Introduction

This book aims to reconstruct the spatial, visual, and gender modernity of nineteenth-century Shanghai, from the beginning of huayang zaju (mixed residence of Chinese [sojourners] and foreigners) during the Small Sword rebellion (1853-55) and the invasion of the Taiping rebels (1860-62) to the years around China’s humiliating defeat by Japan (1894-95) and the beginning of the imperial reforms (1898), which initiated the Shanghai-based construction of a modern Chinese national identity. Its central argument is that modernity fi rst arrived in China via a revolutionary concept of space rather than of time. My focus is not on the imagined space of new Chinese nationhood but on the urban spaces of everyday life, which are examined as fl uid and dynamic confi gurations of social and gender relationships.