Shanghai and the Edges of Empires

Even before the romanticized golden era of Shanghai in the 1930s, the famed Asian city was remarkable for its uniqueness and East-meets-West cosmopolitanism. Meng Yue analyzes a century-long shift of urbanity from ChinaÕs heartland to its shore. During the period between the decline of Jiangnan cities such as Suzhou and Yangzhou and ShanghaiÕs early twentieth-century rise, the overlapping cultural edges of a failing Chinese royal order and the encroachment of Western imperialists converged. Simu