This work examines the history of urban planning and administration during modern China's first age of city-centered politics, focusing on the New Policies of the late Qing and the city administration movement of the 1920s. Between 1895 and 1937, the management of cities emerged as one of the chief challenges for the Chinese state. Through a detailed case study, based on newly available archival sources, of the process of urban reform in Chengdu, a key provincial capital in the interior, Kristin Stapleton shows how urban reformers permanently changed urban administration, the urban landscape, and urban life by promoting a new type of orderly and productive community in population centers despite the many upheavals of the late Qing and Republican eras.

Civilizing Chengdu is analytical, mature, measures, and theoretically unpretentious...The book is unusually cleanly written, and enlivened by wit...It is thoroughly researched in archival, journalistic, and literary sources, supplemented by personal interviews--the author's empathy and rapport with Chengdu's people and their own historical memory show through on every page.
-- William T. Rowe Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies