ABSTRACT
China's encounter with architectural modernity was critically bound to the experience of engagement, invariably under duress, with foreign powers. China's twentieth-century architectural history has been approached and portrayed as two largely separate experiences: foreign and Chinese. This chapter presents to arrange in two acts, each comprising three scenes, the first focuses on the treaty ports established along China's coastline and major waterways, and the second is set in the territory of north-east China known internationally as Manchuria. The buildings that populated these early Japanese settlements were predominantly designed in a western 'neo-Renaissance' style imported into Japan in the late nineteenth century with foreign architects and teachers before being exported to Manchuria by their graduated students. On China's coast, a resurgent non-western nation had seized from an ailing western empire a city designed according to the latest planning theories, and set about altering and enhancing this design according to its own particular interpretation.
