ABOUT THIS BOOK

Writing Beijing offers a comprehensive study of the textual representations of the city from the late Ming dynasty through the Republican era, interrogating how urban narratives were actively constructed, adapted, and repurposed across periods of political transformation. Scholars, officials, and travelers reshaped the capital’s identity by rewriting older texts, borrowing new surveys, and even inserting critiques into guidebooks.. This study reveals how the crises brought by intense social transformation, including dynastic collapse and foreign invasion, forced writers to reinvent Beijing on paper. Some turned the city into a monument to lost glory; others documented everyday life to resist imperialism. These narratives served to critique contemporary sociopolitical conditions, assert cultural legitimacy during times of crisis, and ultimately shape Beijing’s enduring cultural image as China’s symbolic capital.

Naixi Feng bridges literary studies, urban history, and critical historiography by examining a wide range of genres—including literary miscellanies, local gazetteers, Qing imperial compilations, Republican textbooks, social reports, and travel guides—to demonstrate how writing about Beijing was never merely descriptive but always a site of cultural and political contestation.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Naixi Feng is Associate Professor at the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University.

REVIEWS

“Feng’s ability to read across this wide variety of texts is impressive. Writing Beijing will make contributions to Chinese literary history, turning attention to texts usually mined for ‘facts’ rather than their literary construction, and to the ways in which representations give rise to the imagination of place.”

— Andrea S. Goldman, University of California Los Angeles

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Table of Contents

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Late Imperial Beijing
Chapter One. Miscellaneous Accounts of the Imperial History: Liu Tong (1593–1636) and A Sketch of Sites and Objects in the Imperial Capital (1635)
Chapter Two. Inhabiting the Northern Landscape: Travel Writings in the Late Ming
Chapter Three. From Scholar’s Studio to the Emperor’s Library: Book Projects on Beijing in the High Qing
Part Two: Modern Beijing
Chapter Four. A Patriot’s Passion: Lin Chuanjia and His Beijing Textbooks, 1900–1919
Chapter Five. Applying a “Scientific” Method: Urban Surveys of Beijing, 1919–1937
Chapter Six. New Journeys to the Old Capital: Historicity, Politics, and the Discourse of Civilization in the Guidebooks of Beijing, 1912–1937
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography