Urbanization in Early and Medieval China

"Urbanization in Early and Medieval China has done a significant service to the field by making available a much-needed new set of Suzhou-focused texts for historians, literary scholars, and cultural geographers of early and medieval China. For those of us who teach seminars on Chinese cities past of present, this book will provide ample productive reading material with which to provoke discussion, along with texts with which to launch research projects—at any level."

"The most important contribution of this book by far is the excellent translation of these three gaz-etteers. Far too much of Chinese history is written from the perspective of the imperial court, which presented a centralizing, homogenizing imperial narrative that exaggerated the cultural, ethnic, and political unity across the imperial realm. Gazetteers such as these provide an alternative vision of the empire, describing instead a patchwork of regional variation wherein locals took pan-imperial elite culture and blended it, each in their own way, with unique local customs, local cults, and multiethnic demographics."

"An extraordinary achievement. The scholarship is sound, and the author’s command of both primary and secondary sources is quite impressive. The translations from Chinese to English are superb. They are both faithful to the original text and read quite well in English. The topic is important. Virtually all scholars who deal with premodern China at some time or another turn to these local histories for information."

"I thoroughly enjoyed reading Urbanization in Early and Medieval China. It includes a wealth of information that is not available anywhere else. The scholarship is superior."