “To commemorate Confucius’s Birthday will revive the traditional status of the nation!,” and resolve the country’s abject status in contemporary geopolitics: “To commemorate Confucius’s Birthday will resolutely redress National Humiliations and save the Nation!”58 The new state ceremony was to consist of bows, the Republican analog to the kowtow, toward the national flag and pictures (as opposed to spirit tablets) of Sun Yat-sen and Confucius, speeches on Confucius’s life and the relevance of his teachings in the Republic, and the singing of a newly composed “Commemorate Confucius Song”: In Practicing the Great Way: The world is for all. Pick the Good and select the Capable for Public Office. Expound Truth and Create Social Amity. Then people will not exclusively treat their own relatives as kin or their own sons as their progeny. The old will then be secure and without want. . . . 59

Having foreseen that in Suzhou, Confucius and his temple would be secure against any iconoclastic onslaught, Fan Yanqiao penned the following reaction of feigned surprise when state Confucian ritual was reintroduced, Who would have thought that cooperation between Nanjing and Wuhan [i.e., the start of the New Life Movement] would have benefited Confucius? For the Sage’s birthday we once again pick up the flags and drums and following old precedents pay 100 large cash for several weeks of dancing rites!60

Again the Confucian temple was selected as the site for the solemn celebration of the new Confucian rite. At 7 a.m. on the morning of August 27, 1934, more than fifty government officials and noted local citizens, such as the educator Zhang Taiyan, former Presidential Secretary and Head of the Ministry of Education Zhang Yilin, and former Qing official/revolutionary leader Li Genyuan, gathered at the Pavilion of Great Achievement. Contrary to the newly passed regulations, the rites celebrated that morning at the Confucian temple combined elements of the Spring and Autumn Sacrifices with the state-sanctioned Republican ceremonial. With the ritual vessels and musical instruments of Qing ritual prepared for the ceremony, county officials officiated, entering and exiting the pavilion three times to present their offerings. Then on the command of the local department of education head, the sacrificers and assembled dignitaries stood outside the pavilion and bowed solemnly toward an image of Confucius.61 After the sacrificial ceremony, most of the party moved to the Minglun (Illuminate Ethics) Hall, which had formerly served as a lecture hall during the

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Imperial period. While the pavilion rite closely followed Qing ritual precedents, the Minglun Hall ceremony consisted of political speeches detailing GMD political-cultural policies and clarifying the present relevance of Confucian teachings. As the most prominent of the assembled cultural luminaries, Zhang Taiyan gave the official address. At the outset, Zhang argued that similarities to late Qing and early Republican ritual notwithstanding, the new GMD Confucian ceremonial was untainted by superstitious or religious overtones and was therefore fundamentally modern and progressive: Today we are holding this meeting to commemorate Confucius’s Birthday. This should not be mistaken as a Sacrifice. Since Confucius is naturally not present with us today but in the hearts of our countrymen, we must not neglect to remember him. During the late Qing the sacrifices to Confucius were raised to the level of Supreme Sacrifice, which continued during the first few years of the Republic. Honoring Confucius and making sacrifices to a spirit are not the same. Everyone should know that my generation honors Confucius. This is to remember the Sage Teacher. It is different from the heart with which a religious person views spirits. Honoring Confucius is appropriate, yet it would be a mistake to see him as a religious teacher. . . .

Zhang argued that there was an explicit distinction between “honoring Confucius” (ji Kong) and “making a religious offering to a spirit” (jisi). Here Zhang skirted casuistry, for during the Imperial period the compound “ji Kong” had been used to indicate an offering to the spirit of Confucius. This semantic hair splitting betrayed a general unease among Republican officials that in light of its pedigree, the rite might seem to be antediluvian superstition or religion, either of which would violate the decidedly rationalist nature of Republican nationalism. Indeed, Zhang Taiyan’s apologia was echoed by other speakers in Suzhou and elsewhere. Later that day, Wu xian head Wu Qiyun argued a similar point, “That we remember Confucius is rational, not superstitious. We remember him as a Sage, not as a spirit. ‘The Master did not discuss supernatural forces or troublesome spirits.’ [Analects VII.20] How then could we commemorate him as a spirit, thereby sliding into superstition?”62 Zhang’s oration further underscored the modernist cast of the rite by emphasizing that the nation, not Confucius, was the ultimate object of the day’s sacrifice. In a strikingly Nationalist reinterpretation of the Rites of Zhou, a ritual text honored by Confucius, and the Analects, Zhang argued that ethno-nationalism (minzu zhuyi) had been the irreducible principle of Chinese nationhood since the Warring States and thus formed the heart of Confucius’s and Sun Yat-sen’s political philosophy alike. Honoring Confucius was therefore equal to honoring the contemporary incarnation of Chinese national principle, Sun Yat-sen’s “Three Principles of the People.”63 The Confucian temple was redacted into being a ritual site for the salvation of the Republic.

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f i g . 1 3 . Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall during the 1930s. Source: Suzhoushi difangshi bianzuan weiyuanhui bangongshi, ed., Lao Suzhou: bainian jiuying, 121. Courtesy of the Suzhou Municipal Local History Office.

At 8 a.m., after the temple Confucian ceremony, more than two-hundred local party members and government officials gathered at the newly opened Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall. There the meeting abjured all elements of Qing ritual and followed a decidedly secular Republican script.64 Neither temple or historical monument/scenic spot, nor yamen or guildhall, that is, none of the more common types of public buildings during the late Imperial and Republican periods, the hall was meant to symbolize the new political culture and mode of political participation under the GMD Republican state.65 The city had previously lacked a space for large indoor assemblies. (Grand public gatherings convened at the municipal athletic ground or public parks, themselves late Qing and earlier Republican innovations explicitly created to foster urban/national physical and social vitality and mass politics.) Designed to accommodate 2,000 people, the Memorial Hall explicitly marked the GMD’s espousal of mass meetings and campaigns as the most fundamental and effective form of modern political participation. The grand scale of the hall was meant to inspire awe. The use of Imperial-style (i.e., “Chinese style” per local newspaper reports) architecture emphasized the continuity of national identity despite the wholesale replacement of political institutions, while also representing Sun Yat-sen and the Republic as equal in dignity to the deposed emperor and Imperial state. In doing so, the Suzhou

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Hall and its counterparts bore a clear ideological resemblance, if not a close architectural one, to Sun’s resplendent Nanjing Mausoleum, which had been consecrated with lavish funeral obsequies in June 1929. Like the memorial halls, the mausoleum had selectively combined past architectural forms with contemporary design and materials to magnify the “Father of the Nation” and his political party as inheritors of China’s Imperial greatness and custodians of the Republic’s modern ascendancy.66 Civic leaders lavishly praised the hall’s traditionalist architecture as a compelling depiction of Nationalist cultural and political ideals in material form. From the specialized perspective of academic architectural history, however, the design was viewed as less than successful. When Liu Shiying’s former classmate and architectural partner, Liu Dunzhen later visited Suzhou to survey the city’s ancient architecture, he was so irked by the aesthetic and historical shortcomings of the Memorial Hall that he singled it out for special complaint. In a city containing sublime traditional architecture such as the Prefectural Confucian Temple, the clumsy shape and proportions of the new hall were a jarring travesty. However the hall’s failings were not unique for, as Liu lamented, few people— architects included—truly understood the precepts of China’s traditional architecture. The hall’s cumbersome bricolage exemplified what contemporary architectural historians decried as the general failure to achieve a synthetic modern Chinese nationalist architecture by adapting traditional architectural design principles for contemporary use.67 The two commemorations represented the bifurcation of the governmental and Confucian aspects of the commemoration. Scholars continued to gather at the temple for the solemn remembrance of Confucius, while representatives of the state, local GMD officials, and party members, met at the Memorial Hall to commemorate Confucius and Sun Yat-sen in a rite of party discipline. In later years, local GMD officials attempted to further popularize the modern commemoration by requiring local groups to participate in the Memorial Hall ceremony, promoting the display of the national flag, and even encouraging people to take the day off work. Circulars urging compliance were sent to the chamber of commerce and other organizations, suggesting that the holiday elicited spotty participation and that businesses had to be goaded into taking a day of rest. Nonetheless, local observance continued until the city was occupied by the Japanese in December 1937.68 The Nanjing decade began with a wholesale rejection of the Confucian temple, its history, and associations, but when Chiang Kai-shek and his advisors explicitly turned to traditionalist ideas as the basis for national renewal, the Confucian temple was resurrected as a symbol of the Nanjing government’s legitimacy. In the end, however, this attempt to rehabilitate and use the past only

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highlighted the extent to which politics and culture had changed. The New Life Movement’s doctrinaire traditionalism notwithstanding, the holders of political power were to be found at the Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, not the temple, for the hall had replaced the temple as the paramount venue for state ritual. The temple’s political eclipse attested to the fact that the GMD’s reinvention of tradition failed to reconcile the building with contemporary ideological and material challenges. Though subject to several bouts of reinterpretation, the Confucian temple remained an Imperial-era structure that symbolized and, more fundamentally, was built to accommodate the previous non-mass mode of political life. In the end, the GMD found it preferable to build a different kind of ritual space more amenable to the practical and organizational requirements of modern political parties and mass indoctrination campaigns. Yet the temple could still be made compatible with contemporary nationalism. The structural anachronisms that made the building untenable as a Nationalist institution were precisely the qualities that would soon make the temple a valuable national artifact for the scholars who were in the process of creating Chinese architectural history.

The Confucian Temple and Chinese Architectural History On August 9, 1936, Liu Dunzhen arrived in Suzhou on the 9 p.m. train from Nanjing, where he had spent most of his vacation admiring the capital’s historic and new Republican monuments. Having no particular plans or obligations, Liu spent two full days freely wandering the city and exploring scenic spots and historic architecture and making some quick sketches for his own pleasure. He then returned to Beiping. Only after returning to the former capital did his Suzhou excursion acquire a serious purpose. In Beiping, Liu showed his sketches to his colleague at the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture (Yingzao xueshe), the American-trained architect Liang Sicheng, son of the reformist public intellectual Liang Qichao. Examined as a body, the individual drawings provoked an exciting discovery. “The two of us were shocked: Suzhou was outstanding. With the exception of Hangzhou, Suzhou was the city with the greatest collection of antiquities south of the Yangzi river.”69 On assignment for the National Central Museum to produce architectural drawings of historic architecture, Liu returned to Suzhou on September 7 with Liang and several assistants. There some local architects joined them for an intensive week of surveying, sketching, and documenting the city’s notable historic buildings. As architects, the society researchers’ analysis of the Confucian temple and other historical buildings in Suzhou differed markedly from other urban critics.

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They neither denounced the temple as an obstruction to contemporary progress, nor did they reflect on its historicity, or attempt to remake it as a Republican institution. Fundamentally, Liu, Liang, and their associates were more interested in the creation of history than in its interpretation. At the time that Liu penned his report on Suzhou, there was as yet little knowledge of the Chinese architectural past. In fact, the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture had been founded in 1929 for the express purpose of evaluating and classifying China’s building arts: Liu, Liang, and their associates were engaged in the “discovery” of Chinese architectural history by assessing historic buildings through the lenses of evolutionary history, Beaux Arts formal analysis, and twentieth-century nationalism, all new ways of viewing buildings. That Liu Dunzhen’s epiphany came with hindsight in Beiping and not Suzhou underscores the novelty of the society’s larger historical project and its methods. This delay was not due to his lack of familiarity with the city. Liu’s Shanghai architectural practice with Liu Shiying had brought him to Suzhou for various projects. Then in 1927, he had joined Liu Shiying at the Suzhou Provincial No. 1 Technical School and taught architectural theory and practice, perhaps even lecturing on Chinese architectural history, the subject in which he would become a world authority.70 Despite his long-standing personal and professional involvements with Suzhou and its buildings, his recognition of the city as a preserve of nationally significant architectural artifacts only came years later. We can therefore date the elaboration of an evolutionary narrative of Chinese architectural history, in Liu’s mind at least, to his later work with the society in the 1930s. The creation of Chinese architectural history, like the invention of the modern discipline of national historical science a few decades earlier, was part of a broad early twentieth-century cultural movement, which sought to create a strong nation-state and society through the overall modernization of national culture. History never displaced science and industry, improvement of popular customs, road building, or other more orthodox components of modernism to become the main focus of patriotic progressives. Nonetheless, historical writing and analysis played a key role in resolving the disjunctions in the conception of time and space precipitated by the initial late Qing pursuit of modernity and its allied practice, nationalism. Late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Chinese who espoused foreign scientific, economic, and political ideas as a means of transforming China into a nation of wealth and power, such as Liang Sicheng’s father, Liang Qichao, were often shocked at the violence with which modern Western knowledge challenged and denied their understandings of China’s past and culture. Studies of foreign history and social science led them to realize that China was but one

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nation among many and that its historical experience, while unique, did not (indeed, could not) abrogate the scientific rules of development and historical time enshrined in “world history.” Liang and other intellectual seekers were consequently appalled to learn that world history was based almost exclusively on Western experience and made little, if any, reference to China’s past. In fact, many contemporary writers of world history in Europe and Japan did not grant China or East Asia (excepting Japan) much possibility for future development. Cognizant of the Western parochialism and analytic limitations of modernist discourse, Liang and others believed that it was necessary to create a salutary mode of modern history that focused on China as a nation and traced the general progress of national politics and civilization. Such a national history would not only have remedial effects on the Eurocentric nature of world history and increase foreign recognition of China’s civilizational achievements; most crucially, it could serve as a diagnostic tool for self-strengthening. A scientific rendering of China’s national history would give Chinese reformers a more accurate assessment of the nation’s situation, thereby enabling them to make better use of modernizing technologies.71 The modern discipline of Chinese history, of which Liang Qichao was one of the earliest and most profound practitioners, established the intellectual template for the society’s research, including Liu’s analysis of the Pavilion of Great Achievement. Creating a modern, evolutionary history of Chinese architecture required Liu, Liang, and the other members of the society to overcome a dearth of knowledge and relevant documentation. China had possessed buildings for millennia, but builders and buildings did not enjoy the renown or status that architects and architecture had enjoyed in the West since the early modern period. Carpenters were respected as powerful figures schooled in the magic necessary for erecting built structures, yet they were generally viewed as artisans. Furthermore, unlike Europe and the Americas, where the professionalization of architecture involved the state as a promoter (as in France, where the state ´ established the Ecole des Beaux Arts) or enforcer of standards (as in the United States and Britain), the Qing state had not regulated buildings except for the odd sumptuary ruling or the issuance of guidelines for Imperial palaces and temples. As such, the historical record yielded relatively little information on the makers of buildings or the construction techniques they had employed. Most fundamentally, the disciplines of architecture and architectural history were entirely absent from Chinese traditional studies. Yue Jiazao addressed the ramifications of this lack in his 1933 A History of Chinese Architecture, China’s first book of national architectural history. “From ancient times, China has not had architectural studies, nor has she had architectural history. Instead, there have been books that record the names and engineering of palace buildings.”

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Yet these dynastic records failed to examine “the profound meaning of [Our] country’s architecture” due to their lack of critical perspective.72 Given the need to promote nationalist consciousness and mobilize for progress, not to mention improve building and infrastructural design, the development of architectural history could no longer wait. Built structures represented too profound and rich a store of national spirit and historical achievement to leave unrecognized and unappreciated. Yet, Yue noted, heretofore, scholarship on Chinese architecture had largely been foreign. “In the centuries since the Enlightenment, the world [European] standard has become dominant in everything. Thus, the term ‘Chinese architecture’ first appeared in books by Europeans.”73 In fact, the very term architecture (jianzhu) was a Chinese translation of the English term via the contemporary Japanese word kenchiku. Architecture was one of the many return graphic loan-words that entered the language during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These classical Chinese compounds had been appropriated by Meiji period Japanese modernizers as translations for European-language scientific, engineering, and social science vocabulary. The Japanese kanji (Chinese character) neologisms had then been reintroduced into Chinese through Japanese works, translations, and original scholarly treatises, which were avidly read by Chinese modernizers. In this way, much Chinese knowledge of modern technology, society, and thought was acquired through the mediation of Japanese, which helped “translate” modernity into Chinese.74 In addition to architecture, corollary technical terms such as jianzhuwu, built or architectural structure, and basic scientific concepts such as the investigation (diaocha) of a problem were also borrowed from Japanese. In the end, even the language that Liu and his colleagues used to name their project, “An Investigation of Suzhou Ancient Architecture,” testified to the novelty and complex intercultural borrowing underlying their work.75 Given the general absence of Chinese art and architectural history, Chinese readers interested in investigating their own cultural heritage often had little recourse but to avail themselves of foreign research, which often harbored extremely critical attitudes toward the contemporary Chinese nation. It¯0 and Sekino carried out groundbreaking work on the Chinese architectural past but their research concentrated on the monuments of the Tang and Song, which they found particularly compelling in light of Japan’s cultural borrowing from China during these periods. Yet in celebrating the monuments of the distant past, they harshly judged the present as an unworthy successor and failed to unreservedly praise the national genius of China. Nor did European scholarship. European architectural criticism of Chinese structures dates back to at least 1721, when a work on the buildings of China and other non-European nations appeared, and interest in gardens and ornamental

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pavilions blossomed during the eighteenth-century Chinoiserie craze.76 The tone of much of this early commentary, in Britain at least, was unabashedly derogatory; arbiters of taste (even those, such as William Chambers, who helped promote Chinoiserie) proclaimed that Chinese aesthetics and material culture appealing only to those afflicted by nouveaux riche vulgarity or female impetuousness.77 Reflecting the general growth of the discipline of art history, the burgeoning market in Chinese antiquities, and the increasing sophistication of scholarship on China, European commentators produced several works on Chinese art and architecture in the early twentieth century. Yet, until the 1910s and 1920s, when the work of Ernst Boerschmann and Osvald Siren attempted to examine Chinese architecture on its own terms, most European-language works on Chinese architecture vigorously applied the Western classically derived paradigm of “art” and European-centered aesthetic standards, and declared Chinese architecture odd and unchanging. Stephen Bushell, the author of the long-lived and influential Victoria and Albert Museum guide to Chinese art (first published in 1906 and reissued several times in its second edition) also presented Chinese architecture as monotonous for a thousand years.78 The lack of change and vitality that foreign scholars ascribed to Chinese architecture supported the overall Orientalist vision of China as having stalled in the progress of its social evolution: as Hegel influentially argued in his lectures on the philosophy of history, China’s static nature put it “outside of the World’s History,” and therefore modern development.79 The society expressly aspired to counter such European and Japanese Orientalist scholarship regarding China’s national architectural and greater cultural history. Foreign Orientalists without exception declared that Imperial architecture and city planning evinced the inferiority and essential stasis of Chinese culture relative to the “West.” In addition to Sekino and It¯0’s writings, which were readily accessible to many readers in the Japanese original or through Chinese translations and secondary scholarship, Chinese readers interested in scholarly interpretations of China’s fine arts could turn to the commercially successful translation of Bushell’s guide, A History of Chinese Art. Published by the prestigious Commercial Press under the imprimatur of former Peking University President Cai Yuanpei, the book went through at least four printings (1923, 1928, 1934, 1937). While enraptured with painting and decorative arts, Bushell’s History was less enamored with architecture and city planning: “the first impression given by the view of a Chinese city from the parapet of the city-wall . . . is that of a certain monotony, resulting from the predominance of a single type of architecture.” To Bushell’s eye, the predominance of carved ornamentation on buildings affirmed that “the Chinese seem to have a feeling of the innate poverty of their architectural designs. . . . ”80

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Liang Sicheng’s Zhongguo jianzhushi [History of Chinese Architecture], written in 1943, is widely recognized as the first comprehensive history of Chinese architecture. Nonetheless, when Liu Dunzhen wrote his report in 1936, the basic outlines of the society’s approach to history were already clear: Chinese architecture revealed that Chinese civilization had developed through a dynamic of evolutionary progress, placing the Chinese well within “world history.” In 1934, the society had published Liang’s annotated Qing guide to standards for official buildings, Gongbu gongcheng zuofa (1734), which, along with the more difficult Song work, Yingzao fashi (1103), would provide the theoretical basis for the society’s architectural history. The introduction by Lin Huiyin, Liang’s wife and fellow student in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania was essentially the manifesto to which the later histories would conform. (The continued influence of this work is a testament to the excellence of the society’s research, Lin’s the acuity of mind, and the satisfactions of nationalist history.) Her introductory essay also provides the key for understanding why it was not the temple’s grandeur per se that held Liu Dunzhen’s attention, but the dougong (brackets) that supported and structured the roof. Lin began her introduction with the pronouncement, Chinese architecture has continuously evolved as an independent, Eastern [architectural] system, covering a large area for several thousand years. Although China has on several occasions been influenced by other peoples from the outside in regard to thought and customs, thus causing several transformations, Chinese architecture has into its ripe, complex later period still maintained its essential structure, methods, and proportions . . . becoming a uniquely venerable and honorable architectural system.

Lin thus reinterpreted the universally noted trait of Chinese continuity in architectural form and materials as a sign of cultural strength and longevity, not monotony or decline. The Chinese architectural system was characterized by three important components: 1) a platform, often of stone, on which 2) wooden frame of columns, beams, and dougong, would support 3) a roof, often quite large, and of varying, increasingly sharp pitches. The predominant use of wood, however, enabled the development of the crowning aesthetic and technological glory that is unique to Chinese buildings, the roof, which rests on the novel technology of dougong to raise the roof truss. The development of the dougong itself represents the general process of architectural evolution in each period. The dougong is not only an element unique to Chinese architecture. It later became an architectural “order” unique to Chinese architecture.81

In other words, the roof bracket was the crucial element to understanding the historical evolution and aesthetic rules of Chinese buildings. The dougong was,

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thus, the key for understanding buildings as artifacts exemplifying Chinese national cultural essence. The dougong is made up of dou (blocks) and gong (arms) that transfer the load from a horizontal member to a vertical one underneath.82 Through the use of dougong and supporting timbers, the roof is held up. Most importantly, the necessity of using several sets of dougong to support a roof allows builders to vary the angle at which the roof rises, giving Chinese roofs their characteristic profiles. Throughout the centuries, the rise of the roof and the proportions between the roof and the rest of the building had changed markedly due to shifts in the number and size of dougong and the conventions governing the slope of the roof. Dougong were the mechanism for transforming the overall design and structure of Chinese buildings. The large size and varied arm lengths of Song dougong allowed the roof to rise gradually and gave Song buildings their characteristically gentle sloping roofs. Following the Song, dougong gradually shrank so that by the Qing they had become much smaller. Having fewer and shorter arms, Qing dougong raised the roof much more sharply. Like the Renaissance Europeans who invented the classical architectural “orders” out of their admiration for ancient Greek and Roman civilization, the society distilled and ranked a set of historically derived architectural proportions in terms of their aesthetic merits. These modes isolated a significant pattern of gross stylistic shifts, however in doing so they also codified their creators’ aesthetic and nationalist sensibilities as central to the objects’ structure, value, and history. Lin’s analysis featured two prominent nationalist biases, which remain fundamental to much architectural history scholarship: a tendency to value monumental timber-frame architecture typical of palaces and temples over vernacular forms and a marked preference for northern styles found in Beijing, the capital for 500 years, over southern forms as the basis for “National” styles.83 The society’s aesthetic order also reflected the commonplace opinion that the Song dynasty had marked the premodern apogee of Han Chinese culture, a claim that caused many nationalists to feel anxious pride: locating the height of civilization so far in the past suggested that the nation had been in a seven-century period of stagnation or decline. In addition, the Song’s long-term military travails and eventual defeat at the hands of its “barbarian” neighbors conveyed an ambiguous image that undercut the nationalist verity that the Song represented the apex of a vital Han culture unadulterated by foreign intermixing. Reflecting this narrative, the society celebrated the gently sloping Song roof as “lively” while faulting the generally larger, sharper-pitched Qing roof as “top-heavy and rigid,” a decline in aesthetic achievement. The rise and fall of aesthetic achievement thus mirrored the pattern of China’s putative rise and fall as a nation.

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f i g . 1 4 . Pavilion of Great Achievement brackets (dougong). Source: Liu Dunzhen, Suzhou gu jianzhu diaocha ji, image 23b.

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