The Neighborhood: Space, State, and Daily Life in a Manchurian City

This masterful blend of history and urban storytelling brings to life the people and politics that shaped a single neighborhood in a Manchurian city across several centuries.

What can one neighborhood reveal about the making of a modern nation? The Neighborhood deciphers the unexpected significance of Xita, a half-square-mile quarter in Shenyang, in Northeast China. As the historian Nianshen Song shows, over nearly four centuries, Xita has been shaped and reshaped by empire, war, migration, and urban transformation. Remarkably, the history of this small area mirrors large-scale changes, including and especially China’s metamorphosis from a multiethnic Eurasian empire to a postindustrial society.

Song begins with Xita’s origins as a Qing-era Tibetan Buddhist center, following the lives of Mongol lamas and their imperial patrons. He tracks the neighborhood through the tumultuous twentieth century, when competing Russian and Japanese railway empires fueled its industrial growth, and Japanese colonizers turned it into a showcase for their imperial ambitions. Later, Xita became a vital enclave for Korea’s diaspora before emerging in the post-Mao era as a neon-lit hub of commerce and entertainment.

A thoroughly researched microhistory, The Neighborhood reveals how global forces play out in everyday spaces. By studying the emperors, warlords, merchants, laborers, and migrants who shaped Xita, Song presents a captivating and original perspective for understanding China’s past--not from the top down, but through the streets and people who lived it.

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