Elizabeth LaCouture - Dwelling in The World - Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960-Columbia University Press (2021)

Dwelling in the World
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STUDIES OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
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FAMILY, HOUSE, AND HOME IN
TIANJIN, CHINA,
1860–1960
Elizabeth LaCouture
COLU M BIA U N IV ER SIT Y P R ESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: LaCouture, Elizabeth, author.
Title: Dwelling in the world : family, house, and home in Tianjin,
China, 1860–1960 / Elizabeth LaCouture.
Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2021. |
Series: Studies of the weatherhead East Asian institute |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021007874 (print) | LCCN 2021007875 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780231181785 (hardback) | ISBN 9780231181792 (trade paperback) |
ISBN 9780231543798 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Families—China—Tianjin—History—19th century. |
Families—China—Tianjin—History—20th century. | Households—
China—Tianjin—History—19th century. | Households—China—Tianjin—
History—20th century. | Social classes—China—Tianjin—History—
19th century. | Social classes—China—Tianjin—History—20th century. |
Tianjin (China)—Social life and customs.
Classification: LCC HQ684.T53 L33 2021 (print) | LCC HQ684.T53 (ebook) |
DDC 306.850951/154—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007874
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021007875
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

and durable acid-free paper.
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Cover image: Courtesy of the author. Artist: Ye Qianyu ਦ⍵Ҹ, Van Jan
(Wanxiang з䊑), no. 1, May 20, 1934, n.p.
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part I. Domestic Empires

1 Unraveling the Chinese Empire 17
2 Family in Ideology and Practice 47
3 Property, Power, and Identity in a

Colonial-Capitalist City 80
Part II. At Home in the World

4 Choosing a House 123
5 Designing House and Home 154
6 Living at Home 189

vi Contents
Part III. Chinese Social Spaces

7 Engendering the Chinese City 217
8 The Chinese Bourgeois Home in the Socialist World 242
Epilogue: Historical Erasures and China’s New Middle Class 264
Notes 271
Bibliography 315
Index 337
Acknowledgments
M
any homes have shaped this project. My interest in the
urban Chinese home began with printed-out pages of
Ling long magazine scattered across the floor and futon
of my tiny bedroom in a shared apartment on Claremont Ave-
nue in Morningside Heights, and I finally closed the door to
family, house, and home from my living room desk, looking
onto Robinson Road and Victoria Harbor in a three-bedroom
Hong Kong flat. Along the way I read and wrote in a spare
room adjacent to an office in Kichijoji, a refurbished danwei
apartment along Heyan Dao in Tianjin, a 1930s house in
Waterville, and apartments in Urbana, Hamilton, and Taibei.
This research taught me how to design my own home: when I
began, I had never purchased a piece of furniture for myself,
and now I have amassed enough antiques, art, midcentury
modern, and Ikea to fill an apartment, a storage unit, and my
in-laws’ basement.
I am grateful to all the large houses that supported my
research and writing. Academic affiliations provided access to
libraries and a space to work. I am fortunate to have studied at
Columbia University, the International Chinese Language
Program (ICLP), and the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences
and to have worked at Colby College, the University of Illinois,
and the University of Hong Kong. Generous grants supported
viii Acknowledgments
study, research, and writing. Thanks to Fulbright-Hays, the American

Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation,
the Julie How Dissertation Fellowship, the Institute for Social and Eco-
nomic Research Policy (ISERP), the Weatherhead East Asian Institute,
the Daniel and Marianne Spiegel Fund, the Foreign Language and Area
Studies Fellowship (FLAS), the Academy of Korean Studies, and Colby
College Social Science division. My research would not have been possible
without all the houses that provide shelter to all the books, magazines, and
documents. I am especially grateful to the staff at les Archives diploma-
tique, the Tianjin Municipal Library, and the Tianjin Municipal Archives.
A large extended family, the size of which would put a May Fourth
activist to shame, helped raise this book. The lineage of my intellectual da
jiazu begins with the matriarch of Chinese feminist history Dorothy Ko.
Dorothy taught me to look at Chinese gender history from the past, helped
me discover my creativity, and inspired me to trust how I see. Madeleine
Zelin always ensured that I had funding and supported me as I started my
own family. My Columbia family has long supported my study of China.
Bob Hymes first taught me about the Chinese family as an undergraduate,
and Irene Bloom and Lu Xiaobo supported my intellectual journey at Bar-
nard College. Mary Hue taught me much more than Japanese language,
and Meng Yuan-yuan shared her infectious love of Zhang Ailing. Eugenia
Lean, Pamela Smith, and Gwendolyn Wright provided fresh perspectives
on gender, material culture, and architectural histories.
Over the years, I have been graciously welcomed into other academic
families. Countless surrogate parents offered feedback and conversation.
I am especially grateful to Ronald Knapp, Jordan Sand, Ruby Watson, and
Antoinette Burton. Linda Grove introduced me to China studies in Japan
and to the possibilities of research on Tianjin. Not only was the Tianjin
Academy of Social Science a research home away from home, but Liu Hai-
yan, Ren Yulan, and Zhang Limin invited me into their homes. Wang Li
supported my research, offered friendship, and shared his family of won-
derful students. I have been inspired by the intellectual feminist sister-
hood of scholars at Academia Sinica, especially Lien Ling-ling, Sun Huei-
min, and Jennifer Ning. At the University of Illinois, Jungwon Kim, Erica
Vogel, and the late Nancy Abelmann provided a nurturing home for my
research. Eileen Findlay has been a mentor and a model feminist scholar.
Acknowledgments ix
I am grateful to the many brothers and sisters in my academic family.

My xuege Fabio Lanza and xuejie Georgia Mickey have provided mentor-
ship in graduate school and beyond. My brothers and sisters in the disser-
tation support group—Alyssa Park, Li Chen, Jisoo Kim, Adam Clulow,
Colin Jaundrill, and Matt Augustine—were generous with their feedback
while writing their own brilliant books. Courtney Fullilove, Jeremy Tai,
and Alexandra Tunstall helped round out my intellectual family at Colum-
bia, while Annelise Heinz and Lawrence Chua have been much welcomed
additions to this family. My professional and personal life is sustained
through the true feminist sisterhood of colleagues Sonja Thomas, Puja
Kapai, and Staci Ford.
My scholarly life is enriched by the welcomed distractions and much-
needed support of people in my personal life. I am grateful to both my cho-
sen family— Cleo Abrams, Heidi Johnson, Michael Hill, Louise Brown-Oz,
Udi Oz, and Ayal ben Or—and my inherited family— Susan Buckley,
Angelo DeSantis, Isabella Buckley-DeSantis, Jay Lacouture, Patricia
Lacouture, Dale Petrulis, Ken Petrulis, and Denise Petrulis. Housework is
work, and I am grateful to the women who provided domestic labor and
childcare, especially Cai Xiuying and Eliza Laamoon, that allowed me to
write this book. Finally, to my own xiao jiating Jason and Clio, my greatest
joy has been dwelling in this world with you.
Introduction
O
n a hot summer afternoon in 2005, I joined a group of
historians led by Tianjin scholar Liu Haiyan on a walk-
ing tour of the city. We entered Tianjin’s former British
Concession, walked along its tree-lined streets, and stepped
into a courtyard of semi-attached houses. Liu began to intro-
duce the history of these and similar single-family houses,
built in the 1920s and 1930s, when a friendly couple who lived
in the neighborhood approached us. They invited us to look
inside their home, and we followed them through the once-
grand entryway of their building.
Standing on graying, multicolored, glazed tiles, we gazed
upon a carved wooden staircase with chipping paint. We noted
that although the house had been constructed for single-
family use, it had since been subdivided into several apart-
ments. Our hosts lived on the ground floor in a bright and tidy
two-room flat, in what once likely served as the parlor and the
dining room of the home. The front room continued to serve as
a sitting room, and the couple invited us to take a seat. The
sofa stood across from a double doorway that led into what was
likely designed to be a dining room but now served as a bed-
room. Our hosts explained that they had recently purchased
the apartment for a good price, and that they had consulted
with their daughter on renovations. Although they were of
2 Introduction
modest means, they told us, their daughter was well educated, and she dis-
couraged them from destroying any of the original architectural features.
Liu complimented them on their decor and commented that they had
done well to heed their daughter’s advice. A fresh coat of paint brightened
the two rooms, while the original crown moldings, fireplace, and wooden
floors transported us back to the time when the house was built in the
1920s. The couple was proud of the house and its history. They informed
us that when it was originally built, Chinese people would not have been
able to live there, since only foreign nationals were allowed to live in the
foreign concession. Liu politely advised them that their house’s former
residents most likely would have been Chinese since the majority of resi-
dents in the British Concession were Chinese (over 90 percent in the
1920s). Indeed, the surrounding houses of this residential courtyard had
been constructed during a real estate boom designed to meet the demands
of Tianjin’s well-to-do Chinese population for concession housing.
Our hosts were not alone in their belief that housing in Tianjin’s foreign
concessions had once been off-limits to Chinese urbanites. On repeat vis-
its to Tianjin’s former foreign concessions, older people would stop me in
the streets or in a park to inform me that before 1949 only foreigners could
live in Tianjin’s concessions. And this collective postcolonial memory did
not value all colonized spaces equally: while Chinese residents of the for-
mer European concessions celebrated that they, as Chinese people, could
now live there, residents of the former Japanese concession wanted to
leave. As I surveyed architecture along those streets, multiple residents
told me that I would be better off studying the “five great streets,” or
Wudadao, the Chinese name for the former British Concession. One
woman told me that she wished the government would demolish her home
in the former Japanese Concession and compensate her so that her family
could afford to move.
With different parts of the city eliciting divergent emotional responses
from residents, architectural fieldwork in Tianjin revealed the affective
relationship between the city’s residents and the urban landscape and
architecture. My initial goal for this book was to uncover the historical
consequences of the relationship between people and things by asking
how changes in the urban landscape and the built environment, which
began in the late nineteenth century, forged new social structures and
Introduction 3
reshaped individual identities. Archival research and fieldwork in Tianjin

revealed that as urban spaces were demolished and rebuilt, the city’s
urban elites invented the modern house and home themselves, and
through this process fashioned new classed and gendered identities.
The relationship between identity, space, and architecture that exists in
Tianjin today, however, is no longer shaped from below but instead is
guided from above as those earlier processes were deliberately erased
from popular historical memory. This erasure began shortly after the Chi-
nese Communists came to power in 1949. Ironically, the Chinese Com-
munist Party (CCP) erased the historical memory of an earlier Chinese
middle class by adopting the emerging middle class practice of linking
individual housing rights to political rights. Shortly after assuming power,
the CCP made housing a central feature of their political legitimacy, dis-
tributing housing through work units. Today, people purchase or rent
housing through markets. But whether housing was allocated through
work units or through the market economy, the ability to inhabit a home
has been credited to the Communist Party. Today, housing is central to the
identity of the so-called new and rising Chinese middle class, and indeed
is key to the relationship between state and society.
State-led urban renewal and development in Tianjin also shapes public
memory of the city’s colonial past. Beginning in the late 1990s, the old
Chinese city was demolished, only to be rebuilt as a Chinese-style shop-
ping arcade. The Italian and British Concessions, by contrast, have been
preserved as tourist destinations and business districts. Italian-built resi-
dences are now restaurants and serve as a popular backdrop for wedding
photographs. Across the river, Beaux Arts banks have been preserved and
new “old European style” architecture has been erected, even as the Japa-
nese Concession remained largely neglected and forgotten as of the early
2000s.
In postcolonial Tianjin, the preservation of European architecture
has taken precedence over Chinese-style buildings. But while Tianjin’s
European architectural heritage is celebrated, this pride is less about com-
memorating a colonial past or remembering the contributions of Chinese
people who lived in the colonized city than it is about memorializing Chi-
na’s place of strength in the world today. European-style buildings, espe-
cially large public buildings, symbolize economic and political power.
4 Introduction
Occupying former European-colonized spaces and designing new Euro-

pean buildings demonstrates that China is now on par with Europe, thanks
to the Communist Party.
In Dwelling in the World I move beyond these façades of power, and into
Tianjin houses, to fill in the erased histories of the everyday experiences of
the city’s urban elites. By writing Chinese people back into the concession
houses they once inhabited and imagining how they lived at home, I
explore how Chinese people forged their individual gendered and classed
subjectivities. In taking this approach I reveal the power of their everyday
lives, which spilled out beyond the walls of the home to shape Tianjin’s
social and cultural histories yesterday and Tianjin’s urban life today.
In 1860, Tianjin became a treaty-port city and eventually included nine
foreign concessions, more than any other Chinese city. The number of
concessions fluctuated along with geopolitical events, but many remained
in the city until after World War II. Each concession functioned like a
colony, with its own municipal governing body, individual contracts with
public utility companies, national or religious curricula and schools,
streets named in the national language, unique zoning regulations, and
distinctive architectural styles. With nine foreign concessions, or minia-
ture colonies, occupying such a small area of land, Tianjin was perhaps the
most international city in the world during the first half of the twentieth
century. A Tianjin resident could experience multiple languages and
architectural styles simply by taking an afternoon stroll across the city.
And since Tianjin was the largest port in northern China, its residents
experienced the world at home through consuming goods from across the
globe. A Chinese resident of Tianjin was quite literally dwelling in the
world.
Encountering the world at home and in the city led Tianjin urban elites
to articulate new forms of social distinction. They formed a new urban
cosmopolitan class whose people felt equally at home living in the Chinese
city, in their natal home in the countryside, or in other cosmopolitan cities
from Tokyo and Paris to New York and London. The Chinese modern
home was not an isolated, private space but rather a contact zone, if you
will, in which Chinese individuals encountered, tried on, experienced,
and consumed the world.1
Introduction 5
By casting house and home as a global space in this book, I explore not
only how Chinese people invented the modern home by consuming the
global but also, more importantly, introduce how Chinese people pro-
duced their own identities and ideas about modernity on and for the global
stage. Thus, while other historians of Chinese consumption during this
period have argued that Chinese people either boycotted foreign goods
due to a sense of rising nationalism, or embraced foreign goods because
they were exotic, I argue that Chinese people did not take for granted cat-
egories such as Chinese and foreign, new and old, or male and female.2
Instead, they produced meanings for these categories based on their
understandings of their world, inventing their own conceptions of the
modern. So for many of Tianjin’s urban elites, their experiences of dwell-
ing in the world, rather than national awakening, played a central role in
forging their individual subjectivities. Moreover, as they explored every-
day life at home, people forged new conceptions of social status. The aboli-
tion of the Chinese civil service examination system in 1905 and the fall of
the Qing in 1911 brought about the end of the Confucian ideal of social
hierarchies and opened up spaces for people to create new status identi-
ties. Home became a central site for identity formation. But this new con-
cept of home was only available to a small subset of urbanites, a group we
might call the middle class or the bourgeoisie. As a result, this book is not
a history of how Tianjin people from all walks of life made their dwellings
in the world, but rather the story of how a group of urban elites invented
the modern home and developed it into a central site for class and gender
identity formation.
By writing the history of the modern home into the history of modern
China, Dwelling in the World joins histories of the United States and Europe
that have linked changing class and gender identities to the spatial trans-
formation of the domestic sphere.3 According to these histories, new gen-
der and middle-class identities were a development of a discrete separate
domestic sphere that emerged with the Industrial Revolution. The histo-
rian Jordan Sand has argued for an opposite causality in Japan, asserting
that Japan’s middle class invented the modern home and ideas about
middle-class domesticity through interpreting and translating global
ideas of domesticity and bourgeois culture. 4 I offer a third argument for
6 Introduction
China: that Chinese people simultaneously invented the modern home as

they invented new status identities. Moreover, unlike their counterparts in
Tokyo or London, they did not strongly identify with being part of a bour-
geois class even as their patterns of behavior suggested otherwise. This
begs a question: What did status, or more specifically “middle class,”
mean in modern China?
Chinese politics have long exerted a heavy influence on the Chinese
history field—including Chinese history practiced outside China—by
focusing attention on peasant and working classes. As a result, few histori-
ans have examined the “middle class” in modern China. Marie- Claire
Bergère was one of the first historians to do so, arguing that the Republi-
can era was a prosperous period for Chinese treaty-port cities and charac-
terizing it as “the golden age of the Chinese bourgeoisie.”5 When looking
at the Chinese middle class, historians often have drawn on Euro-
American historical models of class. Bergère employed a French historical
understanding of the bourgeoisie as an independent economic group vis-
à-vis the state, while others have ascribed middle-class status according to
new economic professions such as entrepreneurs, lawyers, and clerical
workers, or according to their new political role between state and
society.6
China historians who examine class have also been quick to point out
that Euro-American analytical categories of class do not always map
neatly onto Chinese society. Bergère argued that while an independent
entrepreneurial class emerged during the 1910s and 1920s in Shanghai, in
Tianjin an independent bourgeois class never developed since most of the
shareholders of Tianjin’s cotton mills hailed from bureaucratic or military
backgrounds and invested much more widely in real estate than in indus-
trial production.7 Likewise, looking at Tianjin’s working class, the histo-
rian Gail Hershatter found that union activity and worker conscious-
ness were much lower in Tianjin than in Shanghai.8 Class consciousness
appears to have been low among Shanghai’s middle classes as well. Look-
ing at “middle class office workers,” the historian Wen-hsin Yeh described
the emergence of a new urban middle class culture, but the group she
examined rarely described itself as middle class. Instead, Yeh argued that
the new middle- class urban culture connected modernity and nation
to class, making it “virtually imperative for a patriotic Chinese to be
Introduction 7
modern.”9 During the Republican era, the Chinese government was weak,
and China was multiply colonized, so patriotism and nationalism emerged
as the primary ideological constructs around which people could form
identities. Although middle class may have been an ideological construct
in Paris or in Tokyo, in pre– Communist China the ideological concept of
middle class never fully formed. Yet Chinese urbanites still engaged in
certain cultural and social practices that historians typically associate
with a middle class. The case of the Chinese modern home thus suggests
that to understand everyday modernity comparatively, historians must
decouple material practices of modernity from modern ideological
constructs.
Perhaps because a unified middle-class identity did not emerge in
twentieth-century China, the Tianjin house and home could become a site
for identity experimentation, a place where status identities intersected
with new gendered practices and understandings of Chinese-ness. A
wealthy male warlord, for example, could express his masculinity and
elite social status through displaying his economic capital and his ability
to purchase a grand house in one of the foreign concessions, while the
daughter of a civil servant could show off her educational capital and
access to female knowledge by demonstrating how to design everyday life
in the modern home. In treaty-port Tianjin, gender roles were changing,
and social status was relational. Thus, shifting focus from the ideological
categories or sociological markers of class to the relational and multilay-
ered processes of identity-making was in keeping with Pierre Bourdieu’s
notion of status as a process of “distinction.”10 More than political or
socioeconomic definitions of social status, “distinction” can highlight the
practices of status formation, emphasizing the multiple factors that people
call upon to establish their social position within a particular social group,
or vis-à-vis others, through leveraging multiple forms of capital. In addi-
tion, examining class as a social process rather than as a given category
can level the playing field, allowing historians to write comparative histo-
ries of places that did not follow the same historical trajectories as Europe
or North America.
When we take class and gender formation to be dynamic processes that
are historically contingent, rather than universal stages, we can see a dif-
ferent history of house and home in modern China—a history that reveals
8 Introduction
the making of the Chinese middle class, yet also engenders the history of
Chinese modernity. Beginning in the 1970s, feminist historians of the
United States and Europe began to write the private history of the domes-
tic sphere into mainstream historiography. They argued that as capital
exited the household and moved into factories, the home became a private
sphere, a site of respite and individual identity formation, and also the site
of political ideological control.11 To achieve legitimacy in the eyes of main-
stream history, women’s history reinforced a Euro-American historical
timeline that identified the Industrial Revolution as the pivot of modern-
ization. In other words, the history of private space was told through
the timeline of Euro-American public spaces. Economic and political his-
torians of China have challenged such universal historical markers of
modernity and have called on us to rethink the “great divergence” and
“the public sphere.”12
Chinese women’s history, however, is doubly marginalized by the mas-
culinist field of Chinese history and the Euro-American-dominated field
of women’s history. As a result, scholars of Chinese women’s history have
needed to cite U.S. women’s histories if only to explain that China’s histo-
riographical trajectory was different.13 Moreover, although historians of
late imperial China such as Francesca Bray, Dorothy Ko, and Susan Mann
have recast our understanding of Chinese and women’s history by analyz-
ing the experiences of Chinese women on their own terms, their scholarly
work rarely becomes required reference outside the field of Chinese wom-
en’s history. A historian of eighteenth-century United States is never
required to explain why Confucian notions of nei and wai never developed,
and likewise, historians of China’s economy are never expected to cite
gender historians.14
Chinese women’s history can only be understood on its own terms, but
we can still aim to make these histories legible to other historians through
comparative analytical frames. Susan Glosser, for example, who explores
the changing ideology of family in twentieth-century China, argues for
focusing on “prescriptive ideals” before the lived experience of families
because it follows historiographical practices of scholars of U.S. women’s
history. But she also argues that Chinese socio-spatial ideologies were
different from the Euro-American concept of separate spheres.15 Thus,
Introduction 9
although Glosser follows Euro-American historiographical methods, she

also acknowledges that China had a different historical experience.
With Dwelling in the World, I invite historians to go even further. By
focusing on the materiality of everyday life over the politics of ideology, I
aim to disrupt the historiographical methods that have established past
Euro-American experiences as historical theory by proposing new com-
parative frames for women’s history. Consider the ideological concept of
“domesticity.” The concept, which is so central to U.S. women’s history
and has such a rich historiography, literally does not translate into Chi-
nese.16 The term typically is rendered as jiating shenghuo or “home life,” a
very different historical lens. In contrast to a history of domesticity, a his-
tory of home life considers common global trajectories as well as individ-
ual localized female experiences. Comparative histories of home life thus
introduce modernity as a shared experience rather than a stage, a histori-
cal marker, or a timeline. By shifting the analytical lens from ideology to
materiality, a history of home life can dislocate the Euro-American cul-
tural experience from its primacy as theory and instead reveal similarities
across the material experiences of global histories.
A history of home life in modern China reveals that the urban house
and home was the site of one of the most significant revolutions in Chinese
everyday life. This revolution was articulated linguistically through the
transformation of the classical Chinese term jia (household) into the mod-
ern vernacular word jiating (home). These transformations in language
and social spaces emerged as the Qing Empire’s hold over its realm began
to loosen in the late nineteenth century. Intellectuals, politicians, and
even merchants began to rethink the relationship between state and soci-
ety and, in the process, began to define the new Chinese nation. It marked
the linguistic transition from the late imperial or early modern jia (house-
hold) to the jiating (modern home). This transition occurred historically as
the Qing Empire’s hold over its realm began to loosen in the late nine-
teenth century, as intellectuals, politicians, and even merchants rethought
the relationship between state and society and, in the process, began to
define the new Chinese nation.17 Historians have focused on this political
redefinition of the modern Chinese nation and the public sphere, but few
have considered the redefinition from another direction, either by looking
10 Introduction
into the urban house and home, or by examining a debate that was every
bit as intense as the one over state and society: the contest over the mean-
ing and role of family, house, and home.18
In late imperial China, family, house, and household were intercon-
nected conceptually and linguistically through the single- character
word—jia.19 Depending on the context, jia could mean family, house, or
household, thus social relations and social spaces were closely intertwined.
The architectural design of a family’s house, ordered according to feng
shui principles, could bring prosperity to a family or it could lead to ruin
for future generations. And just as people and house were connected, the
household was linked to the dynastic center, a relationship best envisioned
as a set of mutually reinforcing nested spheres. In the Chinese classical
text the Great Learning, Confucius is asked how to govern the state, and he
answers that one first must regulate the household, and only then can
order be brought to the state. Likewise, familial harmony and wealth was
most easily achieved when the empire was peaceful and prosperous.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, a new world order of
imperialist competition, powered by capitalism, governed by social Dar-
winism, and proselytized by missionaries, began to erode the philosophi-
cal principles and the material landscape of this Chinese spatial order. In
1911, the Qing dynasty finally collapsed, taking with it the imperial core
that had glued this sociopolitical spatial ideology together. What hap-
pened when the world as Chinese people understood it literally crumbled
beneath their feet? As I answer this question in my book, I connect life on
the ground to the larger shifting political and economic landscapes that
framed Chinese people’s everyday lives. I argue that this was a transitional
time for Chinese people in two main ways: first, it was a period between
two empires—the Qing dynasty that fell in 1911 and the People’s Republic
of China, established in 1949 and set up on top of the territorial map of the
Qing Empire—and second, it was a moment when China was at the center
of multiple foreign empires, each fighting over economic and territorial
rights in China. To design everyday life at home Chinese urbanites picked
up the broken pieces of a fallen Qing and turned to the many global mod-
els of their multiply colonized city. Dwelling in the world at home and in
their city, people in Tianjin forged new individual gender, class, and ethnic
identities.
Introduction 11
Moreover, I argue that it was precisely because this historical moment

fell between two Chinese empires—after the fall of the Qing imperial
order, and before the founding of the People’s Republic of China’s new
socialist political order—that Chinese people actually had enough space
and opportunity to create new categories of understanding. The Republi-
can era was a period of weak political unity, but it was a time rich with new
political discourses. Cultural histories of modern China describe the
Republican era as a period of “national awakening,” yet when it came to
the architecture of the modern house or the design of the modern home,
nationalist social reformers and government officials actually had very
little to say.20 If anything, nationalists argued against the idea that the
home could be a space for expression and empowerment and suggested
instead that the oppressive feudal household was a space from which mod-
ern women should escape.
Late imperial Confucians had advocated for the proper arrangement
and design of houses as central to social order in the family and political
success in the dynasty, but twentieth-century reformers focused on the
social structure of the family. Emboldened by the principles of a new
global social science, Chinese ideologues called upon Chinese people to
abandon the traditional, extended, large family structure and form mod-
ern, small, nuclear families to save the nation.21 These new ideas about
family accompanied a new vocabulary: jiating, the new two-character
word to describe family, was a neologism borrowed from Japan that could
mean family, house, or the new modern concept of home, depending on
the context. Although nationalist ideology focused on family, as Chinese
people tried to reconstruct their social world they continued to connect
social relations and social spaces through the new modern term jiating. As
they emphasized social reform, however, nationalist politicians and
reformers disconnected the social relations of the family from the social
space of the house. Still, the nationalist calls to reform family social rela-
tions and build xiao jiating, or small families, may not have resulted in the
desired demographic change. Drawing on archival research on Tianjin
family size and structures, I argue that ideology did not always line up
with how Chinese people formed or even thought about their families.
The questions then arise: If being a modern family in Tianjin was not
about heeding the calls of nationalist rhetoric to live as a small nuclear
12 Introduction
family, what did Chinese people living in Tianjin understand as “mod-

ern”? Moreover, if textual sources tend to tell a story of “national awaken-
ing” that did not always materialize into social practice, what kinds of
sources can illuminate how Chinese people understood everyday moder-
nity? To answer these questions, I construct a multifaceted archive of jiat-
ing as Chinese people, not political ideologues, understood it, organized
around the categories of family, house, and home. Placing municipal doc-
uments and intellectual essays alongside architecture and women’s maga-
zines, this interdisciplinary archive illuminates how the transformation of
the late imperial Chinese jia into the modern Chinese jiating was central
to how Chinese urbanites experienced modernity and how they forged
new individual identities.
The project of constructing an archive of home is not a mere documen-
tary exercise; rather, it is a methodological intervention in historical prac-
tices. As the historian Antoinette Burton argues for colonial India, the
archive of home not only helps to write women and domesticity into his-
tory but also “rescues history itself” from the totalizing narratives of
imperialist and nationalist histories. 22 Just as Burton highlights how
Indian women “used domestic space as an archival source to construct
their own histories,” I use the archive of the Chinese modern house, home,
and family to reach into the gray areas of colonial modernity, highlighting
the agency of ordinary people by illuminating how Chinese women and
men designed everyday life themselves. Jiating is not only the archive
from which women constructed their personal narratives, but it also
serves as a platform for launching what Burton terms the “counterhisto-
ries” of colonial modernity. For urban China, the “counterhistories” that
emerge from jiating explore the dynamic interactions between personal
experiences, political discourses, and capitalist processes to rewrite the
history of modern experience. The modern home emerged in twentieth-
century Tianjin precisely because nationalist ideologues and foreign
imperialists ignored it, thereby opening a space in which Chinese people
could invent house and home themselves. Thus, in Tianjin and in urban
China, the modern home elucidates our understanding of Chinese and
global empires precisely as a counterhistory to Chinese nationalist and
foreign imperialist historical narratives.
Introduction 13
To understand how Chinese people interpreted the modern family

house and home, I have divided this book into three chronologically
ordered parts. Part 1 focuses on the spaces and ideologies of empire,
exploring the shifting global, national, and local frames that informed
everyday life at the turn of the twentieth century, and connecting changes
in Tianjin’s urban landscape to ruptures in political ideology. This section
argues that while late imperial social and political ideologies focused on
connections between family, house, and home through the single word
jia, nationalist ideology focused on the demographics of the small family,
or xiao jiating. Chapter 1 explores spatial ruptures and continuities in the
Tianjin landscape as it changed from a Qing administrative city to a colo-
nized treaty-port city. Chapter 2 introduces new ideas about family that
emerged to fill the gaps left by the fall of imperial ideology. When we com-
pare these new family ideologies and scientific theories with how Chinese
people actually formed their families, however, we see that discourse was
not always put into practice. Chapter 3 introduces the colonial capitalist
system that built twentieth-century Tianjin through a speculative real
estate market and new legal ideas and legislation about property owner-
ship. As property ownership became linked to political rights, the mascu-
line individual replaced the jia as political participant, and legal reforms
that appeared to guarantee female property rights actually bolstered the
rights and identities of individual male elites.
Part 2 explores what it meant to be at home in the world in pre–World
War II Republican-era Tianjin. Chapter 4 argues that choosing a house in
treaty-port Tianjin was to select an architectural technology, Chinese or
Western, that prescribed a specific set of social practices. Chapter 5
describes how Chinese people worked with and within these architectural
structures to create their own sense of modern style. Both chapters explore
the idea that the Tianjin modern house and home was created through
juxtaposition and combination: Tianjin’s urbanites placed old beside new,
and Chinese next to foreign, to invent a Tianjin modern style that reflected
how they were dwelling in the world. Chapter 6 explains how the material
spaces and objects of home were articulated through an affective under-
standing of home, which in turn formed individual subjectivities. Wom-
en’s magazines introduced the new concept of home as both a prescriptive
14 Introduction
site of everyday life and a modernist escapist fantasy of individual subjec-

tivity formation, instructing readers not only how to dwell in the world,
but more importantly how to feel at home in the world. Moreover, whether
authors and editors were male or female, the knowledge about home
printed on the pages of women’s magazines was presented as female-
gendered knowledge.
Part 3 focuses on the second half of the twentieth century to analyze
how ideologies, architecture, and material culture combined to produce
numerous configurations of social space in Republican-era China, and to
consider how social space ideals narrowed after 1949. Chapter 7 explores
the intersections of gender and social status to understand the multiple
interpretations of female-gendered spaces in Republican-era Tianjin.
Family and home, for example, could be considered the enemy of female
social status or the site of a woman’s individual subjectivity formation,
while new urban sites of socialization, such as restaurants and cinemas,
became places of female social agency. Chapter 8 looks at how, after
World War II, a single prescriptive ideal for housing emerged from the
multiple concepts of house and home that had been developed during
the Republican era. Foreign countries returned their concessions, and
the Chinese municipal government under the Guomindang gained full
control over the city. In postcolonial Tianjin, Tianjin’s city government
proposed public housing for Tianjin urbanites, but they never had the
opportunity to construct their plans. In 1949, the Chinese Communist
Party came to power, and in Tianjin took up the issue of housing almost
immediately. The Communists transformed the earlier bourgeois notion
that housing was central to masculine political identities into the idea that
housing was a political right for all citizens, thus making housing central
to their political legitimacy. In other words, the CCP reconnected family,
house, and home under political ideology. Integrating the multiple facets
of jiating under state political ideology and policies harkened back to the
Qing dynasty, but the idea of family, house, and home had been forever
changed by the middle class experimentations in dwelling in the world
during the Republican era. Thus, the epilogue considers the legacy of this
history as housing and property have become central issues in the fraught
relationship between China’s so-called new middle class and the state
today.
1
Unraveling the Chinese Empire
N
eo- Confucian ideology constructed a cosmological
ordering system of space that connected individual
households to the state. Social relations, economic pros-
perity, and political stability were all maintained through the
proper construction and regulation of spaces. The political and
the personal or the empire and the everyday were mutually
constructed through relational spaces. The historian Dorothy
Ko has termed the gendered nature of this socio-spatial rela-
tionship the inner/outer continuum.1 According to Ko, nei
(inner) was gendered female and usually attributed to the
household, while wai (outer) was male and associated with
civil service or commerce. She argues that nei and wai differed
from European concepts of “private” and “public” in that they
were neither discrete separate spheres nor were they mutually
exclusive. Inner was embedded in the outer, but nei and wai
were also relational and always shifting. The historian Susan
Glosser has argued that the inner/outer continuum continued
in twentieth-century China, and that the European notions of
a discrete private sphere never took root.2 The Republican-era
xiao jiating ideological discourse did seem to echo earlier Neo-
Confucian language in its call to transform the nation by
reforming the family at its center, but the xiao jiating ideology
also departed from earlier ideology by ignoring space. In
18 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
Qing-era China the regulation of space was a central component of the

inner/outer continuum, and indeed imperial power, whereas during the
Republican era, the xiao jiating ideology focused largely on the social rela-
tions and demography of the family while ignoring the spaces of housing.
The removal of space from family political ideology coincided with
China’s loss of political control over its own spaces. In late imperial China,
Tianjin started out as a military garrison and trading hub. Under the Qing
dynasty, it became a city, the administrative center of the northern prov-
ince of Zhili, which included the capital city Beijing. In 1860, Tianjin
became a treaty-port city and included up to nine foreign concessions. The
landscape of this multiply colonized city was deconstructed and recon-
structed. Foreign powers destroyed and displaced Tianjin’s late imperial
planning and architecture, attacking the spaces that had once established
the state’s sociopolitical ideology in materiality. Thus, the political author-
ity of the Qing literally crumbled beneath people’s feet.
Tianjin may have been unique in having more foreign concessions than
any other Chinese city, but the deconstruction and reconstruction of the
city elucidates how colonial processes of spatial occupation delegitimized
the Qing and established colonial power across China. Patterns of violent
interactions led to the systematic destruction of the city followed by new
reconfiguration of space. Qing-era symbols of political power were torn
down, but no single authority took its place. Colonialism in Tianjin, as in
most other places, was multiple yet partial, globally oriented but locally
inflected, and always violent. The result was a city of multiple spatial ide-
ologies where Qing-era structures, ruins, and ghosts lingered alongside
new Chinese architecture and several foreign-controlled districts. This
multiplicity of power structures, represented through space, created a vac-
uum at the level of the everyday life. Without a single authority, Chinese
people in Tianjin created their own understandings of social spaces and
social identities for themselves and for their families.
THE SOCIOPOLITICAL IDEOLOGY OF JIA
Women and the family had long held a central place in Chinese political
ideology and practice. The inner-outer continuum divided the dynastic
realm into two interconnected spheres inner (nei) and outer (wai) that
Unraveling the Chinese Empire 19
were mutually reinforcing.3 Stability in the empire relied on order in the

home, making the inner sphere an integral part of political and economic
life. Living in the inner chambers, women had significant political and
economic roles that reached into the outer realm. Women conducted
rituals at the family altar that connected the future prosperity of the
household to stability in the imperial realm, and women brought political
recognition to the family when they were bestowed the honor of chaste
widows or virtuous women by the imperial state. 4 Women participated in
the daily economy of running the household, making food, and clothing,
and they contributed to family income, with poor women working in the
fields alongside husbands and sons, and elite women producing embroi-
dery for sale and poetry for publication. Indeed, the wives, daughters, and
sisters of male scholar-officials were often the primary household manag-
ers and income earners when men left home to study for the imperial civil
service examination or filled official posts in distant locations.5 Thus
women in late imperial China were productive members of the household
and political actors within the greater imperial realm.
In late imperial China, inner and outer were not separate spheres; they
were interconnected spaces that did not clearly map onto our contempo-
rary understanding of “public” and “private” spaces. Moreover, the house-
hold ( jia) in late imperial China was not a separate domestic space, but
rather a dynamic political, economic, and social institution—what may be
called “public” in modern Euro-American contexts. For instance, as Mad-
eleine Zelin has shown for salt merchants in Sichuan Province, the house-
hold was also a business institution with the family lineage acting on par
with the Western corporate business model to make it “one of the most
advanced business institutions of the late imperial period.”6 The house-
hold was also a political institution, with Neo- Confucian ideology desig-
nating it the center of political and social stability, a fulcrum point on the
cosmological continuum of individual, household, and state that consti-
tuted the ideological foundation of the late imperial world.
Confucius’s Great Learning, chosen by Zhu Xi as one of the four books
of the Neo- Confucian canon, describes the interconnected relationship
between individual, household, and state:
The ancients who wished clearly to exemplify illustrious virtue through-

out the world would first set up good government in their states. Wishing
20 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
to govern well their states, they would first regulate their families. Wish-
ing to regulate their families, they would first cultivate their persons.
Wishing to cultivate their persons, they would first seek sincerity in
their thoughts. Wishing for sincerity in their thoughts, they would first
extend their knowledge. The extension of knowledge lay in the inves-
tigation of things . . . only when our persons are cultivated are our
families regulated; only when families are regulated are states well
governed; and only when states are well governed is there peace in the
world.7
The late imperial Chinese household was fully integrated into the Neo-
Confucian political realm, and the success of the state, even world har-
mony, relied on a well-regulated household. A well-ordered household
could bring prosperity to the realm just as a peaceful kingdom would
instill harmony at home; likewise, chaos at home could result in the politi-
cal collapse of the state. 8 Thus the household was both a political unit
of, and model for, the state; consequently the inner chambers were not
separate from politics. Not only did women and proper familial relations
support the political stability of the state, but the moral rules and social
relations of the family extended to state policies and political relation-
ships. The relationship between ruler and subject, for example, paralleled
the filial bond between parent and child, making the family a miniature
version of the state.
The household was also a social space. The classical Chinese word jia
that designated household embraced a multiplicity of meanings that can-
not be translated simply into English. Depending on context, jia could
mean house (the physical domestic structure), household (the people who
live within it), or family (the social ties that bind the inhabitants together).
According to this multifaceted late imperial concept of jia, space, people,
and social relations were not separate concepts but part of an organic
whole. Thus in late imperial China, Chinese people not only understood
the jia as linking the individual to the household and state in mutually
reinforcing concentric circles, but they also considered the social relations
of the family to be deeply connected to the social spaces where they lived.
Designing a house according to correct cosmological practices was just as
important as maintaining proper social relations within it, and the
architecture of the house became central to both the prosperity of the

family and to the stability of the empire. Although the Euro-American
gender ideology of separate spheres used space as a metaphor to describe
the distinct realms of domesticity for women, and economy and politics
for men, the late imperial Chinese ideology of jia not only mapped the
social and political practices of women and family onto the spaces of the
house, but also connected individual bodies to the physical spaces of
the house.
ORIENTING TIANJIN IN THE CHINESE EMPIRE
The topographical and cosmological geographies of Tianjin connected the

city to the capital Beijing and embedded it in the Qing Empire. Tianjin was
framed by two waterways: the Grand Canal to the north and the Hai River
to the east.9 Whether from our current understanding of urban develop-
ment or imperial Chinese ideas of spatial planning, it made little sense to
build the city on this low-lying marshy plain at the crossing of two water-
ways. The rivers constricted urban expansion and often flooded over.
Moreover, according to the local Tianjin historian Liu Haiyan, the city’s
siting violated Chinese spatial principles of feng shui, which held that cit-
ies and buildings should be south of mountains and north of rivers.10 But
Tianjin owed its history and development to these two waterways, first to
the Grand Canal that linked Tianjin to China’s imperial core and later to
the Hai River that connected the city to the Pacific and its global markets
and capital.
Being strategically located a hundred miles southwest of Beijing on the
Grand Canal, Tianjin developed in tandem with the imperial capital city.
The Grand Canal was an artificial waterway constructed to transport food
and luxury goods from the south to the north. Although the Grand Canal
dates to the sixth century, Beijing did not become an imperial capital until
the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty in the thirteenth century.11 The Ming
dynasty (1368–1644) established Beijing as its northern capital; during the
fifteenth century the Yongle emperor supposedly observed Tianjin while
crossing the Hai River, declared its strategic military importance, and
named it a wei or garrison. Also during the Ming, the city earned its
22 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
contemporary name Tianjin, which means “heaven’s ford,” and the city
wall was constructed.
During the Qing Empire, Tianjin developed from a military garrison
city into an imperial administrative city and regional economic center.
When the Manchu Qing established Beijing as their sole capital, the
Grand Canal became increasingly important as the main trade artery to
transport tribute grain from the south. Tianjin’s trading role expanded
accordingly, and in 1731 the Yongzheng emperor bestowed administrative
responsibilities on the city, making it the prefectural seat.12 Tianjin’s eco-
nomic and political histories were also tied to salt. Records of salt produc-
tion in the area date to the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BCE).
Under the Qing, Tianjin became a center for administering the salt tax
and developed not only as a center of the salt trade but also as a trading
post for most of northern China.13
Whether by Grand Canal or by sea, most southern trade bound for Bei-
jing passed through Tianjin, and many of the handicraft and luxury goods
that shaped the Qing’s bustling early modern economy made their way
into Tianjin.14 Merchants from across the empire flocked to the city and
established native-place associations or guilds. On the eve of the Opium
Wars, more than half of Tianjin households were engaged in commerce
while fewer than one-tenth were employed by the state.15 Salt merchants
became particularly powerful civic actors. The historian Kwan Man Bun
argues that as the Qing’s hold over its empire began to wane in the nine-
teenth century, it stopped supporting some local social services, and the
eight large families (badajia) who dominated the salt trade stepped in to
fill the gap.16 But this nascent form of civil society did not seek to upset the
imperial order; Tianjin was too deeply embedded in the Qing political
economy flowing up the Grand Canal.
In the late 1830s, on the eve of the Opium Wars, Tianjin’s population
had grown to the point that it surpassed every U.S. city except New York.
But cities in late imperial China were more than population centers; they
were deliberately designed.17 Tianjin became a city through state-led
urban planning that marked Tianjin’s transition from military garrison
under the Ming dynasty by building a rectangular wall to frame the
city center. Walls were the chief architectural signifier for an imperial
Chinese city; in fact, cheng (“wall”) was also the word for “city” in
classical Chinese. During the Qing dynasty, Tianjin’s walls enclosed

imperial administrative buildings such as the prefectural yamen, or
government building, in the northwest, the district yamen in the north-
east, the salt commissioner’s yamen, also in the northeast, and the gar-
rison headquarters in the center of the city. But these enclosing walls
also facilitated movement. Four gates in each of the four cardinal
directions—north, south, east, and west— allowed traffic to flow in and
out of the city center. The city also extended beyond these inner walls.
Many of the city’s merchants and its chamber of commerce set up
between the north side of the wall and the Grand Canal. The geogra-
pher Yinong Xu argues that walls did not contain the imperial Chinese
city; rather, they physically and symbolically marked the official adminis-
trative center of the city.18
Tianjin’s urban planning and architecture was in keeping with late
imperial Chinese standards. Although the placement of the city to the
south of the Grand Canal deviated from fengshui ideals, the city was still
designed according to urban planning orthodoxies that aligned the spaces
of the built environment with the imperial realm and the greater cosmol-
ogy. Tianjin was planned on a north-south axis, with the two main thor-
oughfares running north to south and east to west. The flows of traffic and
cosmic energies along these roads were broken up by a drum tower in the
city center that also served as a lookout point for the city’s security, and
indeed the garrison commander’s office was located next to it.
The city’s residences, administrative buildings, and temples were all
built using the same kind of modular post-and-beam architecture as a
house in the countryside or the emperor’s palace in Beijing.19 Like the city
itself, each architectural unit or compound was ideally built on a north-
south axis (according to feng shui principles) and surrounded by a wall.
Tianjin compounds followed the northern architectural style known as a
siheyuan, in which four wings were built around a courtyard. A compound
could comprise a single courtyard unit or multiple units aligned on a
north-south axis. Modular building practices meant that an individual
compound could be expanded by adding additional courtyard units, but
also that the size of individual units might differ proportionally between
buildings. In other words, the size of the units of the imperial palace would
have been significantly larger than that of a local government office or an
24 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
average residence, even while the proportions and principles remained

consistent across structures.
Late imperial Tianjin was part of an interconnected spatial world in
which power was understood not through height or monumentality but in
terms of placement, position, and relation to the imperial state. Tianjin’s
city walls and drum tower gained power and structural significance not by
surpassing the surrounding structures in height, but through their sym-
bolic connection to the imperial administrative yamen contained within
the walls and the imperial authority in Beijing. Like other cities in imperial
China, Tianjin did not have a separate civic administration or a municipal
hall; instead, since the state administered the city, administrative cities
like Tianjin included an imperial yamen within its walls. While the empire
framed Tianjin with its walls, the city was also an essential part of the
imperial spatial order. According to Mark Edward Lewis, ancient Chinese
philosophy mapped out a spatial world in which everything was signifi-
cant, and everything connected through the concentric units of the human
body, household, city, and region.20 Each individual space was responsible
for ordering the chaos of the universe through proper ritual and spatial
organization. Moreover, spaces were interrelated; the health of individual
bodies depended on order in the cosmos, and vice versa. The concentric
ordering of the universe was enabled through parallel construction of
space. Spaces were fractals of one another, so that an individual household
was designed to structure the patterns of the universe.21
Qing-era Tianjin was constructed systematically according to political
and social principles of space. As ideas of separate domestic and public
spheres were forming in Europe and North America, in China the inner
space of the household and the outer circles of city and empire were inter-
connected and mutually reinforcing. So, while Europeans and Americans
built their worlds along binaries such as urban and rural, private and pub-
lic, the Chinese constructed a universe of concentric circles. This is not to
say that Qing-era Tianjin was stagnant, but rather that even when Tian-
jin’s salt merchants took on many of the civic and philanthropic roles of
the state in the late Qing, they never attempted to alter the built and spa-
tial signifiers of Qing political authority in the urban landscape: although
changing social and political structures may have challenged Qing author-
ity, the city’s urban plan and architectural design remained uncontested
and inscribed the Chinese Empire into the local urban landscape, thereby
continuing to signal and reinforce Qing power. At the turn of the twentieth
century, European, American, and Japanese urban planning decon-
structed and reconstructed Tianjin, reorienting the city according to new
spatial principles that not only questioned Qing power but also reached
deep into individual Chinese bodies, reconfiguring how they connected to
the city, the empire, and the world.
REORIENTING TRADE
Tianjin’s first foreigners could not see Qing expressions of power in space.
These early travelers barely passed through Tianjin and rarely left their
boats. Those who did disembark ventured little farther than the shores of
the Hai River, never reaching the symmetrically planned rectangular city
wall or visiting the opulent interiors of merchants’ grand courtyard
houses. But even if foreigners had visited these structures, the Chinese
sense of planning and spatial order was invisible to their eyes. Instead, for-
eigners described Tianjin as they understood urban space in their home
countries: they noted city streets crowded with people or the monumental
height of the city’s military fortifications. Even against these foreign yard-
sticks, Tianjin still fared well as a bustling port city with potential for for-
eign trade and commerce.
Some of the earliest foreign accounts of Tianjin came from European
embassies to the Qing court. Although such missions often failed to achieve
the type of trading or diplomatic negotiations that the European firms or
states desired, accounts of the missions succeeded in feeding the European
imaginary of China. In the seventeenth century, Johannes Nieuhoff joined
the Dutch East India Company on an embassy bound for Beijing from the
southern trading port of Canton. Nieuhoff detailed his trip in an illustrated
volume that was published in multiple European languages, providing
some of the first documented foreign observations of Tianjin.22 Nieuhoff’s
words and images entertained with details of the exotic oriental, but also
informed readers of economic opportunities that awaited in China. Illus-
trations from the Dutch boat captured Tianjin’s lively commercial life, with
multistoried buildings packed along the riverbank and ships crowding the
26 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
FIGURE 1.1 Johannes Nieuhoff, “An Embassy from the East-India

Company,” 1669.
waters (figure 1.1). Were it not for the stylized, upturned corners of the tiled
rooftops, the picture might be of any European trading city. Indeed,
Nieuhoff used his European sense of urban space to describe the city’s
strength and wealth to European readers. Although he seems never to have
never left his boat, Nieuhoff did observe watchtowers and military forti-
fications along the river, and he remarked on the city’s twenty-five-foot-
high “strong walls,” even as he misread another structure as a “castle”
(figure 1.2).23 But most of all, Nieuhoff was impressed with the amount of
commerce he observed in Tianjin, noting that it was on par with Canton as
one of the top three seaports in China. Since Canton was the only Chinese
post open to foreign trade at the time, Nieuhoff’s flattering descriptions of
Tianjin suggest that he had his eye on the city’s economic potential.
More than a hundred years later, George Staunton, secretary of Great
Britain’s Macartney mission to the Qianlong emperor’s court in 1793,
described Tianjin as a lively maritime city crowded with shops, ware-
houses, and people along the shore. Staunton also noted that many of the
buildings along the quays were two stories high, compared to the more
common single-story structures he had viewed in other parts of China.24
FIGURE 1.2 Johannes Nieuhoff, “View of Tianjin,” 1669.
Staunton deduced that the demand for space along Tianjin’s busy com-
mercial docks required building upward even though it went against the
nature of Chinese people, who felt awkward “ascending stairs or looking
down from heights.”25 Like the Dutch visitors before them, the members of
the British embassy found Tianjin to be a lively commercial city. But also
like the Dutch, they ventured little beyond the banks of the Hai River.
While Staunton claimed their boat had docked “nearly in the center of the
city,” its passengers seem only to have disembarked onto a riverside pavil-
ion for an audience with the viceroy.26 From the banks of the Hai River,
Staunton failed to see beyond what was visible to his European eye. Trying
for a glimpse of residences, Staunton observed “private houses” built in
“leaden-blue” brick, which he described as “little more than dead walls in
front, the light only coming to them from interior courts.”27
Viewing Tianjin from the river and its banks may have limited the scope
of Nieuhoff’s and Staunton’s observations of Tianjin, but their descriptions
of what they did see point to different conceptions of space, order, and
power. These differences came to a head during Macartney’s eighteenth-
century diplomatic mission to Beijing. Sent by King George III to establish
28 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
more open trade with China, Macartney returned to Britain empty-

handed. While historians typically have characterized this diplomatic fail-
ure as a cultural misunderstanding that culminated in war and imperial-
ism, James Hevia’s revisionist account argues that this was not a clash of
cultures but an encounter “between two imperial formations, each with
universalistic pretentions and complex metaphysical systems to buttress
such claims.”28 Just as the British and Chinese represented two differing
models of imperial statecraft, they offered two distinct concepts of space
and spatial order, each claiming to explain the order of the cosmos. In
Qing China, as in Europe at the time, space and power were intertwined,
as the empire enhanced its authority by expanding territory and regulat-
ing the spaces of empire.
While early modern commercial cities like Tianjin were in many ways
universal in form, the ways in which cities architecturally and spatially
represented power were culturally specific. As spatial units of the Qing
Empire, Chinese cities represented the imperial order from the bottom up.
Tianjin’s built environment was part of the Chinese Empire’s “metaphysi-
cal system,” from the wall that marked imperial authority to the individ-
ual walled courtyard households that regulated the everyday in accord
with ritual practice. Early European visitors to Tianjin, by contrast, evalu-
ated the city’s built environment against European values. They gauged
power by the height of the built environment rather than the placement of
symbolic structures, and as a result mistook military fortifications for cas-
tles. And although impressed by commercial activities, they were sur-
prised when the private residences of wealthy merchants failed to project
status through public façades.
Space and power in Tianjin might have looked different than in Europe,
but Tianjin nevertheless fared quite well according to European standards
of urban vigor, such as commerce and population. In fact, European mis-
sions to Tianjin all described the city’s trade and commerce favorably and
showed little interest in re-engineering Chinese cities; they were primar-
ily interested in trade. The British Empire waged war with the Qing over
“free trade,” and as a result of the First and Second Opium Wars (1839–
1842 and 1857–1860), China’s first treaty ports were established. Tianjin
became a treaty port in 1860, after the Second Opium War.
But free trade came to China at great cost. In addition to opening Tian-
jin to trade, treaties granted the British, Americans, and French parcels of
land along the Hai River to the south of the Chinese city. These foreign
concessions, as they came to be known, were leased parcels of land con-
trolled by foreign governments or foreign-led municipal councils. The
number of foreign concessions in Tianjin eventually grew to nine—more
than any other Chinese city. Shanghai, by contrast, had two concessions.
Britain, France, and the United States had the first concessions; Japan and
Germany joined after the Sino-Japanese War; and the Qing granted par-
cels of land to Russia, Italy, and Austria-Hungary after the Boxer Uprising,
with Belgium joining them a year later. The Chinese government not only
relinquished legal control over these urban districts but over many of Chi-
na’s foreign residents who, under negotiated extraterritoriality agree-
ments, lived under the laws of their home countries and not Chinese law.
Initially foreign countries were more concerned with reorienting trade
than changing the urban landscape. Foreign powers in Tianjin and across
China directed their new commercial routes toward global maritime
trade, in contrast to earlier routes such as the Silk Road or Grand Canal
that channeled trade toward China’s capital city. By the 1920s, there were
nearly fifty cities in China opened to trade under foreign treaties, and
thirty more established by the Chinese. Early treaty ports were set up in
cities along the Pacific coast, such as Shanghai, Ningbo, Tianjin, and Yan-
tai; eventually, they also extended to interior cities, such as Chongqing in
Sichuan and Simao in Yunnan. Whether on the coast or in the interior,
these new port cities directed trade flows east toward the Pacific Ocean.
Foreigners in Tianjin’s concessions set up to the southeast of the Chi-
nese city—a strategic spot along the Hai River that connected Tianjin with
the seaport Dagu, thirty-five miles to the east. As the only northern coastal
port opened to foreign trade at the time, Tianjin was the second-busiest
port in China after Shanghai, and the largest importer of foreign goods of
any treaty port in China.29 To facilitate trade further, the foreign empires
worked together and with the Qing government, constructing a bund
along the river and establishing the Hai River Conservancy Commission
in 1897, a multinational organization that managed the bund and main-
tained the river in optimal condition for shipping. Even as foreign traders
30 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
worked along the Hai River and concessions occupied territory there,
the Chinese city, rather than the foreign concessions, remained the
center of urban life. In 1866, the French and American settlements were
still unoccupied, and most foreign consulates were located outside the
concessions.30 The Prussians, Danish, Portuguese, and British were head-
quartered within the British Concession. The French Consulate, by con-
trast, was located not in the French Concession but in a former imperial
building across the river from the Chinese city, with the Russian Consul-
ate close by; the American, Dutch, Swedish and Norwegian consulates
were located in the “suburbs” outside the city-center walls. Indeed, while
some foreigners lived in the British Concession, most lived in the city sub-
urbs, conducting business inside the walled city.
In Tianjin, Chinese cosmologies of space and power initially remained
intact. An 1899 Chinese map of Tianjin depicts changes and continuities
in the urban landscape (figure 1.3).31 The map depicts two walls: the cen-
ter wall that frames the yamen and the administrative center, and an
outer wall that encircles the suburbs. The outer wall includes openings
for railroads and waterways. Railroad tracks enter and exit the upper
portion of the outer walls, and two trains move along these tracks toward
each other, almost as if they are bound for a collision. The cartographer
seems to have more experience illustrating boats, as several small,
FIGURE 1.3 Map of Tianjin. Feng Qihuang, “Tianjin cheng xiang bao jia
quan tu,” 1899. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
presumably Chinese boats with single sails inflated in the same direction
move along the Grand Canal and lesser waterways. Only one small Chi-
nese sailboat is depicted on the Hai River. To the far right of this boat, close
to the edge of the map and the Bohai Sea, which is not depicted on the map,
two large Western ships are docked with their sails lowered, next to what is
labeled as the British concession on the map. The French Concession lies to
the left. The white building in these two sections is depicted as three stories
tall, while most Chinese buildings are single stories. There are multistory
Chinese towers, but the tallest building depicted on the map appears to be
the Wang hai lou French Catholic Church, built across the water from the
Chinese city center and drawn on the map as a five-story castle with three
spires. The cartographer depicted the Western architectural ideal of height,
but late imperial cosmological ideals of placement and power still domi-
nated the map. Despite Western buildings and boats, and the smoke rising
from factories in the suburbs and trains passing through the city, the spa-
tial principles depicted on this late Qing map remain consistent with earlier
maps of Tianjin and other late imperial Chinese cities.
CONFRONTING FOREIGN EMPIRES
Beyond the depictions on this map, Tianjin’s cosmological order was being
challenged by multiple foreign empires through a deliberate and violent
colonial process. Chinese people would confront foreign occupation and
presence in parts of the city. Foreign countries would violently suppress
these confrontations and then aggressively alter the urban landscape,
destroying Chinese spatial constructions and replacing them with foreign
imperial structures. Ideology was both a result of and a catalyst for these
confrontations. Colonial violence and the destruction of imperial spatial
authority paved the way for the introduction of new ideologies, but ideo-
logical confrontations with missionaries were often what sparked such
confrontations to begin with. During the nineteenth century, foreign
diplomacy not only focused on opening up new trading routes, but it also
sought out new communities for religious conversion. Thus, diplomatic
treaties ensured the free flow of capital and merchandise, as well as the
rights of Christian and Catholic missionaries to proselytize.
32 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
As foreign empires in China intertwined diplomacy with trade and reli-

gion, they created a platform for conflict in which foreigners established
their trade and religious interests on Chinese soil, and Chinese people
pushed back. Foreigners, in turn, argued that they needed to protect their
interests even more strongly, pushing them to take measures that made
them even more entrenched on Chinese soil. The push and pushback
between foreign empires and local Chinese unfolded in Tianjin in tandem
with the rest of China, with missionaries as the first targets of the Chinese
backlash against foreign intrusion. Missionaries were likely targets since
few Chinese came into contact with foreign diplomats or merchants, but
missionaries regularly ventured into Chinese communities to convert.
Thus, beginning in the late nineteenth century, the missionary presence
across China catalyzed antiforeign sentiment among many Chinese peo-
ple, leading to widespread protests and violence. Whereas the fervor
behind the violence was evidence of a growing Chinese resistance to the
inequalities of foreign diplomacy and free trade, the foreign reaction fur-
ther entrenched foreign imperial power on Chinese soil. Colonial resis-
tance was present from Tianjin’s colonial beginnings.
Tianjin’s first colonial confrontation began during spring 1870. Rumors
began to circulate that a group of nuns, who resided in Tianjin’s French
Catholic mission and ran an orphanage, were offering financial compen-
sation for children brought to their doors. As an outbreak of disease led to
a growing number of child deaths and the rise of children’s graves in the
Catholic cemetery, rumors became allegation that the nuns were cutting
out the eyes of Chinese children to make medicine. In early June, the Qing
arrested and executed a group of kidnappers for selling children to the
nuns, and shortly thereafter an angry mob gathered outside the French
Catholic mission looking for answers and revenge. The mission was
located not in the French concession, but in a compound across the river
from the walled Chinese city that included the mission, the Wang hai lou
cathedral, and the French Consulate. As the crowds gathered to protest
the actions of the nuns, the atmosphere soon turned more broadly antifor-
eign, with the rioters eventually killing twenty-one foreigners including
ten nuns and two priests, the French Consul, French citizens staying at the
consulate, and Russians from the nearby Russian concession.32
This confrontation, which came to be known as the Tianjin Incident,

had two consequences. First, it sparked the bifurcation of the city into
Chinese and foreign spaces. The French moved their consulate out of the
Chinese city and into the French Concession. Eventually, all foreign con-
sulates followed suit, and foreigners also eventually chose to set up resi-
dences and businesses in the concessions. Thus the Tianjin Incident sig-
nificantly altered the urban landscape by driving foreigners out of the
Chinese city and encouraging the further development of the concession.
Second, Chinese violent resistance to Catholic imperialism encouraged
the articulation of a new colonial capitalist vision that justified rational
military force to protect foreign trade and economic interests against irra-
tional Chinese mob violence. Foreign observers of anti-missionary riots
described the conflicts as part of a greater backlash against foreigners and
foreign diplomatic and trading interests in China. George Thin, a British
doctor living in China, warned that the Tianjin Incident demonstrated
why foreigners needed to “take measures” to “enable business to be car-
ried on in freedom and safety,” as the “slaughter of foreigners is always
possible by a superstitious mob.”33 Thin argued that foreigners had been
too easy on China, prompting the growing and ever-angrier Chinese mobs
to become emboldened; if the foreigners were to maintain the peace, he
claimed, Chinese people needed to fear that the foreigners could strike at
any moment. Thin advocated peace through gunboats and argued that the
Chinese people should bear the cost of such policing.34
Tianjin’s second major colonial confrontation occurred as a result of
the Boxer Uprising, initiated by a group known in Chinese as the Yihe-
tuan, or the Righteous Harmony Society. The Boxers were not local to Tian-
jin. They originated on the northern coast in Shandong Province, over two
hundred miles to the south of Tianjin. According to the historian Joseph
Esherick, the Boxers formed through multiple movements that drew from
local protest traditions and popular folk cultures.35 Foreigners named
them the “Boxers” because they engaged in martial arts fighting tech-
niques; they also practiced spirit procession and believed that they were
impervious to bullets. The Boxers initially targeted Western missionaries
and Chinese Christians who, under the guise of diplomatic negotiations,
were receiving privileged status in the region where the Boxers originated.
34 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
As the movement grew, the target expanded to all foreigners and foreign
influences in China.
The Boxers came to Tianjin in June 1900, occupying the city as they
moved north to Beijing. In anticipation of an attack, the foreign legations
in Beijing had dispatched a group of foreign-trained Chinese soldiers to
protect Tianjin’s foreign settlements. On the morning of June 10, residents
of the foreign settlement awoke to the sounds of gunfire, as the Chinese
troops, siding with the Boxers, fired on their European officers and aban-
doned their posts.36 Without troop protection, the foreigners banded
together, forming a unified multinational defense, and families who
resided in the center of the settlement opened their doors to friends who
lived in houses in the more vulnerable outskirts. While foreigners helped
one another, many Chinese servants and staff fled the foreign settlements
in fear of a Boxer attack, while still other Chinese people with religious or
business connections to foreigners sought protection in the concessions.
As the Boxers organized and grew in numbers, Qing officials began to
worry. At first, the Qing court had been divided on whether to support or
put down the rebels, but once the Boxers reached Beijing, it was forced to
take a stand. The empress dowager took the side of the Boxers. The United
States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, Italy, and
Austria-Hungary then formed a military alliance to put down the Boxers;
once it defeated the Boxers in August 1900, the Eight Nation Alliance
would demand financial and territorial reparations from the Qing.
The Boxer Uprising intensified the line between foreigners and Chi-
nese, but as attacks isolated the foreign settlements for over one month,
an attitude of every man (or nation) for himself also surfaced. National
factions often fought over the quotidian. Food shortages, for example,
made milk cows prized possessions, so when an American cow and calf
wandered off, the German army claimed them, refusing to return the calf
to its rightful American owner.37 Everyday life in the foreign settlements
under Boxer attack was filled with conflict. On the one hand, the shelling
and violence made foreigners so fearful that the sound of a stray bullet
could produce a hysterical mob of foreigners ready to round up and exe-
cute foreign-sympathizing or Christian Chinese people hiding in the set-
tlement.38 On the other hand, constant fear helped to normalize the
violence.
In an article in Ladies’ Home Journal, the American journalist Frederick

Palmer recounted his stay with Herbert and Lou Hoover during the Boxer
Uprising. The future U.S. president was then a young mining engineer,
and he and his wife Lou had recently been dispatched to Tianjin.39 Sensing
that the cottage was under fire, Palmer looked out the window and saw a
shell burst under the feet of Japanese soldiers, “tossing them as shattered
and shredded human debris.” Lou Hoover, however, had retreated to the
living room, where, clouded in plaster dust, and with cards fallen to
the floor, she calmly finished a game of solitaire. These everyday contra-
dictions continued after the Boxers had been defeated and the Qing court
fled to Xi’an. While the Eight Nation Alliance claimed victory and order
over Chinese lawlessness, foreigners engaged in frenzied looting of Chi-
nese property. Society ladies joined soldiers and missionaries in plunder-
ing Chinese public offices and private residences for treasured trophies,
and in shopping for looted merchandise in local antique markets. 40
The colonial violence of confrontations between foreigners, Boxers,
and local Chinese people erupted into chaos and confusion, which the
global media attempted to rationalize and recast into a universalist dis-
course that justified imperialism. New media technologies catapulted
the Boxer Uprising onto a global stage, bringing Chinese spaces into
dwellings across the world. Indian newspapers reported on the events in
China and stereoscope photographs brought Boxer rebels to life in Amer-
ican living rooms. Images of Boxers flooded public spheres across the
globe. (See figures 1.4 and 1.5.) Japanese people followed the success of
their soldiers through lithograph and woodblock prints, while Britons
watched films of Boxer events. 41 In fact, the Boxer Uprising was the sec-
ond conflict, after the Spanish-American War, to be caught on cinematic
film. 42 From the telegraph to the photograph, new communication tech-
nologies brought the fighting home and brought people to the front with
a speed and intimacy never before experienced. But global media was
not always accurate. Newspapers misreported facts and reprinted sto-
ries, and one British newsreel was purportedly filmed in a London sub-
urb far from China. 43 Such inconsistencies were less important than the
new consistent discourse of global empire that emerged from the event.
The British drew upon their experiences in India, referencing events and
insurgencies in the British colony to understand the uprising in China,
FIGURE 1.4 A Japanese regiment attacks Tianjin during the Boxer Uprising.
Lithograph by Tanaka Ryozo, published in Tokyo, 1900. Courtesy of
the Library of Congress.
FIGURE 1.5 Company of Boxers in Tianjin. Published by the Whiting View

Company, 1901. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
and after the Boxer defeat, Americans used the uprising to explain anti-
foreign sentiment in China as well as colonial resistance elsewhere. A
Chicago Tribune article on Ethiopians storming foreign legations in
1936, for example, evoked the memory of the Boxers. 44 Thus, in the eyes
of foreign observers, imperialist actions in China were equivalent to
colonialism elsewhere.
The global media needed to construct a consistent set of discursive cat-
egories to describe colonialism because everyday life in colonized spaces
was messy and complicated. The media struggled to tell stories with clear
winners and losers. But while European and North American presses
depicted the Boxers as barbarous savages, some papers in India portrayed
them as patriots “aroused by the aggression of foreigners.”45 Moreover,
after the uprising, newspapers that had previously recounted the heroic
battles of foreign troops now exposed the surprising savagery of Russian
soldiers who were alleged to have killed innocent Chinese women and
bayoneted children. 46 Even if they could not always identify the heroes
and the villains, they nonetheless began to sort out the morality of impe-
rial war: subversives against nationalists, barbarians against the civilized.
These were the terms of a new order of global empire.
The everyday evidence of chaos and contradiction during the Boxer
Uprising helped to hasten the disintegration of the Chinese Empire on
Chinese soil. Missionaries who had been called to save Chinese souls also
argued that foreigners needed to rule over the Chinese with an iron fist. 47
The universal laws of treaties privileged foreigners over Chinese, yet for-
eigners felt insecure in China. Mutual interests brought foreign empires
together against the Chinese, but foreign individuals and foreign conces-
sion governments still competed over pieces of the Chinese pie. As the
post-Boxer looting foreshadowed, foreign empires in the twentieth cen-
tury took advantage of the inconsistencies, chaos, and confusion to treat
China as a free-for-all.
UNRAVELING THE CHINESE EMPIRE
The combination of chaos and order continued in post-Boxer Tianjin. At

the same time that foreign empires were plundering temples and govern-
ment yamens, they were claiming to bring order to the city. They often
38 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
imposed order by restructuring urban spaces along lines that differed

drastically from late imperial spatial structures. Late imperial Chinese cit-
ies like Tianjin were political projects, inscribed with distinct political
symbolism in the built environment. From the north-south orientation of
the urban plan and the rectangular wall that surrounded the urban center,
to the systematic modular post-and-beam architecture shared by govern-
ment offices and residences alike, the built environment connected city to
empire. Foreign deconstruction and reconstruction of Tianjin’s built envi-
ronment destroyed and displaced Qing imperial symbolism in Tianjin’s
built environment, leading to an unraveling of Chinese imperial authority
in the urban landscape. Not only were physical symbols of authority torn
down, but the cosmological glue that connected individual people and
their households to the city and the empire came unstuck. Thus, severing
the city from empire through altering the urban landscape would encour-
age some Tianjin urbanites to reconsider the position of their city and
themselves in the world.
Fighting between the Boxers and the Eight Nation Alliance damaged
Tianjin more than any other city in northern China. The Boxers had hidden
within the walls of Tianjin’s Chinese city, and beginning in July 1900, the
Eight Nation Alliance army launched an attack against them. The foreign
army blew open the southern gate and proceeded to loot and destroy the
Chinese city center. Unable to distinguish Boxers from civilians, foreign
soldiers executed Boxers and innocent civilians alike, leaving dead bodies
to rot in the streets. 48 While the fighting devastated Tianjin, the post-Boxer
foreign occupation had an even greater impact on the city’s physical and
symbolic landscape. Once the Boxers were defeated in August and the
Qing court had retreated to exile, foreign soldiers and residents engaged in
a looting frenzy, and the Eight Nation armies took it upon themselves to
control the Chinese walled city. They divided the city into four equal areas
held by the British, French, Japanese, and Americans.
But unlike in Beijing, where foreigners worked with local Chinese
authorities, in Tianjin, the Eight Nation Alliance claimed complete
authority over the Chinese city. Soon after defeating the Boxers, they set
up the Tianjin Provisional Government (TPG). This foreign occupation
government included military and civilian members from each Alliance
country. The governing body included a general chancellery, police and
fire departments, a judicial board, a treasury, a custodian of abandoned

property, and departments of sanitation and military affairs. Each depart-
ment, headed by a foreigner, oversaw a different aspect of life in the Chi-
nese city, although each foreign concession maintained its autonomy, and
the foreign residents of Tianjin remained under extraterritorial protec-
tion. During this period, Tianjin was fully and multiply colonized. The
TPG ruled over the Chinese city and its citizens with impunity. They con-
fiscated Chinese property, both public and private, and they taxed,
policed, and tried Chinese citizens. 49
The TPG ruled over Tianjin like this for two years, under claims that
they were instituting a new system of rational and enlightened rule.
Charles Denby Jr., the son of the American minister to China and the sec-
retary of the TPG council, recalled the achievements of the TPG:
There sprang to existence in a few weeks’ time a completely organized,

efficient, honest, and enlightened administration, which ruled over Tian-
jin, restored order, administered justice, collected just taxes, carried out
public works of long-felt necessity and performed all the functions of
enlightened rulers. Its acts are beyond all praise. From a scene of physi-
cal and of moral chaos there sprang into existence a community, Chinese
still, but enjoying a benefit of honest government.50
By “chaos,” Denby likely referred both to the Boxer violence and the
factional and declining Qing leadership, but chaos was also the result of
multiple foreign empires encroaching on Chinese soil. Chaos resulted as
foreigners looted post-Boxer cities, and chaos emerged when Eight Nation
Alliance member armies sparred with each other. But if foreign empires
were often factional and chaotic, they shared an imperialist vision of ratio-
nal governance that could overshadow the disorder. They could also find
commonality and form a united front by drawing a line between foreign
and Chinese. The TPG forged a multinational united front around the
shared objectives of modern rational governing institutions and practices.
With each united step toward “efficient” and “enlightened” practices,
from instilling order and justice to administering taxes and public works,
they displaced a Chinese world order, thus unraveling Qing imperial
authority over Chinese soil and citizens.
40 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
The TPG’s first order of business was “to restore order and administer
justice” by arresting and executing Boxer rebels. Since foreign soldiers
could not tell the difference between a Boxer and a Chinese civilian, the
Chinese residents of the old Chinese city and its surrounding areas had to
apply to the foreign army commander in charge of their district for a per-
mit, which the police department standardized and issued for a fee. While
the TPG’s original agreement with the Qing had been to bring order within
the city walls, the TPG quickly expanded their zone of “protection” out-
side the wall, claiming that the Chinese residents had requested it.51 Per-
mits gave Chinese residents permission to move freely in their city, and
granted them “protection” under the foreign armies. Permits also regu-
lated the Chinese population, while simultaneously serving as a source of
TPG revenue. Treating Chinese residents of Tianjin as aliens in their own
cities subject to foreign regulation, these permits acted as a first step in de-
centering Qing authority.
In “collecting just taxes,” the TPG took over a role formerly held by
the Qing imperial government, but they also expanded beyond Qing
authority to collect additional revenues from business licenses, permits,
and fines. Though these new fees, fines, and licenses helped to finance
the foreign government, they were also a lever for regulatory and politi-
cal control. For instance, the TPG was not averse to supporting the
darker side of public entertainment as long as they could regulate and
profit from it. At a time when recreational use of opium was illegal in
Alliance countries such as Great Britain, the TPG initially outlawed
opium dens. Later, however, they allowed opium vendors to reopen by
applying to the TPG for a license.52 The TPG also established three broth-
els within the city, one for each army of Japan, the United States, and
Great Britain, along with three outside the city for the Russian army, and
insisted that each brothel be checked routinely for sanitary conditions.53
Eventually, even the most benign forms of leisure and entertainment,
such as restaurants, were required to purchase a license from the TPG.54
Some TPG departments financed their own projects through permits
and fines. The sanitation department, for example, was the only depart-
ment allowed to reach into the foreign concessions for revenue. With
permission from the TPG, the sanitation department began ticketing
any Chinese person littering on any Tianjin street, except in the Italian
Concession.55 In regulating sanitation through fines, the department

funded such sanitation projects as building garbage incinerators and
establishing a hospital for prisoners.56
Sanitation and hygiene emerged alongside policing and military secu-
rity as the TPG’s most important governing principles. As Ruth Rogaski
has argued, hygiene became central to modern urban development in
Tianjin.57 Calls to implement sanitary conditions rang out the moment the
TPG took over a city where dead bodies littered the streets. After the ini-
tial cleanup, sanitation and hygiene instilled order on everyday urban life,
with the TPG regulating the sale of livestock and meat and overseeing
public health efforts to control disease. Finally, hygiene was invoked to
redesign the city for the future, even and especially if Chinese imperial
urban design seemed in conflict with the ideals of a modern hygienic built
environment.
Public works projects, undertaken in the name of sanitation and
policing, altered the urban landscape in a way that challenged the Qing
ideological vision of ordering the city, the empire, and the world. TPG
members most often cited hygiene and control as justification for plans
that modified the urban landscape. To bring the city under control, the
TPG rebuilt buildings destroyed during the fighting and constructed new
bridges. To make the city hygienic, they instituted a water transport sys-
tem.58 Narrow streets that were deemed unhygienic or too difficult to
police were widened, often forcing Chinese residents to relocate.59
Whether deliberate or not, the ways the TPG altered or occupied Chinese
spaces in the city often undermined Qing symbolic authority in the built
environment. An abandoned temple, for example, was turned into a rest-
ing place for foreign soldiers, and Tianjin’s most prominent temple, Tian-
hou gong, was given to the English Methodist Episcopal Mission for use as
a church.60
The greatest challenge to Qing authority came on November 26,
1900, when the TPG decided to tear down Tianjin’s city wall, which had
shielded the Boxers from the Eight Nation Alliance. According to the
meeting minutes from that day, TPG members discussed how tearing
down the wall would make the Chinese city easier for foreign militaries
to control.61 Other members noted that the wall was not hygienic. No
one discussed the wall’s symbolic importance, how it marked Tianjin as
42 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
an imperial administrative city and served to reinforce the sense of

Qing authority. But the silences in the minutes do not necessarily mean
that TPG members were oblivious to the political and symbolic mean-
ing of the wall. Writing about the decision only a few years later, Hosea
Ballou Morse, a China hand with many years of experience working for
the Chinese Customs Service, suggested that while military strategy
and hygienic modern planning were two considerations in tearing down
the wall, the primary reason was the symbolic meaning of the wall.
According to Morse, “walls are the distinguishing badge of an adminis-
trative city, and to deprive Tientsin [Tianjin] of this mark of honour
would inflict on it a signal punishment for its misdeeds.”62 Morse’s com-
ments also suggest that whereas Tianjin’s first foreign observers did not
understand the political symbolism of Qing architecture, by the 1900s
many did.
Walls were more than simply “distinguishing badges” of the Chinese
Empire; they also linked administrative cities like Tianjin to the capital
city Beijing and to the world through an interconnected spatial cosmology.
Walls joined the space of the city to the space of the household and the
individual, creating a nested set of spheres, organized and anchored
around a center. In late imperial Tianjin, that center was Beijing; Tianjin’s
FIGURE 1.6 Tianjin’s drum tower after the wall was torn down. Published by
Griffith & Griffith, 1902. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
wall extended stability to the imperial realm, bringing order to the space
of the city by controlling the movement of people and regulating energy
flows. Thus, destroying Tianjin’s wall not only disrupted the spatial orga-
nization of the city but also attacked the order of the empire and the Chi-
nese world. (See figure 1.6.)
Qing authority did not rest in Tianjin alone, and the unraveling of
empire in Tianjin’s built environment paralleled destruction to the built
environment elsewhere in China. Nowhere was this more profound than
in Beijing, the spatial center of China itself, which had also been devas-
tated by Boxer violence. Yinong Xu notes that although cities were
designed with many of the same spatial and cosmological features of the
capital, they were not actually capital cities in miniature.63 An administra-
tive city like Tianjin lacked any ritual spaces of its own to connect the city
directly to the cosmos, so the connection to the cosmos flowed instead
through Beijing. The capital city was the political and ritual center of the
empire, and during the Qing dynasty, Beijing’s Temple of Heaven became
the most important site of imperial sacrifice.64 Yet in post-Boxer Beijing,
this most sacred site, the cosmological center of the Chinese Empire and
world, became home to the 16th Bengal Lancers, a British regiment of
Sikh soldiers. While occupying the sacred site, British officers allegedly
stole two golden bells from the temple as trophies, later melting one of
them down to divide among themselves, while the troop’s colonel disman-
tled a roof of gold-plated tiles and ordered soldiers to hide them in a ware-
house across town.65 From Tianjin’s wall to the Temple of Heaven, foreign
empires were dismantling the symbols of Chinese imperial authority
piece by piece.
DECENTERING THE CHINESE CITY
On August 15, 1902, after two years of governing Tianjin’s Chinese city,
the TPG returned political control of the city to China. This return came
with conditions. The city could never reconstruct the torn-down wall, and
the city had to establish a health and sanitation board based on the TPG’s
model.66 Yuan Shikai, then vice regent of Zhili and later president of the
post- Qing Republic, took control of the city. Yuan went beyond TPG
44 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
recommendations to institute a series of dramatic structural and adminis-

trative changes. He retained several members of the TPG as advisers,
including TPG head Charles Denby Jr., kept on as chief foreign adviser,
and C. D. Tenney, a former missionary, president of Tianjin University,
and Chinese secretary of the TPG, kept on as director of education.67 One
of Yuan’s first steps was to retrain former Chinese soldiers as police, estab-
lishing China’s first police academy.68 He likewise established schools,
which by 1907 included 121 schools for girls within the mostly male school
system.69 Yuan even organized China’s first Western-style election for
Tianjin’s county council in August 1907.70 Under Yuan Shikai, Tianjin
seemed to be leading the way as one of China’s most “progressive” and
“enlightened” cities.71
Each step that Yuan took to reform Tianjin was a step away from the
spatial and political order of the imperial government. One of Yuan’s first
moves after regaining control over Tianjin was to abandon the former
imperial-era city. With the wall no longer designating the administrative
center, Yuan relocated the political center of the city to the northeast
across the Hai River, naming the new district Xin hebei qu, or “new north
river district.” In his quest to turn Tianjin into a modern urban city, Yuan
turned his back on Chinese imperial ideas of urban design and embraced
foreign principles of urban planning as progressive and superior. Yuan’s
new administrative center included buildings of both Chinese and foreign
architectural styles, constructed on a grid of streets off a broad boulevard,
today’s Zhongshan lu. Yuan’s government offices were built in only six
months and were joined by such symbols of modernity as a train station, a
public park, an exhibition hall, and several schools.
The expansion and growth of foreign concessions south along the Hai
River served to de-center the Chinese city even further. Eight Nation Alli-
ance members that did not already hold territory in Tianjin gained conces-
sions after the Boxer Uprising: in 1900 and 1901, Austria-Hungary, Italy,
and Russia joined France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and the United
States as concession holders in Tianjin. Belgium joined them in 1902 to
make a total of nine foreign concessions. In addition to allowing new con-
cessions, the Qing ceded extra territory to France and Britain to expand
their concessions. These areas, which were developed to be largely resi-
dential, came to be known as the extramural concessions because they
extended beyond the outer city walls that had also been demolished. Thus,
in post-Boxer Tianjin, as Chinese imperial authority was decentered, the
expansion of foreign concessions made the city a place of multiple
centers.
Beijing’s political status was ultimately displaced after the Qing
dynasty collapsed in 1911, and the new Republic moved its capital south to
Nanjing in 1927. This fall of Beijing also signaled the rise of Tianjin. Since
Beijing was no longer the terminus of imperial trading routes, the flow of
money into the former imperial capital city slowed while existing invest-
ment and industry moved to cities on the coast, like Tianjin, where taxes
and transport made it more cost-effective to manufacture goods close to
the port. Moreover, the city of Tianjin itself became a site for investment.
As Madeleine Yue Dong notes in her history of Republican-era Beijing,
former imperial government officials with capital to invest looked to Tian-
jin’s new, growing real estate market rather than the old capital city.72
CONCLUSION
With nine foreign concessions and a Chinese-governed municipality,

early twentieth-century Tianjin was a city with multiple centers, produc-
ing conflicts at the same time it encouraged coordination. Multiplicity
brought chaos when foreign empires competed with one another for pieces
of China, and as Chinese people pushed against foreign incursions. But
the universal values and promises of global empire also claimed to offer
resolutions for these conflicts. Thus, as foreign empires created chaos, the
ideologies of global empire promised security and prosperity, and with
Qing imperial authority crumbling beneath their feet, Chinese intellectu-
als increasingly turned toward these new global regimes of knowledge.
Global empire proposed a different mode of space than the Chinese
imperial world order. Looking at the long history of Chinese imperial capi-
tal cities, Nancy Steinhardt argues that the imperial authorities gained
power in the present by reclaiming the past.73 New capital cities were con-
structed on top of sites of old capitals, claiming the site’s authority. And
architectural plans connected new buildings to the past by using a com-
mon architectural vernacular: the uniform design of city walls, four-sided
46 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
enclosures, and a north-south orientation. Like space, political time was

seen as cyclical, with new governments gaining power by drawing on the
past. These political building ideals had influenced China for centuries,
and they also dominated the regional models for capital cities in northeast
Asia. Thus, when Europeans and North Americans disrupted Chinese
spatial practices by introducing new kinds of urban planning, they rup-
tured the spatial and temporal ordering of the region. Global empire pro-
posed a radically different sense of space and time: European and North
American cities projected power through height, not place, while urban
order was instituted through new rational planning, not by maintaining
the primordial order of things. In imperial China, chaos could only be
resolved by a cyclical return to the ancients, while global empire resolved
chaos through teleological change and progress.
These cyclical and dialectical modes of time and space were incompat-
ible, yet they coexisted, producing conflicts and disjuncture that came to
define the modern experience of twentieth-century urban China. In Tian-
jin, custom-built Chinese courtyard houses sat next to semi-attached
townhouses built on spec. Chinese civil servants kept concubines, while
nationalist officials heralded new-style nuclear families, and schoolgirls
with bobbed hair walked alongside old women with bound feet. Even
Yuan Shikai, the Tianjin viceroy on whom foreigners had bestowed the
highest praises for his embrace of modern urban planning, democracy,
and educational reform, tried to reinstate the Chinese Empire with him-
self as emperor in 1915.
But Yuan proved to be an aberration. Political leaders in twentieth-
century China increasingly spoke the language of global empire, calling
upon new knowledge gleaned from science to construct new categories of
society and citizen as they built a modern Chinese nation. Though not
always in accordance, these political voices offered a distinct rupture from
the ideologies and institutions of the Chinese Empire. By contrast, life on
the ground in Tianjin was never that clear. Rather than embrace a new
order without question, Tianjin urbanites fashioned their own worlds by
juxtaposing and combining old and new. Dwelling in the world, they con-
structed social spaces and identities as the city and country they had once
experienced unraveled beneath their feet.
2
Family in Ideology and Practice
I
n late imperial China, the term jia could mean family, house,
or household depending on the context. This term expressed
the interconnectedness of social relations and social spaces,
or bodies and the built environment. Francesca Bray describes
the house in late imperial China as a “gynotechnic,” a tech-
nology that produces ideas about women and gender and
articulates social values into bodily practices and material for-
mations.1 Bray argues that gynotechnics are historically and
culturally constructed: gendered and social concepts, such as
domesticity, femininity, or even family, held a particular
meaning in late imperial China that differs from our own
understandings today. Moreover, Bray contends that studying
gynotechnics in late imperial China illuminates “the nature of
knowledge and action in a society that rooted intellectual and
moral activity in the physical body and in its material environ-
ment.”2 In other words, moral and political values were articu-
lated through objects and spaces.
What happened to this moral-material world when the built
environment was destroyed and replaced by new structures?
Did ideology outlast its materiality, or did new ideas accom-
pany new kinds of spaces? Bray’s description of the relation-
ship between text and house in late imperial China helps to
answer these questions. She explains that late imperial China
48 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
was unique in the role that written texts played in standardizing spatial
and household practices. Texts and ideas were widely disseminated to the
extent that even illiterate people understood shared principles and values,
and even the house itself became a text.3 Thus, we can only imagine how
disorienting spatial destruction and reconstruction in Tianjin must have
been for the city’s residents. 4 In such a state of uncertainty, what ideas or
alternative texts might Tianjin residents have turned to for new answers?
The multiple colonization of Tianjin and China introduced numerous
ideas and texts that addressed issues surrounding the household. Texts
included Japanese treatises on female education, translations of English
political theory, and social surveys conducted by scholars from the United
States. These texts introduced a new vocabulary, including the new two-
character term jiating, which replaced jia in vernacular Chinese. Jiating
contained the single-character jia, and like jia meant different things
depending on the context. Jiating could mean the social relations of the
family, the physical space of the house, or the new concept of home. In the
popular lexicon and in the minds of Chinese people, jiating meant all three
things, but for intellectuals and ideologues, the political utility of the term
focused on family relations. If Neo- Confucian ideology about jia sought to
manifest itself in the materiality of the house, the new ideas about jiating
found root in the demography and social relations of the family. In other
words, political and moral values migrated from the house to the family.
But even as family superseded the spatial material form of the house
and the central ideological construct of the household, there was no single
shared concept of family. Social scientists working in China, for example,
could not even agree on who to include when measuring the family demo-
graphically. Still, what these multiple ideas of family all had in common
was a connection to the world. Whether to build a stronger Chinese nation-
state or to develop Chinese society, the ultimate goal was to improve Chi-
na’s standing in the world. Dwelling in the world thus transformed the
Chinese family into a yardstick for universal progressive change.
INTRODUCING JIATING AS HOME
The term jiating first entered late Qing discourse through female educa-
tion. Ironically the term for family, house, and home gained traction at a
Family in Ideology and Practice 49
time when the “woman question” was displacing the household as the
central site for expressing social values in political discourse. Instead of
space, Chinese male intellectuals focused on female bodies as problem-
atic, and found their habits troubling. The political reformist Kang Youwei
appealed to the Guangxu emperor to ban footbinding, which he felt weak-
ened the Chinese race and belittled China in the eyes of foreigners, mak-
ing China less competitive on the global stage of nation-states.5 In an 1897
essay on women’s education, Kang’s disciple, the journalist and reformer
Liang Qichao, described Chinese women in terms of economic theory,
labeling them as “parasites” who lived off the labor of their fathers and hus-
bands, and arguing that the only way to make women productive was to
educate them.6 Reformers like Kang and Liang not only debated whether
China should have a constitutional monarchy or whether Chinese people
were ready to embrace democracy, but they also called to transform female
bodies through anti-footbinding campaigns and implored women to
become more productive members of society through female education.
Chinese reformers searched globally for new models of female educa-
tion and found answers in Japan. Female schools and schooling had a long
history in Japan that dated to the Tokugawa period (1603–1868). Schools
were established for girls across elite social strata, and textbooks espous-
ing Neo- Confucian ideology were published to facilitate their education.7
In 1872, the Meiji government proposed a plan for a national school sys-
tem, and the government established schools for women and girls that
built on the earlier foundation of female education. At first glance, the
ideological goals of the new female curriculum to transform girls into
good wives and wise mothers (ryōsai kenbo in Japanese, liangqi xianmu in
Chinese) also seemed to bear a striking resemblance to the Neo- Confucian
gender ideology of the past, but as Koyama Shizuko argues, Japanese
“good wife wise mother” ideology actually was invented in the late nine-
teenth century, and was inspired by European ideas about women and
gender.8 The good wife wise mother ideology called upon Japanese women
and girls not only to educate themselves so that they could better manage
and care for the families of the nation, but as good wives and wise moth-
ers, they were also to think of the nation as their extended family and con-
sider the restored monarchy as the nation’s parents.9 Thus, Meiji-era edu-
cation and political reforms reinvented the Neo- Confucian relationship
between household and society for the modern nation-state.
50 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
The Japanese female educator Shimoda Utako became a bridge

between China and global ideals for female education. Shimoda trans-
lated foreign ideas first for Japanese students. She visited Great Britain in
the 1890s, where she observed Anglo domestic practices at home and in
the field of women’s education; she even commanded an audience with
Queen Victoria.10 Upon returning to Japan, she established the Practical
Women’s School (Jissen joshi gakuen) in Tokyo in 1899 with the belief that
women, who possessed natural virtues of “strength, purity, gentleness,
and grace,” were “capable of rectifying social injustices and bringing more
happiness into the world” if properly educated.11 Shimoda next made this
globalized female education accessible to Chinese women, opening her
school to them in 1901, establishing a separate classroom for them in 1905,
and creating a “Chinese department” in 1908. By 1914, there were more
than two hundred Chinese women in Shimoda’s school.12 Her ideas about
female education earned the respect of Chinese educational and political
leaders, conservatives and liberals alike, and her curriculum became the
basis for similar schools in China.13
Shimoda’s influence in promoting new kinds of female knowledge in
Japan and China extended outside the classroom. She published multiple
books on domestic science in Japan, and helped spread her ideas to China
by establishing a publishing house in Shanghai, called the Society for
Renewal (Zuoxin she), with one of her former students.14 Shimoda’s trea-
tises on domestic science became foundational texts in Chinese female
education, with their influence reaching beyond Shanghai to cities like
Tianjin.15 Her ideas also circulated widely among literate Chinese men and
women, published in such popular Chinese journals such as The Eastern
Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi). Shimoda’s importance to female education
and the female press in China has led Joan Judge to argue that Shimoda
was the most influential Japanese expert on female education in early
twentieth-century China, responsible for translating most of the foreign
concepts of home economics into Chinese.16
Shimoda likely introduced the concept of “home” into Chinese dis-
course, and possibly the term jiating.17 The idea of “home” that Shimoda
put forth hinged on the new Japanese term, katei ( jiating in Chinese).
According to the Japan historian Jordan Sand, the neologism katei came to
stand in for the English word “home” at the turn of the century in Japan,
and it was much more readily adopted into the Japanese vernacular than
earlier attempts by Protestant social reformers, who in the 1880s began to
introduce the home through the transliterated word homu (home).18 As a
word and concept, katei took off in the popular press. According to Sand,
the first Japanese journal to use the term in its title was Katei zasshi (Home
magazine) in 1892; by the turn of the century, there were five magazines
with katei in the title.19
In her Japanese-published book Katei, Shimoda put forth a vision of
katei as a political space and as the center of everyday life.20 Shimoda’s text
was ideological yet practical, part political treatise and part how-to. She
included chapters on the ideological meaning of katei, the role of women
in katei, women’s social roles, and morality, hygiene, and home econom-
ics. The Japanese concept of katei put forth by Shimoda and others was
much like the Neo- Confucian Chinese concept of jia, a political space
filled with ideas, people, social relations, and practices, but it was also a
newly globalized space, the site of new kinds of practical, modern female
knowledge that referenced global discourses of science, economics, and
hygiene. The Japanese discourse of katei thereby transformed the house-
hold into a new rational, modern, global-facing place that would become
the cornerstone of national reform.
Ultimately the Japanese political concept of katei did not take off in
twentieth-century China.21 The Republic of China followed a different
political trajectory from Meiji Japan. In Japan, the household registration
law of 1871 reinvented the Neo- Confucian household, ie in Japanese or jia
in Chinese, as a modern political unit for social control by requiring all
households to register with local government and to organize under the
control of a male household head.22 Chinese political reformers and intel-
lectual elites, by contrast, focused on the male individual as a political unit
and sought to eradicate old family structures.23 The family problem joined
the women problem in discussions over how best to reform Chinese soci-
ety, and the traditional Chinese family was increasingly blamed for Chi-
na’s inability to develop into a democracy. This ideological divergence
between Japanese and Chinese political understandings of the household
was reflected in differences in language. In Chinese, jiating came to stand
for the modern family, house, and home. In Japanese, by contrast, katei
only referred to house and home. Family in Japanese was referred to as
52 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
kazoku, a term which when read in Chinese as jiazu had negative connota-
tions as an extended household or clan. Aside from a handful of Chinese
intellectuals who had been influenced by Japanese social science scholar-
ship, Chinese people rarely used the Chinese jiazu to refer to family.24
Although the Chinese term jiating bore some similarities to its pre-
decessor jia and to new Japanese ideas about the home, the early
twentieth-century Chinese jiating as home was no longer a socio-political
institution. Shimoda Utako’s political concept of home may not have taken
root in China, but the idea of home as both a site of personal comfort and
as the female-managed center of rational, scientific, modern living took
off during the Republican era. Discussions of jiating as home were widely
disseminated in women’s magazines such as the Ladies’ Journal (Funü
zazhi, 1915–1931), and jiating was even included in the title of Chinese
women’s magazines, such as Tianjin’s 1923 Kuaile jiating (happy home).
Disconnected from political discourse, home as described in women’s
magazines became a site of multiple possibilities. Home could be imag-
ined as the political cornerstone of national reform, as a site of cosmopoli-
tan self-fashioning, or as an affective place of apolitical comfort.
TRANSLATING SOCIETY
As home was disconnected from political ideology and feminized, jiating

as family became integrated into political ideology through the mascu-
line knowledge of social science. Social science was viewed as a new
Western knowledge system that offered universally attainable prescrip-
tions and promised competitive success on the global stage of nation-
states. Prescriptive ideologies began with the concept of society, which
was new to Chinese intellectual thought, having been introduced to
China in the nineteenth century through translations. The Chinese trans-
lator Yan Fu led the way in translating theoretical texts that addressed
social and political issues, such as Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics,
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty. Yan
Fu was also responsible for introducing Darwin’s theory of evolution to
China.25
Social Darwinism encouraged Chinese reformers to envision China’s

place on the global stage of modern nation-states, as well as to seek pre-
scriptions for evolutionary social change in the “universal” modern values
of social science. As the Chinese intellectual historian Wang Hui notes,
early Chinese social scientists such as Yan Fu saw science not as a method-
ology for research but as a set of universal principles that explained the
“order of the world.”26 Moreover, Yan Fu did not simply render Western
theory into Chinese. He also offered additional commentaries to guide
new readers of social science through tangible solutions for building and
reforming a new Chinese social order that broke from the Confucian sages
and the foundations of imperial political ideology, promoting the strength
and struggle of the group as the motivator of progress.27 In other words,
the scientific “truth” of Darwin’s theory of evolution imbued Yan Fu with
the authority to denounce Confucianism as a social and political ideology.
Thus, even more than a new academic discourse, the social sciences
became a political ideology—a way to govern and change society rather
than simply a means to explain or measure it.28
Whereas Chinese political ideology had once directed officials, schol-
ars, and emperors to the past for answers on how to govern and bring about
order and stability, social science pointed intellectuals and reformers
toward new global flows of modern scientific knowledge. At first, many
Chinese intellectuals turned to Japan for this knowledge. Japanese trans-
lations of Western theoretical texts could be translated easily into Chi-
nese. But perhaps more importantly, Chinese intellectuals increasingly
shifted their gaze toward Japan after Japan rose as a foreign empire, and
especially after China’s defeat in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–
1895). Between 1896 and 1911, almost one thousand books were trans-
lated from Japanese to Chinese, with just under half on social science. 29
Japan and China’s shared use of Chinese characters facilitated Chinese
scholars’ translation of foreign vocabulary from Japanese.30 When Japa-
nese scholars translated and described foreign texts and foreign things at
the turn of the twentieth century, they used Chinese characters to convey
the meaning of foreign words, which could be translated readily into Chi-
nese through a process that the literary scholar Lydia Liu has termed
“translingual practice.” Liu notes that when Chinese intellectuals
54 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
borrowed two-character words from Japanese, they did not translate them
concept-for-concept, but instead constructed a new meaning as words
were reinterpreted in a Chinese context.31 These two-character words
described new kinds of political knowledge, such as nation or race
(minzoku in Japanese, minzu in Chinese), and modern objects like tele-
phone (denwa in Japanese, dianhua in Chinese). Not all translators and
writers adopted Japanese neologisms. Yan Fu, for example, developed his
own term for “social sciences”: qunxue, or study of the group. But in the
end, most translations used the Japanese two-character term shakai (she-
hui in Chinese), to describe society or social, and the term is still used in
modern Chinese today.
As Chinese people translated society into shehui, they were also defin-
ing how this new term would take shape on Chinese soil. According to
Michael Tsin, when the cosmological glue that held imperial China
together dissolved from the modern landscape, government authority was
replaced by a “constructed social body”—the people. Tsin contends that
the new notion of society became the basis for unity in modern China, and
intellectuals sought to define, construct, and regulate society.32 But Chi-
nese society was not simply defined vis-à-vis the state; intellectuals and
reformers also looked at Chinese society as a player on an international
stage of evolutionary progress. After touring the United States in 1903,
Liang Qichao called upon Chinese society to reform its social customs and
take its place among civilized nation states.33 Thus, new Chinese concepts
of shehui also defined China’s position on a global stage.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals were still
divided over what kind of socio-political ideology would best shape a new
Chinese social body. While intellectuals like Yan Fu saw an unbridgeable
gap between Western and Chinese knowledge, and others turned to Japan
for Western knowledge, others still advocated for maintaining China’s
ideological heritage.34 Kang Youwei interpreted Darwinian progress in a
Confucian cultural context, advocating to maintain China’s Confucian
ideological core while adopting Western institutions and technology.
Thus, the intellectual landscape was still wide open, and a Western social
scientific vision of society did not preclude Confucian ideas of social order.
But soon this changed, as Chinese intellectuals increasingly turned away
from Confucianism to craft a new nationalist social ideology in line with

the universalist principles of global social science.
FROM FAMILY MYTH TO

SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC FACT
In Republican-era China, political ideologies combined with new Western

scientific principles about society, as well as with Chinese literary and
intellectual ideals, to forge a political ideology and social scientific dis-
course of family reform. With the family pushed to the fore, the Chinese
woman was no longer the sole marker of China’s backwardness. Looking
at changing family ideology from the May Fourth Movement (1919) and
beyond, the historian Susan Glosser describes a small family or xiao
jiating ideology, which called upon Chinese people to form small nuclear
families instead of large extended families. Glosser sees this ideology as
building on the political heritage of late imperial China, in which house-
hold and state formed an interconnected continuum. By disconnecting
social relations from social spaces, however, this new ideology signifi-
cantly diverged in substance from earlier ideas.35 Moreover, after the sin-
gle Chinese imperial political order was displaced by multiple imperial-
isms, social science, rather than Confucian ideology, became the glue that
held together the new social system. This new social scientific ideological
system was forged through a process of colonial coproduction, in which
Chinese intellectuals, foreign missionaries, and social scientists of both
foreign and Chinese backgrounds transformed the myth of the backward
extended Chinese family into a social scientific fact.
The process of colonial coproduction is revealed through a close analy-
sis of a 1931 article written by the American economist Jane Newell.
Returning from three years at Beijing’s Yanjing University, Newell
described the Chinese family in the U.S. journal Social Forces:
It is difficult for a Westerner to understand the nature of the old-time

Chinese family. We have no word that exactly translates their chia [sic],
just as they have no word that has much of the connotation of our word
56 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
home. . . . If we look at the formality of family life, its elaborate etiquette

and ceremony, its potential intrigue and training in diplomacy, it seems
more like the household of a king’s court than the homey thing we call
our family.36
Living in Beijing in the 1920s, Newell could have found numerous Chinese
women’s magazines that included illustrations of smiling nuclear families
and photographs of comfortably decorated homey rooms. Working at Yan-
jing University, she could have visited the home economics department,
pioneered by the American home economist Ava Milam.37 In fact, Newell
was familiar with Milam’s work and cited her study of Chinese families,
arguing that Milam’s data proved that Chinese family size was decreasing.
In actuality, the average family size of nine that Milam reported was on
the larger side of Chinese families at the time, but in Newell’s mind, “a
family of thirty persons would not be considered a really large sized fam-
ily” among China’s “conservative well-to-do groups or in isolated rural
districts.”38 In addition to its unwieldy size, the Chinese family, according
to Newell, was also anti-individual and oppressive to women, which led
her to conclude that no matter how much Chinese society and laws
changed, the modern family would not evolve as long as the Chinese tra-
ditional mindset persisted.39
Newell’s description of the traditional Chinese family was not based
in data or fieldwork. Her evidence seems to have come from conversa-
tions with Chinese students, secondary sources, and her own assump-
tions. Indeed, she was reputed at Yanjing to be more of a gossip than a
researcher. 40 But Newell was not only a trained social scientist; she was
also an economist who believed in the authority of science. After earning a
PhD at the University of Wisconsin and assuming a position in the newly
formed economics department of her alma mater Wellesley College, she
stated that she planned “to teach women that economics is not a senti-
ment but a science, to correct their loose, vague conceptions and to give
them judicial comprehension and distinctly philosophical training.”41
Armed with social theory however, Newell did not need data to present
her findings on the Chinese family. The Chinese family looked a certain
way because Western social theory proposed that it should. Such theories
claimed that families evolved from large to small, that smaller families
supported individual autonomy, and that northwest European and North

American families had evolved into this form.
Today demographers recognize that this developmental theory of
family transformation was based less in actual “science” and more in a
“sentiment” that placed northwest Europe at the pinnacle of evolutionary
change and the height of historical progress. In his critique of develop-
mental idealism in the history of family studies and demography, the
sociologist Arland Thornton argues that the evolution of the small,
individual-centered nuclear family in northwest Europe was a myth all
along; demographic research beginning in the 1970s, he says, has increas-
ingly concluded that the extended family never existed in northwest
Europe to begin with. 42 Instead, small families were the “tradition” in a
society that also historically favored individualism and in which institu-
tions held more sway than families. In other words, the institutions, struc-
tures, and values that social scientists of Newell’s generation held up as
indicative of modern development were actually traditional cultural and
social values in northwest Europe. Thornton argues that the evolutionary
model of family change was fabricated through a process he calls “reading
history sideways” in which European scholars as early as the eighteenth
century looked to other societies that they deemed to be less civilized or
developed and assumed that their contemporary social structures must
resemble northwest Europe’s past.
Northwest Europe’s developmental paradigm had multiple conse-
quences for other places: on one hand, it cast development as universally
attainable and desirable and offered other places a plan to achieve it, but
on the other hand, the process of reading history sideways ensured a
teleology of development in which the “evolved” needed to name a “back-
ward other” in order to exist. Once the developmental order of nation-
states was established, it became nearly impossible for those “backward”
places to overcome it. A second legacy is that the northwest European
family form became a universal ideal, with the nuclear family becoming
both a marker of and a means to modernity. Thus, according to Thornton,
the developmental paradigm has made it seem that the driving force
behind global family change is the nuclear family and the social values it
claims to represent—such as individualism, equality, and freedom—rather
than actual social conditions on the ground. 43 But just as we cannot
58 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
assume that social change was natural, we also cannot take for granted
that Chinese people found certain social forms or values desirable. While
nationalists and social science researchers heralded the small family as
the cornerstone of social and national reform, as we will later see in this
chapter, Chinese people imagined family structures in their own ways.
Likewise, Europeans did not simply read history sideways; they often
read it sideways and together with local intellectuals and informants
through a process of colonial coproduction. Thus, in China, developmen-
tal idealism was not simply a product of northwest Europe’s attempts to
understand its present as a teleological product of an invented past. Chi-
nese intellectuals, reformers, and social researchers all played an active
role producing the myth of the traditional Chinese family, as they tried to
envision China’s past and future on an uneven global stage conditioned
by the material violence and theoretical authority of imperialism. More-
over, this global stage included new tools and spaces to facilitate this
coproduction of knowledge. Boxer Indemnity scholarships carried Chi-
nese students to academic institutions in the United States. New universi-
ties in China brought youth together to experience and question social life
in new ways. 44 Missionaries and mission institutions transformed the job
of saving Chinese souls into the mission to save Chinese society, and new
American foundations funded this and other social research. 45
When Newell sought evidence for her argument, she turned not to
quantitative data on family size but to qualitative descriptions of family
life penned by Chinese intellectuals. Quoting from the influential journal
New Youth (Xin qingnian, 1915–1926) Newell introduced a “discouraged
youth” who describes Chinese parents as “despotic” in their use of “old
customs and ancient traditions [to] bind slavery on the people.”46 New
Youth, and the May Fourth or New Culture Movement that inspired it,
were the most influential Chinese intellectual forces in shaping the myth
of the traditional Chinese family. As the historian Vera Schwarcz has
noted, May Fourth youths were not the first activists to criticize the Chi-
nese family system, and indeed many of their ideas echoed those put forth
ten to twenty years earlier by Social Darwinist reformers such as Yan Fu,
Kang Youwei, and Liang Qichao. 47 But it was the New Culture Movement’s
call to abandon traditional Confucian family values in favor of individual-
ism and freedom that rang loudest and most clearly, reverberating across
oceans and continents, influencing not only nationalistic and political ide-
ology but also academic interpretations of the Chinese family system in
China and abroad.
The idea of family advocated in May Fourth publications such as the
New Youth confirmed the northwest European developmental model,
anchoring China in the traditional past. In an article titled “The Way of
Confucius and Modern Life,” the New Youth editor Chen Duxiu argued
that China’s imperial legacy had prevented Chinese people from becom-
ing modern citizens, and he made the Confucian household—the former
cornerstone of social and moral order—the focus of his critique. 48 Chen
criticized filial piety and family relations as the core of Confucianism’s
assault against individualism. As Chen described it, the feudal hierarchi-
cal family system suppressed women and young people by requiring obe-
dience to the point of absurdity—asking them to forgo personal property
or remain obedient to a father or husband even long after the patriarch’s
death. Chen noted that while modern constitutional states allowed people
to make individual decisions, in a Confucian society, bound as it was by
filial piety and obedience, patriarchal family relations hindered individual
decision-making. Chen wondered “how people could form their own
political parties and make their own choices” under such a family sys-
tem. 49 Thus, aligning himself with the developmental ideals of social the-
ory in which political parties and institutions, not families, led societies
and fostered individualism, Chen broke from late imperial Chinese politi-
cal ideology in which the family, house, and household were the center of
political and social stability.
Chen and his fellow contributors to New Youth considered the journal to
be a forum to save China by fostering a new sense of nationalism, but the
journal also placed Chinese politics and society in a new global context. As
the authority of the new “Chinese Enlightenment,” New Youth helped to
produce images of traditional China, its women, and its families for the
global consumption of foreign scholars like Jane Newell, but it also trans-
lated and introduced Western social theory and literature to Chinese
readers. Chinese intellectuals first read Ibsen’s Dollhouse, for example,
when Hu Shi translated it in New Youth in 1918, and they learned how a
Norwegian play could be relevant to Chinese society when he used the
theory of Yibosheng zhuyi (Ibsenism) to explain that Nora’s escape from
60 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
her feudal family was also a path that individuals trapped in the traditional
Chinese family could follow.50
Chinese intellectuals invented the small family ideology by adopting
new Western yardsticks of social progress, yet they also helped to con-
struct the yardstick when they invented the myth of the traditional Chi-
nese family. Indeed, if Europeans invented the developmental ideal of the
modern nuclear family by reading their history sideways, Chinese intel-
lectuals themselves produced a worthy “other” for the global stage—the
backward, large, anti-individual Chinese family. But while Chinese intel-
lectuals may have played an active role in coproducing the image of the
backward Chinese family, they did so on an uneven stage dominated by
European social theories, Euro-American educational hierarchies, and
American research monies.
This stage was set at a 1930 symposium on Chinese culture, a sympo-
sium that was the brainchild of Chen Hengzhe. Chen had developed the
idea for the symposium one year earlier, when she attended a conference
in Kyoto funded by the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) and noted that
“very few data, especially with relation to Chinese culture, were available
as a scientific basis of study.”51 Chen was representative of a new wave of
Chinese intellectuals. She had won a Boxer Indemnity scholarship to study
at Vassar College in 1915, attended graduate school at the University of
Chicago, and became Beijing University’s first female professor, teaching
English and history.52 Chen was also bilingual and often published under
the English name Sophia Chen Zen. Convincing the IPR that the “prob-
lem” of Chinese culture was also important, Chen secured conference
funding from the American research institution.
Chen’s symposium on Chinese culture highlights two aspects of how
the myth of the Chinese family was formed. First, it demonstrates the role
of Chinese intellectuals in the production of knowledge about China and
the Chinese family on the global stage, and second, it shows how Chinese
intellectuals blurred the boundaries between cultural commentary and
social science. As a site for Chinese and Euro-American coproduction of
knowledge about Chinese society, Chen’s symposium was global in con-
ception, and its funder, the IPR, was an American academic institution.
Yet every presenter was Chinese: the participant roster, which was appar-
ently compiled through the IPR and Chen’s personal connections, was a
who’s who of China’s leading intellectuals. But within this geographic

homogeneity was disciplinary diversity, as participants came from a vari-
ety of fields, from the hard sciences to literature. Chen’s former colleagues
from Beijing University, Cai Yuanpei and Hu Shi, gave presentations on art
and literature, respectively. The Tianjin-based economist Franklin Ho
spoke about his IPR-funded research on Chinese industries, while the
sociologist Tao Menghe wrote on social changes in China.53 Representa-
tives from the Biological Laboratory of Science Society of China and the
Fan Memorial Institute of Biology, who may have also been recipients of
IPR funding, attended as well.
Conference discussions may have been conducted in Chinese, English,
or both, but following the Anglophone nature of academic research in
China at the time, the papers were submitted in English, were published a
year later at a Shanghai publishing house, and then were distributed
around the globe.54 Most of the Chinese presenters had received academic
training overseas. Cai Yuanpei studied in Japan and Germany. Hu Shi and
Franklin Ho trained in the United States, and Tao Menghe studied sociol-
ogy in Great Britain.55
When Chinese intellectuals received academic training abroad or
wrote articles in English, they were doing much more than communicat-
ing in a foreign language; they were translating ideas and assumptions
from that language into their research and applying them to local condi-
tions. Writing in English, they also made their work accessible to a global
audience. Together they coproduced the myth of the traditional Chinese
family through a cyclical process of translating theoretical assumptions
and material conditions back and forth across a global stage—albeit a
stage that privileged foreign academic institutions and was funded by for-
eign research monies. Still, contrary to Thornton, Europeans did not sim-
ply read the Chinese family sideways. Instead, Chinese intellectuals
played an active role in producing foreign knowledge about Chinese
society.
The coproduction of knowledge about Chinese society also happened
across disciplinary boundaries. The diversity of symposium participants,
from philosophers to biologists, suggests that Chinese intellectuals across
the disciplines could come together to examine a certain set of social and
cultural problems deemed crucial to strengthening Chinese society. It
62 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
also meant that social issues were not always derived through social scien-
tific empirical research but were often cultural problems proposed by
humanists. Thus, in Chen’s essay “Summary of China’s Cultural Prob-
lems,” which concluded the eighteen-essay symposium volume, she
described the Chinese family by calling on a series of cultural assump-
tions that were fast becoming social fact. Chen, much like Chen Duxiu fif-
teen years earlier, turned to the authoritarian nature of Chinese Confu-
cianism in the Chinese family. She argued that the Chinese family was a
“state in miniature,” and thus less like a “home in the western sense.”56
The household as state, according to Chen, was ruled by “the patriarch or
matriarch with a bureaucracy of sons and daughters, as well as in-laws,
grandchildren, and dependent relatives to the nth degree.” The Western
family system, by contrast, was “the product of the Industrial Revolution,”
based on love and free choice rather than filial piety and obligation.57 But
while industrialization had liberated the Western family, Chen likened the
Chinese family to a machine in which the individual is only a nail or screw
in the engine, with everything existing for “the sake of a bigger whole.”
Chen’s essay spoke to two audiences: Chinese intellectuals, who in a
quest to save their society transformed myths about traditional Chinese
culture into social scientific fact, and foreign academics who sought
answers to their own cultural and social histories in a contemporary other
they perceived as backward. With Chinese intellectuals like Chen taking
an active role in the coproduction of knowledge, Chinese and foreign
descriptions of the Chinese family bore striking similarities. Indeed, by
the 1920s and 1930s, the cultural idea that the anti-individual, despotic
Chinese family was impeding national democracy had become a social
fact. This coproduced fact began with Western social scientific knowledge
translated into Chinese language, but once Chinese intellectuals inter-
preted this scientific knowledge in local context, these ideas underwent a
second translation back into English, with foreign academics and social
scientists turning to Chinese intellectual elites for information on China.
In other words, when Americans published what seemed to be unin-
formed, biased observations on the Chinese family, they were often actu-
ally reiterating a Chinese interpretation of western ideas. Thus, thirty
years after Chen Duxiu published “The Way of Confucius and Modern
Life,” and fifteen years after Chen Hengzhe’s symposium on Chinese
culture, Ernest Osborne, a professor at Columbia University Teacher’s

College, offered a critique on the Chinese family that seemed to reiterate
them word for word, stating that filial piety fostered obedience and pre-
vented individuals from learning to live in a democracy.58
THE FAMILY AS LABORATORY
While the social scientific fact of the extended Chinese family was ban-
tered about in discourse, it was also quantitatively measured and evalu-
ated in the new field of family social science in and of China. In fact, China
became a laboratory for the social sciences of the family in the early twen-
tieth century Asia. In this laboratory, researchers were both foreign and
Chinese, funding was often American, theories were universal, and meth-
ods were actually quite diverse.59 The social sciences in and of China
developed on a global stage on which all researchers, regardless of nation-
ality or methodological approach, shared a common belief in universal
progress and the imperative that Chinese society must change. Family, as
both a marker of a modern society and a means to get there, became a site
to explore and promote social change, and the study of family became
both a global and national developmental project.
With the family at the center of social reform, the new social sciences
may have looked at first glance like the Neo- Confucian sociopolitical proj-
ect of promoting household order to bring about political stability to the
realm. Social science’s foundational understanding of mechanisms of
change, however, differed greatly from Confucianism. Neo- Confucianism
advocated for cyclical and restorative change through a return to ideal
models. The social sciences, by contrast promoted teleological and dialec-
tical change that supported the creation of new forms out of the destruc-
tion of existing ones. According to these models, the past would never be
restored, but instead had to be destroyed and overcome to progress. Social
scientific teleology offered new political possibilities, and Chinese intel-
lectuals turned to studying Chinese society in order to strengthen the Chi-
nese nation. Historians have debated whether the move to apply scientific
method to everyday political and social issues constitutes a rupture or
continuity in Chinese intellectual inquiry.60 When it came to the social
64 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
science of family, however, the theoretical foundations for understanding

the social relations of family, as well as the disconnection of social spaces
from social relations, broke radically from previous intellectual
understandings.
The laboratory was also driven by foreign, largely American desires to
change Chinese society. Foreign missionaries, who had been concerned
initially with saving Chinese souls, shifted their focus to saving Chinese
society. The first wave of American empirical sociologists in China were
affiliated with American mission colleges and institutions such as Yanjing
University, the YMCA, and Princeton University.61 By the 1920s, Ameri-
can funders such as the Rockefeller Foundation or the IPR, also funded by
Rockefeller, supported social science research alongside other projects in
China.62 Rockefeller came from a Baptist background, and many of the
foundation’s projects were connected to Christian institutional, social,
and academic networks. The majority of foreign sociologists working in
China came from the United States, and Chinese social scientists increas-
ingly came from U.S. academic backgrounds.63 Moreover, two of the top
training centers for social scientists in China were founded with American
funds: Qinghua University, which trained more social scientists than any
other Chinese university during the 1940s, was established under the U.S.
Boxer Indemnity program in 1911 (first as a preparatory school for students
studying abroad), and Yanjing University, the sixth-largest producer of
social scientists in the 1940s and an early pioneer in the field, was formed
out of an amalgamation of American mission colleges in 1916.64
Researchers subscribed to universalist social scientific ideals that
family form was an indicator of social form, and that family change was
central to social change. Researchers employed differing approaches to
measure and describe the family— empirical and cultural—and the pic-
tures they drew of the Chinese family likewise varied. Empirical research-
ers used family as a comparative social unit to study social behaviors
across cultures, or they quantified family form to measure China’s com-
parative modern social development. Cultural researchers, by contrast,
while acknowledging the existence of universal family types, studied the
Chinese family as a unique cultural form undergoing transformation.
Empirical researchers took up a new seemingly objective tool—the
social survey—to measure and quantify families and society. Collecting
and compiling data, empirical sociologists believed they could use social
surveys to systematically measure and understand Chinese society—and
then enact social changes based on the snapshot of society they had taken.
It was an opportunity to transform social science theory into practice. But
in order to systematically measure Chinese society, social surveys used
new “universal” social concepts and categories that did not always fit with
Chinese practices. When surveys measured Chinese families, for exam-
ple, they often took the cohabiting household as the unit of analysis. This
proved problematic in cities where poor people often lived among strang-
ers in sublet quarters, while well-to-do families housed several servants.
Moreover, many Chinese urbanites were sojourners who defined “family”
as their extended family living in their natal home. But the social survey
needed to define parameters to make it comparable across places and uni-
versally applicable. Thus social surveys in China looked at the family in
two ways: as a social unit for comparative analysis, or as a quantifiable
marker for measuring modernity.
The first social surveys of Chinese cities looked at standard of living.
The American Sidney Gamble led this wave of surveys, traveling to China
in the 1910s on behalf of Princeton in Asia and the YMCA and later teach-
ing sociology at Beijing’s Yanjing University. Beijing became a laboratory
for Gamble to conduct surveys on household consumption. Gamble, and
the household consumption surveyors that followed him, based their
hypotheses and data collection on the nineteenth-century German econo-
mist Ernst Engel’s principle of “Engel’s Law,” which claimed that as fam-
ily income increased, the percentage spent on food decreased.65 In other
words, poorer families spent a greater proportion of their income on food.
Looking at industrialized Europe in the 1850s, Engel had been interested
in explaining class and consumption. Some of Engel’s contemporaries
criticized his empirical research for focusing on the poor or working class
and assuming the consumption habits of the middle class without
empirics, But Engel was not alone highlighting an emerging bourgeois
class, distinguished by their conspicuous consumption of superfluous
things, in Europe’s post–Industrial Revolution societies.66 Years after
Engel’s death, Thorstein Veblen published The Theory of the Leisure Class,
in which he coined the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe how
people consumed nonessential luxury items to display their status. For
66 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
Veblen, this was not only a way of distinguishing status groups within a
society but also a sign of a society’s evolution and progress. Although
Veblen’s work did not address Engel’s studies, both point to a growing
sense of crisis in post–Industrial Revolution consumption in nineteenth-
century Europe and the United States. If the two approaches seem radi-
cally different—Engel was examining a bare-bones consumption existence
among the working classes, while Veblen was describing superfluous con-
sumption among the well-to-do—both economists shared the view that
the move toward leisure consumption would be the inevitable result and
sign of modern progress.67 Thus the experiences of nineteenth-century
northwest Europe paved the way for new social scientific theories on class
consumption, social change, and modernization for the world.
Sociologists working in China took Engel’s theory and applied it to local
society, concluding that indeed poorer households spent proportionately
more on food than their wealthier counterparts.68 But Sidney Gamble took
his studies of household consumption in Beijing a step further, using
Engel’s theory to measure Chinese household consumption comparatively
with other countries. Gamble felt that comparison should be used not to
judge China, which he noted was “in a period of transition” and had made
remarkable progress since 1911, but to “point out what we would like to see
done in China” with the hope that comparison could save China from the
mistakes other countries had made.69 Some of Engel’s theory did not hold
up for China, but Gamble still tried to make the China data fit with the
global data on Engel’s Law.70 Focusing on percent spent on food, Gamble
compared data between nation-states and concluded that Engel’s Law
held true between countries as well as individuals: as a country became
more developed, the percentage spent on food decreased. Gamble also
compared consumption patterns across nations, noting that clerks in Bei-
jing and middle-class families in Bombay enjoyed the same standard of
living as Russian city workers and American farming and working-class
families, and that even the wealthiest families surveyed in Beijing spent
3.6 percentage points more on food consumption than American profes-
sionals.71 Thus, by placing China’s urban elite on a global stage of progress,
Gamble believed he had demonstrated that even those members of Chi-
nese society who were most modern in their consumption patterns were
still behind their Euro-American counterparts.
Standard of living surveys aimed to measure class and consumption,

but they also evaluated Chinese families. Taking the consumer household
as a unit of comparison, these surveys made assumptions about universal
family structures that often differed from how Chinese people actually
thought about and experienced family life. Gamble, for example, defined
the economic family as “any two or more persons living together.” The
economic household included members related by blood living under the
same roof, as well as children away at school and family members working
and living elsewhere in the city. Family members who worked outside the
city, even if they contributed to the family income, however, were not
considered part of the economic family; yet servants counted, since they
consumed family food and other household goods.72 In their survey of
working families in Shanghai, a city known for its elaborate housing sys-
tem of subletting, S. K. Yang and L. K. Tao used a similar definition of the
economic household, and also included boarders who lived or took meals
with the family.73 Herbert Lamson, a sociology professor at Shanghai Col-
lege in the 1930s, used a narrower definition of family based on direct kin-
ship when he examined workers in Shanghai.74 For Lamson, family was a
“biological unit involving one set of children and the immediate parents of
these children” rather than an “economic family” that extended to include
aunts, uncles, and grandparents.75 Thus, in his study of Shanghai workers,
he labeled a single mother and her daughter as a family unit unto them-
selves, and not as part of her relatives’ family unit, which she relied on for
financial support.76 But while all three surveys defined the parameters of
the economic household differently, they all yielded similar results: as
household income increased, the percentage spent on food decreased.77
When researchers branched outside the usual parameters of household
consumption surveys, a more complex picture of family emerged. Look-
ing at factory workers in Tangku, located just outside of Tianjin, for exam-
ple, Sung-ho Lin found that many laborers left their extended family in
their native place. Lin thus measured two different family groups: the
“greater family” that resided in a respondent’s native place (5.96 mem-
bers) and the family that resided together (3.72 members).78 When surveys
looked beyond the economic household as a site for comparison and
focused on family structure in its own right, the Chinese family began to
stray from social science models.
68 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
As background research to founding a home economics department at

Yanjing University, Ava Milam, who had served as the dean of Oregon
State University’s School of Home Economics, conducted a survey on Chi-
nese family culture that asked respondents to self-report family size.79
Milam defined family as “a group of kinsfolk . . . consisting of parents and
their children, living together in a single domestic establishment.” She
noted that a multigenerational family was called a “greater” family and a
nuclear family was called a “marriage” family.80 Over two-thirds of those
surveyed responded that they lived in a “marriage” family. These results
might suggest that the overwhelming majority of students lived in nuclear
families, but even Milam conceded that actual living conditions often
exceeded the parameters of her definitions. She allowed that grandparents
might be included in the “marriage” family, a conclusion that was strongly
suggested in another section of the survey, which asked respondents to
report on the number of family members. By allowing Chinese respon-
dents to determine the size of their family themselves, Milam came up
with a much larger average family size than her colleagues who were mea-
suring the standard of living: the average family size for Milam’s respon-
dents was 8, while Yang and Tao reported 4.77 in Shanghai, and Gamble
calculated 4.6 in Beijing.81 Asking a more open-ended question had
yielded a dramatically different result.
The discrepancy in family size also may have been due to a difference
in income levels. Gamble, Yang, and Tao looked at working-class urban-
ites for the most part, while Milam distributed her questionnaires to stu-
dents, mostly at Christian schools, who came from families that could
afford to pay their children’s tuition and forgo their children’s economic
contribution.82 Looking at family size across a wide range of incomes in
Shanghai, Herbert Lamson found that low-income families had an aver-
age family size of two to four members, whereas high-income families had
an average of eight.83 Indeed Lamson, Gamble, Yang, and Tao all agreed
that for China, as family income increased, so did family size.84 Herbert
Lamson added education to the mix. He observed that family size actually
increased with mother’s education— contrary to New Culture ideas that
Western education would lead to a smaller family size, and contrary to
data from Western countries as well.85 Lamson attributed this peculiar
phenomenon to a lack of information about birth control, despite access to

modern education. The problem with his hypothesis was that Margaret
Sanger’s works on birth control had already been published in China and
were available in urban areas, and that Sanger had delivered a widely pub-
licized speech about birth control at Beijing University in 1922 with Hu Shi
as her translator.86
While standard-of-living surveys could be used comparatively to chart
China on a universal path of social progress, the diverse data on family
size contradicted universal models of social progress. Family size had
become a seemingly standard and comparable measurement of modern-
ization, and Chinese sociology dictionaries and textbooks often included
statistics on family size across nations.87 Moreover, the May Fourth myth
of the traditional family conjectured that with increasing income, educa-
tional attainment, and overall societal modernization, families would
become smaller. Data from surveys of the 1920s and 1930s that quantified
family size, however, contradicted those theories by demonstrating that
Chinese family size increased rather than decreased with an increase in
income. Somehow, Chinese families seemed to defy the scientific predic-
tions of Western developmental idealism and the cultural prophecies of
the May Fourth Movement by failing to follow social theory’s progressive
model for family change.
Academics also attempted to use qualitative cultural studies of the Chi-
nese family to explain China’s changing families on their own terms, aim-
ing to support the idea that changes in family structure were natural
developments of social progress. For Sun Benwen, one of the founders of
cultural sociology, this meant examining culture as “national essence.”88
Sun, a graduate of New York University, did not advocate turning away
from Western social science. In fact, he was known for having published
the most widely used Chinese textbook on Western sociological theory
(Shehuixue yuanli, 1935).89 Instead, Sun wanted to imbue Western social
theory with a Chinese culturalist perspective, thereby creating a social
science that was theoretically relevant to China. Following Sun’s cultural
lead, Mai Huiting, his student from Nanjing’s Central University (Zhong-
yang daxue), conducted field research on the Chinese family in the 1930s,
publishing the Problems of Change of the Chinese Family (Jiating gaizao
70 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
wenti) in 1935.90 Balancing universal social scientific theory with local

social observations, Mai attempted to describe the unique systems and
changes in the Chinese family structure.
Mai’s observations on family change in the 1920s were moral, cultural,
and structural. His analysis started with the dichotomy between the large
(da) and small (xiao) families. Mai described the large family as a multi-
generational group—sometimes up to five generations—that lived together
and shared property. According to Mai, in practice, the large family con-
ducted ancestor worship, observed filial piety, arranged marriages, and
ultimately privileged male rights over female. The small family comprised
a husband and wife, along with their unmarried children, and in contrast
to the large family practiced free marriage, individual control over the
family economy, and male/female equality.91 Thus, to Mai, the change
from large to small was not simply about size and structure but also about
a way of life.
Contrary to the survey data that revealed the persistence of large fami-
lies among high-income groups, Mai argued Chinese families were chang-
ing over time in tandem with broader social and economic changes, and
that large families were falling apart in favor of small families.92 Mai placed
the Chinese family on a timeline that naturally progressed from large or
old ( jiu) to small or new (xin). Mai also invented a third category, a transi-
tional stage that he called zhezhong (literally “compromise”). The transi-
tional family fell in between large and small both in terms of quantitative
and qualitative measurements. It might have been a nuclear family with
the addition of grandparents or one that sent money home to the larger
family they had left behind in the countryside. Mai argued that while this
transitional phase had its good points, promoting care for the elderly and
encouraging children’s responsibility for their parents, it ultimately had a
negative impact on social relations, individual psychological status, and
even family hygiene and children’s education.93 But Mai remained faith-
fully optimistic in the teleology of modern social change that promised the
traditional large Chinese family would eventually become a modern,
Western-style nuclear family simply by letting time take its course.
As an outsider to academic sociology, Olga Lang, a Ukrainian native
who fled to China in the 1930s from Nazi Germany with her then-husband,
the sinologist Karl Wittfogel, also sought to understand the family using
Chinese cultural models rather than universal models of family change.94

With funding from Columbia University’s Institute of Social Research, the
IPR, and the Carnegie Corporation, Lang spent from 1935 to 1937 collect-
ing questionnaires and data from across the country. Though Lang was
not a card-carrying social scientist, her 1946 study, Chinese Family and
Society, became one of the most influential monographs on the Chinese
family to emerge from the family laboratory of the 1920s and 1930s.
Breaking from Chinese and foreign social scientists’ ideas that family size
correlated with modern progress, Lang argued instead that the traditional
large Chinese family was never as widespread as academics and reformers
had suggested. Looking at studies of Chinese historical records and cen-
suses that reached back as far as the Han and Tang dynasties, she esti-
mated that the average family was around five or six people—somewhere
between large and small.95 Lang also argued that in imperial China, large
joint families were an ideal enjoyed only by the wealthiest of families, and
that a high mortality rate among poor families limited their size.96 Look-
ing at contemporary Chinese society, Lang did not believe that the family
had progressed from large and traditional to small and modern. Instead,
she argued that families in the 1930s were far more complex, with geo-
graphic, cultural, and economic factors encouraging a variety of family
types.97 In terms of family size, Lang also noted that the ideal for most
Chinese families was to have many children. Thus, Lang observed that
“modernized” families, who could afford better healthcare and hygiene
for their children, often had more children and therefore larger families—
meaning that modern families were actually more likely to be bigger than
“traditional” ones.98
Most importantly, Lang proposed a new English-language vocabulary,
as an alternative to the large-small dichotomy, that researchers continue
to use today to describe the Chinese family.99 She proposed the terms
“conjugal,” “stem,” and “joint.” The “conjugal” or “biological, natural,
nuclear, or small family consists of man, wife or wives, and children,” she
wrote, while the “stem” family includes “parents, their unmarried chil-
dren, one married son with wife and children,” and the “joint” family, also
known as the “‘large family’ or the ‘greater family,’” consists of “parents,
their unmarried children, their married sons (more than one) and sons’
wives and children; and sometimes a fourth or fifth generation.”100
72 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
Rather than map social theory onto the Chinese family, Lang attempted
to define social terms to explain her observations of the Chinese family,
thereby revealing a diverse and fluid Chinese family whose structure was
contingent on historical time and geographic place. Lang argued that
while Chinese culture historically may have recognized certain ideal
forms of family, the family had always adapted to different social condi-
tions. But while Lang may not have subscribed to the teleology of family
size, she still believed that changing family form was a sign of social prog-
ress. When Lang penned a biography of Ba Jin, author of the 1930s icono-
clastic novel Family, in 1967, she proclaimed that during Ba Jin’s time a
growing sense of “community loyalty” challenged the “family loyalty”
required of “old China.”101 In other words, in a changing Chinese society,
modern nationalism’s triumph over traditional familism was inevitable.
FAMILY AS PRACTICE
Although social scientists attempted to make teleological family change

seem natural, life on the ground in modern China was far more complex.
People in twentieth-century Tianjin lived in small nuclear families, but
they also lived with grandparents or in joint families with aunts and uncles.
Moreover, in a rapidly growing city with large influxes of migrants from all
walks of life, many of Tianjin’s nuclear families were actually sojourning
in the city and still financially contributed or otherwise felt connected to
their natal household. When social scientists designed surveys to test
social theories, they often missed these on-the-ground complexities of
family life.
Surveys that were disconnected from social theory, however, some-
times captured these diverse patterns and practices of family life. In 1931
and 1946, the Tianjin city government conducted surveys of their munici-
pal workers and their families that appear not to have been guided by com-
parative social theory, nor were they directed by social engineering. The
results of the 1931 survey were published in a volume beautifully decorated
with art deco graphs.102 The 1946 surveys may never have been compiled
or published, but the individual survey sheets were filed in the Tianjin
municipal government archives, where they remain today.103 Neither the
published volume nor the archival records reveal why the Tianjin munici-
pal government decided to compile data on their employees or how they
intended to use it.104 Moreover, the surveys themselves reveal a lack in
methodological training.105 But precisely because these surveys were con-
ducted outside the orthodox methods of academic social science research,
they offer a unique window onto how Tianjin civil servants thought about
their families.
The 1946 survey form, and perhaps the 1931 survey as well, was more
open-ended than surveys conducted by academic researchers at the time.
Employees were simply handed a blank form and asked to fill in their per-
sonal background, including position, education, native place, and address
in Tianjin, along with their family information, including family mem-
ber’s relationship, name, age, educational background, whether they were
still living, whether they lived with the employee, and whether the employee
supported them financially.106 While the unorthodox survey methods of
the 1946 survey and the different sample sizes between the two render
these surveys empirically unreliable, we can still conjure a snapshot of
how Tianjin civil servants in the 1930s and 1940s thought about them-
selves and their families.107 Moreover, even with a difference in sample
size, the data on employee background and family demography was
largely the same in both surveys. According to this data, about one third of
Tianjin city employees were natives of the city, while another third came
from neighboring Hebei Province. The total family size in 1931 and 1946
was just over eight, and in 1946, the nuclear family within that unit was
just over four, suggesting that most people lived in extended families.108
A closer look at the 1946 survey data reveals that Tianjin civil servants had
a broader idea of family that extended beyond the conjugal, economic, and
cohabiting units. Among the respondents in the 1946 survey, roughly 95 per-
cent included their mother and father as family members, even though only
half of them reported that they lived together; likewise, 78 percent wrote in
grandparents, even though only 4.7 percent of grandfathers and 9.3 percent
of grandmothers were reported as still living. The idea of family relations
even extended beyond the grave: several respondents entered that they were
responsible for the financial well-being of a deceased grandparent. In fact,
respondents reported 8.23 family members on average, even though only 7.22
family members were living. Family also stretched laterally, with
74 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
TABLE 2.1 Family Members Reported on Tianjin Municipal

Employees Survey, 1946
Reported Living Lives in same Supports

household financially
Grandfather 78.09% 4.70% 7.67% 3.34%
Grandmother 78.59% 9.28% 10.64% 7.67%
Father 94.06% 46.78% 42.33% 37.38%
Mother 95.17% 64.36% 55.94% 54.70%
Wife 77.35% 75.37% 68.44% 69.68%
Brothers 94.31% 86.76% 60.52% 37.75%
Sisters 65.72% 63.37% 38.86% 30.20%
Brothers’ wives 17.95% 17.08% 12.13% 7.55%
Source: Data collected from the Tianjin Municipal Archives, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao
[Report on the registration of family conditions], j2- 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815, 5816,
5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946).
94.3 percent reporting that family included their brothers (60.5 percent
reported living with their brothers), while 65.7 percent included sisters
(38.9 percent reported living with their sisters).109 (See table 2.1.)
The employees’ idea of family was thus quite complicated. For most of
these civil servants, family meant more than living nuclear family mem-
bers. Even respondents who lived away from home considered extended
kin to be part of their family. A thirty-six-year-old office head from the
southern province of Guangdong reported that he was financially respon-
sible for ten family members who were not living with him: his mother,
wife, three daughters, sister, brother, sister-in-law, and brother’s two chil-
dren. Individual surveys suggest that respondents who were members of
more financially secure families tended to think of themselves as part of a
large family, whether or not all family members regularly inhabited the
household. A thirty-two-year-old man named Wu hailed from an almost
stereotypically modern Tianjin family that nonetheless had fifteen mem-
bers.110 His grandfather was head of the tax bureau, and his father was in
the department of education. All of the women in his family—his three
sisters, his mother, and three aunts—were educated. One aunt even
worked for the high court in Nanjing. According to Wu, he lived together
with his modern educated aunts and uncles in what Olga Lang would
characterize as a joint family.
As Wu’s case suggests, if civil servants in Tianjin could afford it, they
lived with or supported an extended family. But not all city employees were
as fortunate. Members of the police department, for example, were less
well off than their local government counterparts in 1946. Most policemen
came from areas outside Tianjin and nearby Hebei Province—from impove-
rished areas that were even more devastated by the war than Tianjin. On
average, their families were much smaller (5.9), in part because these
poorer men tended not to bring their parents or grandparents to the city to
live with them. But in addition, once they moved to Tianjin, they stopped
thinking of themselves as connected to a larger family back home.111
Were these cohabiting extended families and geographically scattered
families—which still thought of themselves as a cohesive large family—the
product of short-term family survival techniques occasioned by war, or did
they indicate that China’s “feudal” past had not been eradicated?112 In a
way, both: the diversity of family structures among Tianjin’s urban elites
at the close of the Republican era demonstrated that modernity was never
a simple case of linear progress. Even among civil servants—who were
some of the most educated and modern residents of Tianjin—men with
second wives worked alongside men who lived in nuclear families. As late
as 1946, concubinage, the practice so abhorred by May Fourth– era intel-
lectuals, was alive and well in the Tianjin city government, as eight men
reported that their father had at least one concubine, and two men, one
age forty-six and the other age fifty-four, reported that they lived with two
wives.113
The Tianjin municipal government’s survey of their employees reveals
that even as late as 1946, at the close of the Republican era, Chinese urban
families had not followed social scientific predictions or nationalist calls
to form modern small families. In concluding that well-paid and well-
educated men still thought of themselves as members of an extended
family, the Tianjin data aligned with the results gathered by social
researchers working in China’s family laboratory: as family income
increased, so did family size. Thus the theoretical model that small
76 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
families would naturally evolve in China in conjunction with urbaniza-

tion, modernization, educational opportunity, and economic growth had
failed to materialize. But where changing social conditions had failed to
generate social change according to scientific predictions, nationalist
political ideology might have succeeded in awakening and indoctrinating
Chinese elites to form small families to save the nation, especially in the
case of government civil servants. Although the small family ideology was
certainly a prominent nationalistic discourse during the Republican era,
Tianjin civil servants, at least in practice, did not heed its call. Thus while
the empirical truth of survey data on families from the Republican era
must be taken with a grain of salt, it does suggest that the small families
advocated in nationalist ideology did not appear in practice during the
early twentieth century. In other words, the ideology of the nuclear family
did not enact social change.
The nationalistic small family ideology may not have pervaded local
government. At least in the Tianjin municipal government, which pro-
moted family in some of its social programs, there is no archival evidence
to suggest that the local government endorsed or promoted the small fam-
ily model. In fact, while intellectuals at the national level offered a vision
of society based on social change and reform, Tianjin’s municipal govern-
ment seemed more interested in endorsing a vision of society that encour-
aged social stability and order. That is not to say that Tianjin’s Chinese
municipal government was disconnected from new nationalist state-
building projects. Like many other Chinese cities at the time, Tianjin set
up a bureau of social affairs, known as Shehui ju, whose job it was to main-
tain social order in keeping with new nationalist principles. According to
the bureau’s 1929 annual report, the purpose of the Shehui ju was to eradi-
cate China’s “feudal” past and implement the modern people’s principles
(sanmin zhuyi), and as such it was concerned with customs, marriage and
funerary rituals, movie inspection, attending national product exhibi-
tions, and helping people with low incomes, women, and society more
generally.114 The Shehui ju established poorhouses and night schools to
serve the destitute members of Tianjin’s society; they managed requests
for unionization and oversaw hygiene campaigns.115 As part of their effort
to regulate, they also measured society, conducting surveys on industries,
workers, shops, education, healthcare, prostitution, and employment.116
These new social service institutions became vehicles for disseminating

nationalist ideology as well as vehicles for instituting social control.
Women and family were seen as particularly important targets for the
Tianjin Shehui ju’s reform efforts, and several institutions developed
around services for women.117 By helping women, the Shehui ju hoped to
address what it saw as some of the city’s most pressing social ills: divorce,
poverty, and prostitution. In 1929, the Shehui ju’s Women’s Relief Organi-
zation established a home for wayward women that would educate them
about career options as well as promote ideas about bodily health.118 The
home included fifty women of various ages who had been referred by the
courts and police. Among those women were former prostitutes, servants,
divorced women, child slaves, and concubines—a growing underclass to
complement Tianjin’s flourishing urban elites. Some of these women had
migrated to Tianjin in search of new opportunities. A group of five women
aged eighteen and nineteen, for example, claimed to have worked in facto-
ries in Shanghai and traveled to Tianjin in search of similar work. They
were subsequently either sold into prostitution or took on the work by their
own free will because it was difficult to find other jobs. Other women
claimed to have been brought to Tianjin against their will, some even sold
by relatives into prostitution or servitude.119 Since these cases were
referred to the relief organization’s home by the police or courts, it is not
clear whether these women would have sought the help on their own. Fur-
thermore, their individual stories may have been altered to fit a particular
narrative of destitution, either to avoid prosecution or to earn a bed in the
relief home.
Whether driven by compassion or out of a fear of single women in the
city, controlling women became central to the work of Tianjin’s Shehui ju.
The social bureau claimed to help single women in the city by providing
housing and educational opportunities, and it did indeed run night schools
for women working in factories.120 But ultimately, it decided that marriage
in a family was the best occupation for women. While the Shehui ju pro-
moted a modern society in theory, in practice it was interested in social
control; promoting the family as the basic unit of a society proved to be an
efficient way of doing this. In 1937, the Women’s Relief Organization set up
a matchmaking service for its destitute and divorced women. Interested
men submitted portraits and profiles, presumably for selection by the
78 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
women or the home’s manager. Many of the applicants looking for a wife
were young men who had moved to Tianjin from elsewhere and may have
been too poor to find a spouse by conventional means. But the organiza-
tion also may not have been averse to supporting family arrangements
that might be characterized as feudal, as the profiles of hopeful spouses
also included a man with a forty-four-year-old wife and eight-year-old
daughter looking for a concubine who could bear him a son.121
We have no way of knowing whether the Shehui ju ever introduced a
concubine to this man, as we only have a record of the application. How-
ever, it does come as somewhat of a surprise that an organization that
espoused shedding the “feudal” past would even entertain such a request,
let alone file it away. In the end, the Shehui ju specifically, and the Tianjin
city government more broadly, seem to have been more concerned with
social stability than social reform. Social stability for lower-class women
did not mean forging a new role in urban society but rather finding a place
in family life. The Shehui ju’s promotion of conventional marriage for way-
ward women suggests that the individualistic small family ideology may
not have filtered down to the local level, or that if it did, local elites consid-
ered new conjugal families to be an ideal for elite women and not their
lower-class counterparts.
CONCLUSION
The Chinese household has a long history as a political institution; thus,

when intellectuals in the twentieth century turned to the Chinese family
to save Chinese society, they were in many ways following in the footsteps
of Confucian scholar-officials. But the political and social ideas of family
they proposed were radically different. Formed on the global stage and
bolstered by new theories of social science, the new family ideology broke
from Neo- Confucian political ideology, which called for a cyclical return
to former family forms. Instead, drawing from universal social models,
the new small family ideology proposed that families should and did
change along a teleological line of progress.
Family ideology, however, did not always line up with family in prac-
tice. Making the family both a marker of modernity and a means to
getting there, the new small family ideology proposed a formula of social
change to save China—with a modern economy, education, and national
awakening, Chinese families would become smaller. Survey data from the
first half of the twentieth century, however, suggests that ideology and
practice did not always match up. Despite the requisite inputs, the small
nuclear family did not magically appear in modern China. Part of the
problem began with the formula itself: it relied on cultural assumptions
instead of empirical evidence to argue that Chinese traditional families
had been large. While Olga Lang hinted that households in the past may
not have been large, sociologists today are examining data from imperial
China that confirm her insight.122 The formula also underestimated the
resiliency of the family to adapt to material conditions. In fact, the
extended family form in early twentieth-century China may have been a
response to the drastic social, political, and economic changes taking
place in China at the time. Foreign imperialist incursions, the collapse of
the Qing Empire, the rise of warlord power, war with Japan, industrializa-
tion, and economic uncertainty all may have encouraged Chinese people
to seek social stability and economic support in their extended families.
The new small family ideology, with its focus on the social structure of
the family, did not offer practical advice on how families should live. In
late imperial China, by contrast, constructing a house according to unified
feng shui architectural principles was central to the political stability of
the realm. The house formed a foundation for prosperity not only for the
family who resided within it but also through shared spatial cosmologies,
connecting the inner spaces of the household to the political spaces of
empire. By contrast, the new small family ideology, with its focus on social
structure and relations, disconnected the social relations of the family
from the social space of the house. Thus, without a central political ideol-
ogy to guide them in how to build or design their social spaces, Chinese
people were left to navigate the ideas, examples, and practices of house
and home on their own. The following chapters explore how in construct-
ing, choosing, designing, and residing in the modern house and home,
Tianjin’s urban elites formed new ideas about their individual identities,
their city and the world.
3
Property, Power, and Identity
in a Colonial-Capitalist City
A
s Chinese nationalist ideologues were calling to aban-
don Confucian values and put an end to feudal family
structures, people in Tianjin were constructing a new
social system of individuals in a rapidly changing urban envi-
ronment. Ideas and materiality, the two strands that had been
aligned in late imperial China, came unraveled with the fall of
the Qing. Chinese urbanites picked up these strands, knitting
them together with new threads to produce Tianjin’s social
fabric.1 At first glance, their creation appeared to be a tangled
and contradictory mess, but at closer glance the knots came
together in distinct nodes of power. Property or housing was a
site for one of these knots because it was the center of many
power struggles. As the city grew, multiple colonialisms con-
tested Chinese municipal sovereignty over the urban land-
scape, but affluent Chinese men pushed back against foreign
neighbors and governments, leveraging their economic capital
to build and acquire housing.
While Chinese male elites mobilized their economic capital
to overcome the racialized and national discrimination of for-
eign peoples and governments in their city, they also leveraged
their economic power over Chinese women in property dis-
putes that challenged the rights granted to women under the
new civil code of 1930, a legal reform that was intended to
Property, Power, and Identity 81
strengthen modern China in the face of imperialism. Multiple layers of

identity— Chineseness, economic status, and masculinity—twisted and
tangled around property, and as these layers strengthened into a knot,
property became the locus of patriarchal power. Thus, while New Culture
intellectuals were calling to abolish the patriarchal system of the Confu-
cian family system, patriarchy was being reconstituted in new spaces.
Property in colonial-capitalist Tianjin illuminates how patriarchy is
constructed in materiality and in practice, often irrespective of ideology.
As male intellectuals targeted Confucianism and the feudal family as bul-
warks of patriarchal power that needed to be dismantled, they used the
political and economic position of women as a yardstick for measuring
their progress. In fact, much feminist revisionist scholarship of late impe-
rial China has focused on property in order to demonstrate that women
from these earlier historical periods actually exercised individual agency.2
The legal historian Kathryn Bernhardt, for example, argues that widows
fared better under the property practices of the Qing than under the laws
of the Republican civil code.3 Despite the growing number of academic
studies that illustrate female empowerment in late imperial China, popu-
lar (and even some academic) discourses continue to espouse the idea that
Confucianism oppressed women in the past and that any signs of oppres-
sion today are due to the persistence of Confucian culture. Many of the
same men who first raised this idea of Confucian patriarchy and fought to
dismantle the so-called Confucian family structure, however, were the
architects of new structures of masculine power and patriarchy. Ideology
never oppressed women; systems of power created structural inequalities,
and structural patriarchy outlasts ideas.
Power was built into Tianjin’s property system through new ways of
owning, legislating, and thinking about property. The urban economic
system commodified housing in new ways, and the multiple colonialisms
and partial sovereignty of Republican-era China structured political iden-
tities and legal rights around property. Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system
created this combination of global economic markets and foreign political
rule. Economic, political, and legal structures intertwined to shape the
city and forge nodes of power, and elite Chinese men became experts at
navigating the system that resulted. Thus, examining the development of
Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system and how Chinese men leveraged their
82 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
intersecting identities of class, race, and masculinity to claim power

within the system illuminates how practices, not ideas, forged a new patri-
archal property system in Republican-era China.
THE GROWTH OF THE

COLONIAL- CAPITALIST CITY
In 1846, when Tianjin was on the eve of becoming a treaty-port city, its
population stood at less than 200,000, but it grew to 420,000 in 1906 and
exceeded 1,000,000 by 1928. 4 A multitude of factors contributed to Tian-
jin’s growth. As the largest port city in northern China, Tianjin grew along-
side rising foreign trade. Tianjin’s close proximity to and connections with
the capital city Beijing facilitated this rise, but Tianjin’s growth into a
major northern regional center also contributed to Beijing’s decline. Capi-
tal, resources, and people flowed from Beijing to Tianjin especially after
1927, when the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) under Chiang Kai-shek
moved the capital south to Nanjing.5 Tianjin’s early twentieth-century
growth was also part of a broader trend in Chinese urban development
sparked by World War I. The war brought opportunity to treaty-port cities
like Tianjin, as local Chinese industries rose to fill the gap left by exiting
foreign companies and spawned a growing class of Chinese entrepre-
neurs, a phenomenon that historian Marie- Claire Bergère identified in
Shanghai as the “Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie.”6 Tianjin’s new
elites included warlords and ex-Qing-official investors, as well as families
of more moderate means. The foreign concessions became the most desir-
able residential real estate in the city. Protected by foreign police and mili-
tia, the concessions were harbors of stability during what came to be called
the Warlord Era (1916–1928), a period when bandits and military cliques
battled for control over local territories.
The interwar period became the golden age of Tianjin’s foreign conces-
sions. With Germany and Austria-Hungary forced to relinquish their con-
cessions to the Chinese after World War I, Tianjin had six remaining
foreign concessions, and of these six, the British, French, Italian, and Jap-
anese grew into popular residential districts for foreigners and Chinese
alike. Population in the British Concession rose from 17,000 residents in
1913 to 39,000 in 1929 and 47,000 in 1934.7 Foreign- concession munici-

pal governments welcomed and encouraged urban growth by filling in
previously uninhabitable swampland, widening roads, planting parks, and
supporting the growth of a new speculative real estate industry. Although
foreign businesspeople, teachers, and missionaries populated the conces-
sions, this rapid growth was largely led by Chinese nationals, who
accounted for the majority of residents.
Tianjin’s rapid growth during the twentieth century was fostered by
and solidified under its colonial-capitalist system. Tianjin’s colonialism
was both multiple and partial. During Tianjin’s lifetime as a treaty-port
city nine foreign countries claimed concessions in Tianjin alongside the
Chinese municipal district. (See figure 3.1 and table 3.1.) The simultane-
ously fragmented and multiple nature of colonialism in Tianjin and else-
where in China has led historians to describe Chinese colonialism as
“semi” (partial) or “hypo” (multiple). 8 Indeed, in qualifying China’s colo-
nialism, historians have suggested that Chinese colonialism was some-
how different than “real” colonialism elsewhere. Yet by its very nature, colo-
nial power everywhere could be multiple and partial. Even indisputably
colonized India was occupied by multiple foreign powers, while some
princely states maintained sovereignty, at least in name. Focusing on the
uniqueness of colonial sovereignty in China rather than on the shared
history of global colonial processes, China historians have limited the
opportunities for comparison between China and other colonized places.
Rather than arguing that colonialism in Tianjin was either less or more,
this chapter instead aims to articulate how the colonial process of real
estate shaped Tianjin’s landscape and its people, thereby opening the door
to possible comparative studies of other colonial processes, such as urban
planning and housing between Tianjin and other colonized cities from
Pondicherry to Singapore.
China historians’ understanding of Chinese colonialism as “semi” is
a legacy of how contemporary Chinese political leaders described colonial-
ism in China. Both Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong were inspired by Vladimir
Lenin’s coinage of the term “semi-colony” in his 1916 essay “Imperialism,
the Highest Stage of Capitalism.”9 Lenin understood imperialism to be an
economic process through which “finance capital” called upon state power
to extract “raw materials” from the colonized world. But while Lenin
FIGURE 3.1 Map of Tianjin, 1912. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
TABLE 3.1 Tianjin’s Foreign Concessions
Established Relinquished
British 1860 1943
French 1861 1946
American 1861 1902
Japanese 1888 1945
German 1899 1917
Russian 1900 1924
Austro-Hungarian 1901 1917
Italian 1901 1947
Belgian 1902 1931
Source: Compiled by author from historical data.
described imperialism as an economic process, he understood colonialism

to be based on “territorial division.” In a world increasingly focused on
delineating the boundaries of nation-states, Lenin turned to the nineteenth-
century German geographer Otto Hübner, who used data to divide and
define individual countries, condensing the world into a clear and simple
chart that according to one contemporary review could “be mounted and
hung upon a wall.”10 But Lenin’s idea of the economic process of imperial-
ism proved to be more complicated than Hübner’s chart. Although Lenin
argued that the world was being colonized by “six great powers,” he also
added a new category for places that did not fit the orthodox definition of
colonial occupation—the “semi-colonial countries” of Persia, Turkey, and
China: according to Lenin, they were politically “semi-independent,” but
through their dependence on “finance capital” were almost or quickly
becoming colonized. Lenin defined semi-colonialism as a “transitional
form,” suggesting that while he understood the economic process of
finance capital to bring about colonialism, he ultimately defined colonial-
ism along with his contemporaries as territorial occupation.
If semi-colonialism was a transitional stage, what did that mean for
China? Chinese political leaders asked this question as they explored
86 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
Lenin’s idea of the semi- colony. Sun Yat-sen revised Lenin’s character-
ization of “semi-colonial,” declaring in 1923 that China was in fact a
“hypo-colony,” enslaved by multiple masters.11 According to Sun, the
hypo-colonized China was in many ways worse off than the singular colo-
nized Annam or Korea, where the single colonizer maintained a level of
responsibility for the welfare and maintenance of the colonized land.
Writing in 1939, Mao described China as “semi-colonial” and “semi-
feudal.”12 Imperialism, according to Mao, had both spurred the demise of
China’s feudal society and stunted its economic and social development;
only revolution led by the Chinese Communist Party could bring about
complete social transformation. If semi-feudal explained China’s social
and economic conditions, semi-colonial described its political status.
Looking to Japanese-controlled Manchuria in the north, Mao defined
colonialism in terms of sovereignty, noting that China was both semi-
colonial and colonial.
While Chinese leaders and the global community understood colonial-
ism as territorial occupation, the legal practices of extra-territoriality
in China allowed foreign empires to disguise colonial occupation by
claiming that foreign laws attached to foreign bodies and not Chinese ter-
ritory. Studying the legal and jurisdictional process that formed extra-
territoriality in China and Japan, the historian Pär Kristoffer Cassel claims
that China was never a colony “in the strict sense of the word.”13 Yet in
examining how extraterritoriality was practiced on the ground in the
courts of the Shanghai International Settlement, the legal scholar Teemu
Ruskola concludes that legal practice in the settlement looked “far more
like direct control than any kind of informal imperialism.”14 Under extra-
territorial agreements, Chinese nationals in foreign concessions were still
subjects of Chinese law, but they also were subjected to the foreign laws
and regulations of the concessions. In Tianjin, such foreign regulations in
the concessions ranged from limiting the number of inhabitants in a single
house and maintaining an architectural façade in foreign style to prohibit-
ing gambling parties at home. In granting foreign empires jurisdiction
over parcels of Chinese land, extra-territoriality in Tianjin meant that
each concession acted like a colony even in the strictest sense of legal and
territorial occupation. Focusing on process rather than territory, this chap-
ter aims to move beyond narrower understandings of colonialism that are
anchored in the complete occupation of a single territory by a single colo-

nizing state to examine colonialism through a series of locally embedded
global processes.
At the heart of the colonial process in Tianjin was the real estate market
that connected territorial occupation to capitalist investment and brought
together the politics and the economics of colonialism. Concessions were
occupied spaces, global showplaces, and above all, economic investments.
Tianjin’s multiple foreign empires dictated how the city would expand and
how each concession would grow. But though concession governments
proposed detailed plans for urban growth, they lacked the municipal funds
to develop those plans themselves; as a result, they turned to investors,
many of whom were Chinese. During the golden age of the Tianjin con-
cessions, Chinese people could sometimes exercise agency through their
economic status, but in the push and pull of colonial and economic nego-
tiations, foreign empires always maintained the upper hand. Thus,
unequal power relations dictated Tianjin’s urban growth, even as Chinese
renters, buyers, and investors drove that growth.
With multiple foreign empires located next to each other and embed-
ded in a Chinese city, and with foreign residents scattered across it,
Tianjin compressed the global stage into a single cosmopolitan space.
Foreign empires performed colonialism on this global stage for multiple
audiences that included local Chinese residents, citizens at home in the
metropole, and other foreigners. At a time when nations and borders
were forming and being tested across the globe, empire became a mech-
anism for forging the identities of a nation, and the colony offered a
“clean slate” onto which empire could project new nationalist visions of
a modern city.15 Thus for Italy, whose only Asian colony was Tianjin, the
concession became an imperial showpiece, an urban work of art care-
fully planned and built by Consul General Vincenzo Fileti to include
indoor plumbing and paved roads, and indeed the first concession to
have asphalt roads throughout. The Italian press back home sang the
praises of the modern urban colony, claiming that the Italian Concession
was one of the finest in Tianjin.16 Italian-style buildings filled with
imported Italian marble conjured national pride for Italians back home
when juxtaposed against the French Beaux Arts and British Gothic
architecture across the river.
88 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
In a compressed and multinational city, a beautiful concession could be

a source of national pride; but the city’s cosmopolitanism also posed prob-
lems for local concession governments. Take schools, for example. For-
eign schools were material manifestations of empire, colonial institutions
that marked the boundaries of a foreign empire on Chinese soil. Thus in
the 1920s, Tianjin was home to a British school, an American school, three
French schools, a Jewish school, and one Japanese school; a German
school was suspended after World War I, and a planned Italian school was
never built.17 In a city with a diverse population of Chinese, foreign, and
stateless people, and in a city where many expatriate youth had never
stepped foot in the motherland, schools became primary sites of national
and religious indoctrination. But in concessions whose foreign popula-
tions were too small to sustain the schools over time, what was a nation to
do?
Despite a dwindling British population, for example, the otherwise fis-
cally conservative British Municipal Council (BMC) continued to fund a
British school for fear, in the words of its constituents, that British children
would be forced to seek their education at the French Jesuit or convent
schools.18 The school was kept open even though British pupils were just
under half of those enrolled in the school, which included Russian, Ameri-
can, and even Chinese children.19 Moreover, not all British children
attended the British school. Brian Power, an Irish child of the British
Empire, for example, transferred to the Catholic French Marist Brothers
School, where his best friends were Chinese and Russian.20 While the
BMC debated dwindling numbers in the British school, the concession-
supported Chinese school, meant to serve the British Concession’s ample
population of Chinese residents, was rapidly expanding so that by 1932,
there were 735 students enrolled in the Chinese school compared to 447 in
the British school.21
Enrollment figures of Chinese and foreign concession schools suggest
that Tianjin was a Chinese cosmopolitan city, boasting a diverse population
of foreign nationals yet numerically dominated by Chinese residents. This
cosmopolitanism fostered insecurities among foreigners in concession
governments, who tried to stake clear boundaries in their colonial negoti-
ations. Chinese residents of foreign concessions could find ways to exploit
those insecurities to get what they wanted, but foreign empire always
maintained a privileged edge. For example, the BMC continued to subsi-

dize the British municipal school at a much higher rate than the Chinese
school even when enrollment numbers did not warrant it.
Tianjin’s compressed cosmopolitan space also fostered cooperation
among foreign empires when they had common security or economic
interests. The Boxer Uprising brought the militaries of the Eight Nation
Alliance together to defend their security successfully, even when soldiers
of differing nationalities were reputed to fight among one another.22 These
countries continued to find a common interest in local security as they
banded together to govern the Chinese city after the uprising. Collabora-
tion was most successful, however, when foreign empires cooperated to
facilitate commerce. In 1901, the foreign governments in Tianjin worked
with Chinese representatives to establish the Hai River Conservancy
Commission, intended to ensure that the Hai River was properly dredged
and maintained for shipping. Likewise, foreign empires joined forces in
the 1920s to construct a modern drawbridge across the river that provided
direct access to Tianjin’s main railway station while allowing ships to pass
through.
Yet colonial capitalism was not always rational or even efficient. While
Tianjin’s multiple empires joined forces in developing commercial trans-
portation routes, they never came together over other municipal services
such as policing or public utilities, even when it might have been in the
interest of economy. Capitalism provided the impetus for colonialism in
Tianjin, but colonial competition could undermine capitalist markets. It
was far from obvious that national interest should trump economic inter-
est in the concessions; foreign governments, after all, considered Tianjin’s
concessions to be economic outposts rather than colonies. The home
country offered little financial support to develop infrastructure, and
never considered local Chinese residents of foreign concessions to be colo-
nial subjects of empire.23 In concessions such as the British, French, and
Japanese, foreign consulates represented the laws and interests of foreign
states, while locally elected foreign municipal councils governed the eco-
nomic interests of the local concession community.
Still, foreign members of the municipal councils, most of whom were
businessmen and not colonial bureaucrats, viewed concession plans
and policies through the lens of imperial ideals of “civilization and
90 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
enlightenment,” and they often sought ways to align local issues with the
national concerns of the home country. Foreign council members imag-
ined themselves to be much like colonial civil servants dispatched by the
mother country; they articulated plans for urban development through
the imperialist vision of the home country, and not just through the lenses
of business interest. While the imperialist visions of these concession gov-
ernments shared common goals of modern, hygienic urbanization, each
concession articulated a distinct, national vision for implementing that
goal. As a result, the quality of policing, level of plumbing, and even the
electric voltage varied across the city, dependent upon the national ideals
in a particular concession.24 By the time Tianjin’s real estate market began
to take off in the 1910s and 1920s, this patchwork of services could be a
liability or a competitive advantage, increasing or decreasing the price of
housing. Thus in a compressed cosmopolitan city of multiple foreign
empires, the colonial management of each concession fueled a market
competition over real estate drawn along the national lines of empire.
COMMODIFIED HOUSING
When foreign empires initially established concessions in Tianjin, they

were largely interested in extracting natural resources such as coal from
China’s northern lands, but by the 1920s, investors began to see the land
itself as a resource. Their capital found its way into the booming Tianjin
real estate market, a remapping of colonial space that transformed urban
space into a highly sought-after commodity. Under the logic of colonial-
capitalism, Chinese land had shifted from being a site of production to
being the product itself. Much like in other cities during this global period
of high modernity from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries,
real estate investment became a driving force in Tianjin urbanization.
The growth of a housing market in Tianjin illustrates the similarities or
simultaneity of some aspects of modern urban experience, while also
suggesting how global processes unfold differently according to local his-
torical circumstance. In her history of the Manhattan real estate market,
Elizabeth Blackmar examines how housing became a profitable commod-
ity in nineteenth-century New York, with her conclusion building on a
historical trajectory of urban modernity that moved from rural to urban

and created a division between the two.25 Chinese patterns of urban
growth, however, were different. Building on William Skinner’s model of
the urban-rural continuum, historians of late imperial China have argued
that city and countryside were historically linked in Chinese people’s
minds and social behavior and were physically connected through shared
architectural styles.26 During Tianjin’s rapid rise, many new urbanites still
maintained ties to their rural native place, but ideas and practices of the
city also changed. Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system disrupted the city’s
late imperial past, while also distinguishing it from other cities like New
York. The rise of a housing market in Tianjin was not new per se, but
colonial-capitalism introduced new kinds of urban planning and building
practices alongside new modes of economic investment and legal con-
cepts of property that recognized individual or corporate investors instead
of families.
Under Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system, concession governments
established urban plans and zoning regulations based in the ideals of
empire, but because they lacked the municipal funds to develop these
plans themselves, they turned to private investors to build the concessions
instead. The Italians, for example, tried to fund their concession’s devel-
opment by auctioning off rights to portions of their concession before
even breaking ground on a single public building. 27 Other municipal gov-
ernments tried to select investors with whom they shared common inter-
ests, such as nationality or language, to develop their district. The British
Concession, for example, awarded most of their housing development to
the Anglo-American-managed Tientsin Land Investment Company. The
French, on the other hand, turned to the French-speaking Belgian bank
Crédit Foncier to develop private real estate in their concession.28
The colonial-capitalist real estate system also blurred lines between
public government and private business, since investors often sat on
municipal councils and prominent council members worked on the boards
of land investment companies. In choosing the Tientsin Land Investment
Company, the British Concession turned to a company with connections
to the old Tianjin Provisional Government (TPG) and the current British
Municipal Council. Founded in 1902, the Tientsin Land Investment Com-
pany was one of Tianjin’s oldest real estate companies; it included such
92 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
TPG officers as C. D. Tenney and Charles Denby Jr. on its founding board.
The Tientsin Land Investment Company continued to include members of
the BMC among its investors well into the 1930s.29 Thus, as municipal
planners and real estate developers worked closely together, the two forces
became difficult to separate. Did the Tientsin Land Investment Company
draft the plans to expand the British Concession or did the BMC lead pri-
vate development through its zoning laws? Actually, the order of events is
beside the point, as capitalism and colonialism went hand-in-hand in
treaty-port China. The men who sat on the BMC were not British colonial
bureaucrats armed with civilization and enlightenment, preparing to
transform the Chinese populace, but instead were businessmen who had
come to Tianjin to make money.
Like their foreign counterparts, Chinese investors with business or
political connections to certain districts began investing in real estate as
individuals or as part of corporations. Yuan Shikai and his cohorts from
the Beiyang Army led development of his new municipal government dis-
trict, Xin hebei qu.30 In the Japanese Concession, a former comprador for
a Japanese company established the Lijin gongsi (literally “benefit Tianjin”)
in 1901 to develop holdings there, investing in a range of buildings from
residential alleyway homes to brothels and gambling dens.31 While sev-
eral Chinese investors contributed to growth in the Japanese Concession,
other foreign concessions welcomed Chinese investors to varying
degrees. The French Concession, for example, did not allow Chinese peo-
ple to purchase real estate on the main thoroughfare, Rue de France.32
Foreign real estate companies, however, manipulated and even profited
from colonial investment regulations by appointing foreign companies as
trustees for Chinese owners. Crédit Foncier acted on behalf of Chinese
investors buying property in the French Concession for an initial 1 percent
fee and an annual fee after that, and Chinese businessmen eventually
became the primary investors in the Anglo-American Tientsin
Land Investment Company, making up 63.5 percent of all investors by
the 1940s.33
Chinese investors also took advantage of the political vacuum created
in a multiply governed city. At the turn of the twentieth century, a par-
ticularly enterprising group of investors turned to a section of the city
located between the Chinese city, the Japanese Concession, and the
French Concession called the san bu guan, or “three do not deal with it,”
since none of the three bordering municipal governments were interested
in developing it. Investors included the warlord-turned-developer Li Tun,
who established a real estate company called the Dongxing gongsi, and
former Qing minister Rong Yuan, who established the Rongye gongsi.34 Li
and Rong helped transform this untouchable zone into the city’s main
shopping and entertainment thoroughfare until the French Concession
took its place in the 1920s, inspiring the district to be renamed nanshi
(southern market) for its location to the south of the former city wall.35
Real estate investment became a major business in Tianjin, and war-
lords and retired Qing bureaucrats became some of the biggest investors.
Marie- Claire Bergère suggests that in contrast to Shanghai, Tianjin’s
warlords and bureaucrats were not true entrepreneurs because of their
political connections and their tendency to invest in property and finan-
cial speculation over modern industry.36 In other words, unlike Shanghai,
Tianjin never developed a true bourgeois class. Chinese real estate inves-
tors may not have followed the same pattern of social change as France’s
bourgeoisie, yet they did represent a distinct break from China’s past.
These men acted as individual investors or joined forces with other male
investors to work as a group, but they rarely invested on behalf of the fam-
ily as an economic unit; at least nominally, these investors claimed prop-
erty ownership as individuals or corporations and not as families or
lineages.37
The new real estate market also changed social status through new
types of housing and by spatially reengineering how social status related
to political and economic spaces in the city. In Qing-era Tianjin, the social
elite comprised salt merchants and scholar-gentry, and their housing clus-
tered around the political and economic centers of the city.38 The Tianjin
historian Liu Haiyan argues that China historians have been wrong to
assume that social status and residential districts were not related in the
late imperial Chinese city. Liu notes that in Tianjin, at least, residences
were sited according to social position, with the city’s two elite groups,
Qing officials and salt merchants, setting up residences close to the city’s
two centers, the yamen in the center and the market outside the east gate.39
According to an old Tianjin saying, “the north gate is for nobles; the east
gate for the rich; the south gate is for the poor; and the west gate is for the
94 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
lowly” (beimen gui, dongmen fu, nanmen pin, ximen jian). A nineteenth-
century population survey corroborates this evidence, noting that almost
half the city’s gentry and salt merchants lived in the city center, with the
east gate being the second-most popular neighborhood for these elites,
while only a small number of gentry and no salt merchants lived in the
poor southern district. 40
By the twentieth century, with the end of the civil service exam and the
rise of foreign trade, scholars and salt merchants ceased to dominate Tian-
jin’s social ranks; moreover, the city’s political and economic centers mul-
tiplied and shifted. Multiple foreign political centers sprang up, dotting
the banks of the Hai River; they were joined by the Chinese government,
which abandoned its location within the city walls. The landscape of Tian-
jin’s mercantile center also changed dramatically, with banks, trading
houses, and mining companies like the Kailan Mining Administration set-
ting up offices to create a new economic center of the city, located along an
avenue that ran parallel to the Hai River and transected the French, Brit-
ish, and German Concessions. In fact, depending on where you were
standing, and at what moment in Tianjin’s history, that same avenue could
be called Rue de France (along its northern section, in the French Conces-
sion), Victoria Road (in the middle, British section), and Kaiser Wilhelm
Strasse or, after World War I, Woodrow Wilson Road (the southern sec-
tion). The social demography of the city also changed. The area around
the old north gate, once known as the place of nobles, became home to
Tianjin’s working class, while some elite native Tianjin families continued
to hold on to their grand Qing-era courtyard houses. 41 Tianjin’s civil ser-
vants lived dispersed throughout the city, while warlords lived in grand
villas safely ensconced in the Italian and French Concessions, next door to
bankers, compradors, and intellectuals. 42
Economic status displaced Neo- Confucian social hierarchies as the
determinant of where people lived. Simply put, in the new Tianjin, Chinese
people lived where they could afford to. Foreign-concession governments
tried and often failed to control Chinese residents in the concessions. For
instance, the Italian Concession attempted to engineer the social makeup
of their district by mandating that only Chinese people of a “certain char-
acter” could reside there. 43 In fact, while one of modern China’s most pro-
lific journalists, Liang Qichao, lived in the Italian Concession, so did
several notorious warlords. 44 In a concession where resources were nota-

bly low, a potential resident’s suitability seemed to be based less on social
character or profession than on ability to pay. Thus in twentieth-century
Tianjin, urbanites lived where they found housing they could afford, and
the façade and the location of a house likewise marked their economic sta-
tus. Moreover, close proximity to political and commercial spaces no lon-
ger designated a higher status for residential spaces.
As Tianjin’s residential spaces disconnected from political and busi-
ness spaces, and as the social value of housing was tied to cost, Tianjin’s
socio-spatial frameworks began to resemble a Euro-American ideal of
public and private separate spheres. But far from a “natural” transforma-
tion following an orderly economic reorganization, Tianjin’s colonial-
capitalist real estate market instead engineered this new socio-spatial
scaffolding, reconfiguring the city with the aim of maximizing profit.
When the British Municipal Council proclaimed that its goal was to create
a garden city on Chinese soil, they were invoking the residential ideals of
the British Empire, but more importantly they were calling upon a com-
mercial urban planning model that created distinct, for-profit residential
commuter suburbs. 45 While concession governments were drawing on
global prototypes to remap the city, they were also reacting against local
examples of urban organization in Tianjin and elsewhere in China. In late
imperial China, city neighborhoods and individual courtyard houses
mixed business and residential use. This practice persisted in Tianjin’s
Chinese-controlled city and to some extent in the Japanese Concession. 46
Public and private also mixed in Shanghai’s overcrowded neighborhoods,
where commerce intersected with home life and multiple families
squeezed into partitioned houses intended for single-family use. 47
Since Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist real estate market had taken off later
than Shanghai’s, Tianjin’s foreign concessions enjoyed the hindsight of
looking at Shanghai as a model of how not to plan a city. Tianjin’s French
Consulate received reports from their concession in Shanghai, the Tianjin
British Municipal Council closely followed the housing crisis in Shang-
hai’s international concession, and social science journals reported on
Shanghai’s “vile” slums. 48 Shanghai’s housing market embodied unbri-
dled capitalism. In an overcrowded housing market, renters became land-
lords and divided up their single-family houses to rent out rooms. But
96 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
while urbanites on the ground made money in this system, property own-
ers and investors lost out.
Working from Shanghai as a case of undesired urban development,
colonial-capitalist municipal councils in Tianjin’s foreign concessions cre-
ated urban plans and zoning laws to prevent overcrowding and enhance
profits for investors and property owners. To encourage a particular kind
of market growth that would avoid the Shanghai model and promote a
friendly environment for investment, concession governments like the
Italians and the British instituted zoning regulations. Colonial-capitalist
governments could not afford to base zoning regulations explicitly on race
or nationality because they needed Chinese people to invest in, buy, and
rent the new concession housing. So instead they focused on measures to
keep out the Chinese laboring classes who had crowded Shanghai. After
all, in a city of multiple empires, individual concessions did not need to
worry about where workers would live; it simply was not their problem.
To head off subdividing and subletting, the British carefully calculated
how many cubic feet should be required per occupant and included these
calculations as they created zones for different grades of housing in their
new Extra-Mural Area. 49 Plans included the size of individual lots, the dis-
tance between houses, what kinds of houses could be built in each zone,
and whether businesses could be established. Zoning regulations thereby
ensured that each neighborhood would maintain its distinct character, so
that the British Municipal Council could design social distinction into its
concession. In the British Concession, zones were appropriately titled
first, second, and third class; the first-class zone offered the largest lots,
intending them as sites for single-family villas, presumably for the largest
price tag. The first-class zone also forbade businesses, while higher-
numbered zones allowed some mixed use.50 By locating the largest single-
family homes furthest from public or commercial buildings and calling
the neighborhood “first-class,” BMC planners engineered a socio-spatial
system in which the largest, most private, and presumably most expensive
houses would designate the highest-class inhabitants.
Through zoning regulations and market practices, zoning in the Euro-
pean concessions institutionalized and commodified the Euro-American
notion of separate spheres in Tianjin. The British Concession’s colonial-
capitalist real estate development inscribed a new market idea that the
farther private housing was located from the public spheres of commerce
and politics, the more expensive it would become. Likewise, the Italian
Concession decided to bank solely on the residential real estate market,
and explicitly forbade any businesses from setting up outright.51 At first
glance, the new European practice of separating domestic dwellings from
businesses seemed aimed at removing the private life of housing from the
dirty world of urban commerce. But ironically, this move helped to turn
housing into a business itself, because the more planners drew a line
between a house and its commercial urban environment, the more com-
mercial housing became. Moreover, the further housing was removed
from the halls of government, the more it became entangled in concession
and Republican politics.
THE POLITICS OF PROPERTY RIGHTS
While China’s long legal tradition regulated property ownership through

standard contracts and practices, the colonial-capitalist system introduced
new legal understandings of property rights that connected property own-
ership to political rights.52 Madeleine Zelin argues that understandings of
property rights are culturally constructed, and that Chinese notions of
property differed from those of the West.53 Chinese understood property
as a tangible thing that could be owned, whereas Western cultural ideals
had come to link property to a bundle of rights. Indeed, according to the
historian Jonathan Ocko, property became the core metaphor in Anglo-
American political ideology.54 Property was connected to the individual
and the individual’s economic and political rights. Ocko notes that China’s
political metaphor, by contrast, was the family.
By the early twentieth century, however, Tianjin had experienced two
major political changes that caused the cultural understandings of prop-
erty to shift from family to individual. The first was the arrival and installa-
tion of multiple foreign empires, which imposed their ideas about property
onto Chinese soil; the second was the fall of the Qing Empire, which
had held the family at the center of political discourse. These political
events changed how people possessed property—property ownership
moved from the family to the individual—and they changed people’s
98 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
cultural understanding of property—property became endowed with

political rights.
When the foreign-led Tianjin Provisional Government instructed Yuan
Shikai, viceroy of the region at the time, to move his local government out
of the old Chinese city, they also required that he take on foreign advisers.
Yuan carried out reforms beyond their instructions by experimenting with
new forms of governing. In Qing-era China, city governments were staffed
with officials who had passed the requisite level of the civil service exam.
With the abolition of the civil service exam in 1905, Yuan began to set up a
municipal government system in Tianjin that was to serve as a model for
Chinese cities elsewhere.55 The system that went into effect in May 1907
granted suffrage to men over the age of twenty-five who were natives of
Tianjin or had resided in the city for at least five years. Voters had to be lit-
erate enough to write their name, place of residence, and occupation, and
they had to hold at least 2,000 taels of property. Voters in the general elec-
tion selected 135 delegates from a list of candidates with professional and
educational pedigrees that included college graduates, former officials,
acclaimed writers, and directors of public organizations. These delegates
in turn selected thirty members for the municipal council.56 According to
this new system, political identity was no longer based on mastery of the
Chinese classics and ability to pass the imperial examination, but on edu-
cation, profession, and property-holding status.57
Foreign concessions also turned to property as the basis for determin-
ing the right to participate in municipal governance, but the level at which
they allowed Chinese property owners to partake of those rights varied.
Chinese residents were active on the Japanese municipal council from the
start, and Chinese representatives even surpassed the number of Japanese
members in 1914.58 The French Concession, by contrast, hesitated in allow-
ing Chinese to even own property, while the British Concession initially
denied property owners of other nationalities to participate in concession
governance even as property formed the basis for political participation by
Britons.59 According to the 1900 “Local Land Regulations and General
Regulations” of the British Municipal Council, in order to qualify as a
“land renter” or property holder, one had to be a British subject or a natu-
ralized British subject. Subjects of foreign states were allowed to hold land
with permission from their national authority and had to abide by the
regulations and by-laws of the concession. The regulations also estab-

lished an elected council charged with levying taxes and holding public
meetings, and each land-renter was ensured one vote.60
For foreign residents of the concessions, municipal life in Tianjin was
not about experimentation in democratic governance; it was about mak-
ing money. This had two consequences for politics in the British Conces-
sion. First, this created a tension between British residents’ reluctance to
allow Chinese political participation and their need for Chinese capital to
fund the expanding concession. Second, the concession as a money-
making, rather than civilizing, enterprise gave rise to a political system in
which the weight of a person’s vote was linked to his financial stake in the
concession. While Great Britain had a history of linking taxpaying or
property-holding status to voter eligibility, Tianjin’s British Concession
took this tradition a step further by granting property-owning individuals
a certain number of votes based on how much property they held in the
concession. In other words, the more property you owned, the more your
vote counted.
These two issues came to a head beginning in the 1910s, when the Brit-
ish leased more land from the local Chinese government to expand into
what they called the Extra-Mural Area. In the Extra-Mural Area, rules for
political participation changed, having been negotiated under different
terms: notably, Chinese residents or “ratepayers” were allowed to hold
land and vote on the council. Ratepayers in the Extra-Mural Area were
granted a proportional vote based upon the amount of property they held,
though Chinese land owners were held to a higher minimum requirement
than foreigners.61 Despite these restrictions on Chinese participation, the
Chinese vote became a point of contention among local British residents
after the British consulate informed them that the two settlements would
have to combine jurisdictions under a single council. At a 1918 meeting to
discuss amalgamation, a British resident named S. G. Teakle stated his
aversion to giving Chinese a voice on the council. He suggested that con-
cessions were for foreigners “to get away from Chinese society,” and that
Chinese residents could “experiment with running a Western-style
municipality in other parts of China.” He also imagined that the Chinese
government did not want Chinese people to hide from Chinese law in the
concessions.62
100 DOMESTIC EMPIRES
At the heart of Teakle’s fears lay an insecurity that Chinese capital

would overtake foreign political power. This insecurity was grounded in
the reality that the rising Chinese demand for concession housing meant
that fewer foreigners could afford to buy or rent property. The British
Municipal Council’s 1912 report noted the influx of wealthy Chinese into
foreign concessions, stating that “Many of the more well-to-do [Chinese]
refugees bought land in the western parts of the Extension and built
houses.”63 By 1921, foreign residents were beginning to feel the strain on
housing, and at a meeting of general electors of the British Municipal
Council, a British resident named Woodhead voiced his concern that “the
Chinese demand for residences in the foreign concessions and especially
in the British Concession is making it extremely difficult for foreigners of
moderate means to obtain suitable housing accommodation.”64 Wood-
head suggested that in the spirit of urban councils in Britain that provided
housing for the working class, the British Municipal Council in Tianjin
should provide subsidized housing for the foreign middle class.65 Wood-
head’s concern pointed to a growing sense in Europe that not only did
housing represent an individual’s identity (middle-class people lived in
“suitable” housing), but that urban housing was a public right.
Between 1913 and 1925, the Chinese population of the British Conces-
sion had doubled, becoming nearly fifty times larger than its British popu-
lation.66 While some BMC voters may have feared that Chinese residents
were dominating the property rolls, and were thus a potential political
threat, the Chinese voice on the council remained quiet. This changed
once Chinese ratepayers were assessed heavier transfer fees on selling
land than their foreign counterparts. At a 1927 meeting of the general elec-
tors, a Mr. Shen lodged a complaint. Shen was a Chinese comprador for the
Belgian bank Crédit Foncier, which had been responsible for real estate
development in the British, French, and Italian Concessions. He drew up a
list of demands that included translating council regulations into Chinese,
and he demanded the council’s serious attention for “the unique requests
of Chinese landlords, merchants and residents in the area” when deciding
concession policies.67 As a comprador, a go-between for foreign and local
businesses, Shen owed his economic well-being to the colonial-capitalist
system. Yet as a Chinese homeowner in the British Concession, he identi-
fied less with the colonial political-economic system that created his
status than with his Chinese neighbors. In response, the council chairman
brushed aside Shen’s request and suggested that “if Chinese themselves
regularly attend and take an interest,” the council would “carry on in good
will.”68 The chairman’s statement was greeted by a protest from another
Chinese voter named Dong, who addressed the council in Chinese. Dong
stated that he could not understand English and suggested that the Chi-
nese councilors should translate. He was then joined by Mr. Shen, who this
time spoke in Chinese, declaring that the council must hire an inter-
preter.69 The objections succeeded: shortly thereafter, all British Munici-
pal Council documents were published in both English and Chinese.
At this meeting, the Chinese ratepayers used language to exercise
power. The decision to voice Chinese demands in their native language
rather than English seems to have been deliberate. As a concession prop-
erty owner with an interest in attending council meetings, it seems likely
that Dong could have spoken English. Shen, a comprador of a Belgian
company, certainly would have been comfortable conducting business in
Chinese, English, and perhaps even French. Indeed, Shen voiced his ini-
tial concerns in English, the lingua franca of the council, and switched to
Chinese in solidarity with Dong. Filling the site of British colonial power
with Chinese language, Dong and Shen forced the council to acknowledge
that they were beholden to a Chinese constituency, and by 1936 this con-
stituency had become so active on the BMC that Chinese electors out-
numbered non- Chinese.70
ENGENDERING PROPERTY
With property rights increasingly associated with the individual, rather

than the family, political reformers turned to female property rights as a
way to bring about gender equality and to eradicate the extended-family
property system. The Republican government instituted a new legal civil
code in 1929 and 1930 that introduced female inheritance and property
rights alongside marriage and divorce rights. The legal reforms encour-
aged a cascade of litigation in which women articulated new gendered
identities through a legal discourse of “rights consciousness.”71 Outside the
courtroom, however, property was governed by overlapping understandings
of ownership and rights. In a city of multiple jurisdictions such as Tianjin,

property was defined through concession governance and registration
practices, Chinese law, family relations, and individual autonomy. Women
may have been granted property rights under the law, but a female indi-
vidual’s legal and political rights through property ownership were rarely
realized in practice.
Under the new individual rights-based political structure, a house went
from being a ritual space to a tangible manifestation of an individual’s
property ownership and political rights. This ideological transition ren-
dered the political relationship between a woman and the house ambigu-
ous. In late imperial China, a woman’s gendered and political roles were
associated with spatial practices and spatial relations inside the house.72
Chinese socio-spatial cosmologies connected the spaces of the house to
the larger realm of the empire; thus, when a woman prepared and placed
ritual offerings at the ancestral altar, she not only defined her position in
the family but also enacted her role as a subject of the state. While ritual
practices in the household outlasted the Qing, the political position that a
woman performed when enacting those rituals crumbled along with the
empire. Under the new political ideologies of the Republican era, officials
and reformers no longer viewed housing design and household ritual prac-
tice as political acts. Instead, they introduced the house as a piece of capi-
tal that could transform its owner into a citizen of the state. As property
became endowed with a new politics, legal reformers put property owner-
ship in the hands of individual men, hoping to direct loyalty away from the
family and toward the state. At the same time, property rights for women
became an avenue for legal gender equality.
Chinese legal reformers paid attention to female property rights in the
hopes of improving China’s global standing. Chinese reformers targeted
several issues: colonial legal structures in foreign concessions and extra-
territoriality limited Chinese sovereignty over Chinese soil; and more-
over, women had long been a yardstick for measuring Chinese civilization
and modernity. Reforming the legal position of women thus became a way
for China to enhance its global image. China’s legal reformers believed
that if they could “de- Confucianize” China’s laws and implement “uni-
versal” individual rights–based law, they could join the modern family of
nation-states, reclaim their territory, and abolish foreign extra-territoriality
on Chinese soil.73 Advocates had attempted to reform the law as early as

the late Qing, but the new civil code was not instituted until 1929. The civil
code granted daughters and widows the right to inherit property and
included generous provisions that allowed women to file for divorce and
claim property.74 Moreover, the civil code’s call to grant women equal
inheritance and break patrilineal succession went further than earlier
Chinese attempts at legal reform, signaling the extent to which May
Fourth ideas about the small family had influenced China’s new legal and
political cultures.75
Like their May Fourth predecessors, Guomindang legal reformers
wanted not only to bring about gender equality but also to take down the
“feudal” Chinese family. Because reformers saw patrilineal succession of
property as the glue that held that feudal family together, the new civil
code moved property ownership from the family to the individual, chang-
ing both when and how property was divided. In late imperial China, each
male household member had been entitled to a share of the property,
which was itself managed by the male household head. When the head
died, the property was not typically divided among male household mem-
bers; instead, it remained in the household, managed under a patrilineal
heir. The property was divided only when, under extenuating circum-
stances, the household could no longer remain together, at which point
property was divided among male household members through a process
known as fen jia. But under the new property law, in which property
belonged to the individual and not the household, property belonged to
the individual household head, and was divided upon his death among all
family members, including his widow, his daughters, and his granddaugh-
ters. Patrilineal inheritance was to give way to a division among individu-
als, including women.76
Yet the civil code had only mixed success in bringing about gender
equality through property. While abolishing patrilineal succession granted
daughters and granddaughters a right to the family property for the first
time, the law could disadvantage widows. Requiring property division at
the moment of death and then granting the widow only a portion of that
property, put her at the mercy of her husband’s children. Under pre-reform
state policies that had promoted chaste widows, the Qing court had often
ruled in favor of widows. A widow could select a supportive male heir or
she could require that her new household continue to support her.77 Under
the new law, however, a widow was only entitled to a portion of her hus-
band’s estate, and since the law no longer required that her family support
her, she could find that she was unable to keep or maintain her house.78
The civil code may not have changed gender relations overnight, but it
did introduce a new way of thinking about the individual, property, and
gender roles. The legal historian Margaret Kuo argues that the Guomind-
ang government “was never able to remake society according to its ideo-
logical vision,” but that the civil code provided a legal and discursive
framework of “rights consciousness” through which Chinese people
reshaped their ideas about marriage and the family through litigating
from the ground up.79 This language of female property rights was dissem-
inated swiftly into urban areas such as Tianjin.
A few months after the code was put into place, the Tianjin municipal
government issued a handwritten memo explaining how the new regula-
tions would affect married women in Tianjin.80 The statement focused on
widow inheritance, noting that all women married after the law’s enact-
ment would have the right to inherit property. Moreover, women who had
previously been denied inheritance rights by the court would have six
months after the publication of the Tianjin memo to come forward and
claim that property. According to Tianjin municipal tax records from
the 1930s and 1940s, several women owned property in the Chinese-
controlled city under the new property law, suggesting that the civil code
had helped to change the culture of property ownership. Since gender can-
not always be easily discerned from a name in Chinese, some records
made special note of the owner’s gender by ascribing the title nüshi. The
women who owned property in Tianjin’s Chinese city either had pur-
chased the property themselves or received it from a male relative.81 One
woman owned property along the busy East Road of the Chinese city
where the wall once stood, while another woman managed a rental prop-
erty with more than a hundred rooms on the city outskirts.82
Property disputes offer further insight into how Chinese people negoti-
ated the new legal culture of individual property rights in a society that
still organized its ideas about property around the family.83 The new civil
code was designed to promote a society in which nuclear families were the
standard form of family organization, and in which the individual or
corporation was the primary economic rights holder. Yet Chinese society
did not fit that ideal type. Moreover, under the colonial-capitalist system,
Chinese courts did not have complete jurisdiction over property held in
foreign concessions, and foreign courts did not rule over Chinese citizens.
Chinese property cases were heard by Chinese courts, but Chinese home-
owners in foreign concessions were required to register their property
with the foreign concession government. In a multiply colonized Tianjin,
the new Republican government’s political ideology of a citizen-state rela-
tionship expressed through individual property rights was interrupted by
layers of colonial laws. The multiplicity of property laws and rights created
gaps, confusions, and contradictions that Chinese individuals and fami-
lies could exploit. A female property owner could call upon the European
legal culture of individual property rights to ask the concession to help
execute the new civil code on her behalf; likewise, a family could seek the
concession’s support of a male property owner’s privilege to deny his wife
the right to manage the family property.
Living under multiple property jurisdictions and changing legal cul-
tures, Chinese women in Tianjin’s foreign concession negotiated multi-
farious layers of state, colonial, and global power to claim property rights
and ownership. Extra-territoriality meant that an individual’s property
rights were connected to that individual’s home country, no matter where
the property was located. Chinese courts oversaw disputes by Chinese
people who owned property in the Italian Concession, while an American
living in the British Concession would have taken a property case to the
American consular court. But while the home country determined an
individual’s property rights, the concession government decided whether
or not that individual had the right to buy or sell concession property.
Property owners in the French Concession had to file their title deed in
multiple offices, including the concession, the home consulate for foreign-
ers, the bureau of foreign affairs, and the local Chinese government.84 The
French Concession verified whether or not a title deed was valid, and they
could engage their police force to investigate a title’s legitimacy before a
property transfer. In some instances the concession denied the sale of a
property based on the deed’s validity.85 Thus, while foreign courts could
not oversee Chinese cases, concession governments maintained authority
over property ownership. At the same time, this offered some Chinese
residents of foreign concessions an alternative avenue for appeals, espe-

cially when they were waiting for their cases to be heard by the Chinese
court or when they did not want to take their case to court at all.86
The two cases from Tianjin’s French Concession illuminate how Tian-
jin urbanites living in the foreign concessions negotiated multiple political
layers of property regimes to forge their gendered, individual, and familial
identities.87 Moreover, these cases suggest that new cultures of individual
property rights may have supported masculine power over female rights.
The first case involved a woman seeking a divorce.
On March 6, 1931, a Tianjin attorney named Richard T. Evans submit-
ted a letter to the French consulate on behalf of his client Mrs. He Zhang
Suling, asking the consulate and the concession to protect Mrs. He and her
property as she waited to have her case heard by the Chinese court.88
Mrs. He and her husband owned property in the heart of the French Con-
cession off of Rue de Passe along an alleyway named Tianchang Li. The
property had been purchased by the He family and registered with the
concession under the name Yudetang He or the Jade Moral Hall of He.
Mr. and Mrs. He received the property when the He family divided, how-
ever the acte du vente (deed of sale) had not been changed to mark this
transfer, perhaps because the husband and wife were minors, nineteen
and twenty respectively. According to Mrs. He’s attorney, she discovered a
promissory note indicating that her husband was trying to sell the prop-
erty out from under her to his eldest sister and older brother. Moreover, the
husband had abandoned Mrs. He and the property and had removed fur-
niture from the domicile. Mrs. He was seeking a divorce, most likely on
the grounds of abandonment, from her husband who had fallen into a
“disreputable life” in which “court officers can never find him.” Despite
his absence, however, Mr. He had appointed a French man to collect rents
on the property and had hired bullies to harass his wife into leaving the
property. Mrs. He had begun proceedings in the Tianjin Chinese Civil
Court to annul the property sale to her husband’s siblings and to sequester
rental income, but the case would take over a month. In the meantime, her
attorney was requesting that the French Concession permit a title transfer,
seal up the domicile property, collect and hold the rent until the court
decision, and offer police protection.
The He dispute reveals the multiple cultural and legal frameworks

through which Tianjin urbanites understood property ownership and
rights. As the impetus for cases like this one, the civil code illuminated
interactions between Chinese and colonial property regimes, as well as
the tenacity of the family economic unit in a legal culture that increasingly
favored individuals. Even though the He household most likely purchased
the property in the 1910s or 1920s, when property ownership was already
shifting to the individual, they purchased the property as a family unit.
Since the concession required that a title deed be registered under the
name of an individual or of a corporation, the He household registered the
property under Yudetang He. In late imperial China, much like in the colo-
nial city, the household head’s name typically represented the family unit
on contracts or titles.89 The He family may have chosen “Yudetang” as a
poetic name for the property inspired by nearby Rue de Passe, which
included the character de in its Chinese translated name, or “Yudetang”
may have been the name of their family business.90 Regardless of why the
Hes entered the deed as they did, in the eyes of the French colonial property
system, Yudetang He was legally a corporate owner, which would be treated
as an individual unit. That individual unit could change only through a legal
property transfer and corresponding change in the title deed.
The He family, however, understood the property differently from the
French colonial representatives. Drawing on a longer history of family
property in China, the Hes believed the house belonged to the collective
household unit, and since household division had typically been mediated
outside the state, they did not deem it necessary to change the name on
the title deed.91 But the new civil code threatened the seamless transfer of
property under household division, as granting women the right to claim
property in a divorce threatened to remove property from the patriline for
the first time.92 Fear of this threat may have been strong enough to prompt
Mr. He to transfer the property to his siblings. Yet with the property legally
registered under the corporation of Yudetang He, it is unclear how the
court would have ruled on this case.93
The civil code granted women the right to own property and to claim
their fair share, but it did not ensure their right to manage that property,
and neither did it give them political rights that might be associated with
property ownership. If late imperial Chinese cultural understandings

had regarded property as a “thing” owned by the family unit, the new
twentieth-century legal culture of property rights introduced property as a
bundle of rights assigned to an individual owner. The 1929–1930 Chinese
civil code placed women’s property rights between these two cultural
understandings. Women could claim individual ownership over their fair
share of property, but they did not automatically gain the rights and
responsibility that came with property ownership under an individual-
based property regime. Unlike their Chinese male counterparts, women
who owned property did not gain a political voice in the foreign conces-
sions, and married women did not gain the right to manage the property
over their husbands, even when that property was in their name. Thus,
while property was understood to belong to an individual, in the case of
married couples that individual was usually the husband/father until his
death, at which time it was divided among the entire family. Legally, prop-
erty could be listed in a wife’s name, but culturally, a husband might con-
sider himself, and not his wife, to be the manager of that property.
Not all property issues brought to the French Concession’s attention
ended up in court. Elite families preferred to keep family disputes private,
especially those that dealt with the subtleties of property management
within a family, as the second French Concession example shows. In
April 1930, Henry K. Chang, consul general for China in San Francisco,
sent letters to the French Consulate and French Concession demanding
that his wife Isabel Tong Chang not be allowed to sell, mortgage, or trans-
fer his property at 9 Cours Joffre.94 The property, listed in Isabel’s name,
was located along the French Concession’s showpiece—a stunning circu-
lar park in one of the most expensive neighborhoods, indeed a site where
some of Tianjin’s wealthiest warlords and industrialists had built palatial
mansions during the early 1920s. While her husband was stationed in San
Francisco, Isabel had mortgaged the property to the Belgian bank Crédit
Foncier for over 20,000 taels. When her father-in-law heard about the
incident, he repaid the mortgage and asked that the title deed be trans-
ferred to his name.
When Isabel later brought him the deed in Beijing, however, he discov-
ered that it was still in her name. Isabel’s father-in-law promptly asked her
to sign a document stating that she would not sell or mortgage the
property and that to do so “would be illegal.” The father-in-law forwarded

the notarized document to the French Concession, and Henry sent a tele-
gram stating that the property could only be sold or mortgaged in his or
his father’s name. In letters that followed, Henry specified that no state-
ment from him would be valid except one sent from San Francisco or from
a foreign bank under an identified signature. Henry also took further steps
to remove his wife from managing the property and appointed the Banque
Belge pour l’Etranger to pay taxes in his absence.
Henry and his father may have feared that Isabel was attempting to
remove the property from the patriline, but they were more likely con-
cerned that she would mismanage the property in Henry’s absence. There
is little evidence to suggest that Isabel was threatening divorce. Indeed,
she and Henry had six daughters, stayed married to the end of their days,
and Henry, who outlived Isabel by twenty years, never remarried.95 But if
Henry and his father did not want Isabel to manage the property, why did
they put the title deed in her name? Henry may already have been posted
to San Francisco by the time the property was purchased, and they did not
have another choice; or the property may have been put in Isabel’s name to
hide an investment made by Henry or the extended Chang family.96
Regardless of the reason, Henry assumed that with the deed in her name,
his wife would not act outside his wishes, thus echoing the contradictory
political culture of the day that gave women the legal right to own property
but did not necessarily endow them with the trust to manage it. Henry also
seemed to act outside new legal cultural norms of individual property
ownership when he suggested that his father, rather than his wife, should
act on behalf of the property. Indeed, Henry and his father may have
understood the property to belong to the Chang family rather than to
Henry or Isabel as individuals. What effect, if any, did the new civil laws
have on Henry’s understanding of property?
If anyone could understand the legal background of the new system of
individual property rights, it was Henry K. Chang, a member of the Chi-
nese government and a graduate, with a law degree, from the University of
Pennsylvania.97 But more than that, he claimed expertise in property law:
one year after sending his letter to the French Concession asking them not
to allow his wife to manage his property, Henry penned an article about
the Chinese family for the American Rotary Club magazine in which he
discussed China’s shifting legal culture and its effect on the family,
the individual, and their property rights.98 While the article focused on
the Chinese family in general, Henry began the article by noting that
before the new legal code, “Chinese never felt the need of making wills for
the reason that the property rights were so well defined by common
usages,” and he ended his article with a suggestion that with the “recent
completion of the first three sections of China’s civil code, family relation-
ships, marriages and divorce, property rights of both sexes, and the right
of inheritance, etc., are all minutely defined, and are intended by the
authorities to supersede the common law and usages which have hitherto
prevailed.”99 The article was published just under one year after Henry
sent the telegram to the French Concession asking them to prevent his
wife from selling or mortgaging the property in her name.
How might this personal experience have led him to contemplate the
role that the new civil law was playing in defining individual property
rights and in reshaping Chinese family structures? In his private life Henry
acted to intervene in his wife’s individual property rights and called upon
his father and his extended family to manage the property, whereas in his
public essay Henry praised the new legal changes, proclaiming that they
were bringing China “in line in the march of progress.”100 These seem-
ingly contradictory responses by a single person exemplified the two sides
of masculinity and power in twentieth-century China that on the one hand
called for a new relationship between women and property but in practice
excreted male economic power.
When it came to ideas and practices of family and property, Henry
Chang, like many elite men in his day, lived two lives: a private and per-
sonal life in which he negotiated shifting legal cultures and social prac-
tices, and a public life in which he optimistically highlighted China’s
changing family and espoused progressive ideology. Like many of his col-
leagues in government and politics, Henry articulated his public persona
through the rhetoric of new nationalist Chinese ideology. The audience of
Henry’s performance was the global stage. Even before Henry married
Isabel, he began fashioning a public identity for a global audience. He
studied in Europe and the United States before earning his undergraduate
and law degrees from Penn; his educational achievements were even fea-
tured in the Washington Times.101
Henry and his family were launched onto the global stage in Decem-
ber 1909, when his father was appointed as the last Qing ambassador to
the United States. Henry, his mother and his sisters, his future bride Isabel,
and Isabel’s sister joined Henry’s father in travelling together to Wash-
ington, DC, making newspaper headlines along the way. The press
immediately seized on the Chang family as exemplars of a China in
transition. The San Francisco Call featured photographs of family mem-
bers on the front page, with the elder Chang dressed in mandarin robes
and Henry in a Western-style suit. According to the article, Henry was
“as aggressively United States as his distinguished father is oriental.”102
(See figure 3.2.) Isabel also came from an esteemed background and
boasted connections to the United States: her father Tang Shaoyi had
traveled there in 1908 on an official mission to thank the country for the
Boxer Indemnity and later served as the first premier of the Republic of
China, while her sister went on to marry the famed Chinese diplomat
Wellington Koo. Isabel and Henry’s marriage seemed to have been tai-
lored for Washington’s society pages. Henry and Isabel made another
media splash when they married on Christmas Day at the Chinese lega-
tion, leading the American press to speculate whether the marriage was
arranged or a love match.103
In an American media fascinated by the dramatization of the global
stage on American soil, the ambassador’s entourage continued to make
national news. The Omaha Daily Bee reported on the girls’ visit to Spring-
field, Massachusetts, while the New York Tribune announced Mrs. Chang’s
Thursday teas for the diplomatic corps.104 The American media used the
Chang family women to create a story not only of a changing China but
also of the power of American customs and education to transform and
civilize. The Chang and Tang sisters were depicted as English-speaking,
educated, fashionable, and were always said to be wearing foreign shoes.
(See figure 3.3.) But the Chang daughters were anything but passive objects
of an American media frenzy. Instead, they constructed their image. When
the Chinese helped to launch an American-made cruiser from a New York
shipyard, Henry’s youngest sister led the affair, even though the entire
family, including her father and brother were in attendance.105 Alice, who
the Washington paper described as “charmingly naïve,” took the opportu-
nity to wax profoundly to the press on political changes under China’s new
FIGURE 3.2 The Chang family’s arrival in 1909. San Francisco Call,
December 11, 1909.
government, stating that China was now “a republic and we shall have all
the freedom and liberty that you American women enjoy. It will be glori-
ous.”106 Through a process of colonial coproduction, the younger Changs,
in their public celebration of American education, holidays, and footwear,
had already come to represent the freedom and liberty of a future China on
FIGURE 3.3 Isabel Chang with Henry’s sisters and mother.

The Day Book, May 14, 1912.
the global stage as well as the power of American culture and values to
bring about that change. Indeed, the same paper that announced their
arrival also reported on their departure four years later: the Chang family,
a reporter gushed, “came in picturesque costumes of their court” and
departed in “chic tailor made gowns, with smart American made shoes of
black leather . . . and becoming French model hats” (figure 3.4).107
When we look past these carefully cultivated images, however, the
Chang family exemplifies how public ideological proclamations and per-
sonal practices did not always match up. Chinese nationalist intellectuals
and political reformers who supported small families or gender equality in
public did not always practice what they preached in private. While the
senior Chang had willingly dispatched his youngest daughter to represent
the fresh face of a progressive China at public functions in the United
States, he was hesitant to allow his daughter-in-law to manage her property
in China. Likewise, Henry publicly called for changes to China’s old family
FIGURE 3.4 The Chang women before returning to China.

San Francisco Call, June 23, 1913.
system while simultaneously maintaining close financial and property ties

to his father. The new civil law was also fraught with these kinds of ten-
sions. Since property was the center of Anglo-American law, Chinese law-
makers had also made it the legal centerpiece for gender equality; but while
women were granted the right to claim ownership, they were never granted
other political property rights associated with Anglo-American legal and
political cultures. In fairness, women in England and the United States did
not gain the political right to vote until 1918 and 1920 respectively; more-
over, Tianjin’s foreign concessions never allowed female property owners,
Chinese or foreign, to serve as electors or members of the council. Thus in
many ways, property rights became central to Chinese male, rather than
female, gendered identities in twentieth-century China.
MASCULINITY AND PROPERTY
Changing legal and economic practices of property ownership trans-

formed property into a site of individual masculine identity formation in
colonial-capitalist Tianjin. To begin with, the legal conception of property
ownership was shifting from the household to the individual. This was
first enacted in foreign concession property regulations and later codified
in the 1929 civil code. Individual property ownership mobilized layers of
identities beginning with economic status. Owning property depended on
the economic capacity to purchase it, moreover participation in concession
governance was determined by this capacity. But in a colonized city, eco-
nomic status was also undercut by racialized ideas of national origin, and
Chinese property owners were not always allowed to participate in gover-
nance or even be taxed at the same rate as their, usually white, counter-
parts of European or U.S. origin. Finally property became a central site of
gendered identity formation. The Chinese civil code aimed to empower
women through property rights, while the right to engage in the political
affairs of the concessions as a property owner was a masculine affair. Thus,
as elite Chinese men claimed their individual property rights in multiply
colonized Tianjin, they were simultaneously navigating changing practices
of status, race, and gender to forge their individual masculine identities.
In Tianjin’s foreign concessions, the house became a symbol of mascu-
linity because property ownership legally and financially regulated a per-
son’s economic, racial, and gendered identities. In Tianjin, Chinese men
who owned houses were not simply endowed with property rights; they
had to navigate the identity norms that multiple layers of colonial power
put upon them in order to claim their individual property rights. The Brit-
ish Municipal Council of the British Concession is an example of a site
where this process took place. The council was a homosocial space— only
male property owners were allowed to serve on the council and to partici-
pate as electors. These men gathered annually to discuss concession busi-
ness in Gordon Hall, the Gothic municipal hall and government center of
the concession. If women attended these meetings, they were not recorded
in the minutes. While the municipal council began as a white British space,
Chinese property owners were eventually allowed to participate, and as
the Chinese population in the British Concession grew, and as the British
Municipal Council began translating documents into Chinese, their par-

ticipation at council meetings increased.
In 1935, Chinese male rate-payers found themselves mobilized against
the British over a single issue: water.108 In 1899, British Concession Water
Works began pumping water from Tianjin’s Hai River. The water was puri-
fied before flowing through concession home pipes, but it still needed to
be boiled before it was palatable. Over the years, as the city fought off one
cholera epidemic after another, the council debated the sanitation of river
water.109 By the 1930s, the water works had devised a thoroughly modern
system that drew water from wells rather than the dirty river. This new
water was tested by Chinese and foreign residents alike, and Chinese
property owners in particular were concerned that the well water was too
costly and tasted salty. As a remedy, they demanded to be allowed to con-
sume water from the Tianjin Native City Water Works that supplied the
rest of the city.110 Foreigners on the BMC, however, were concerned more
with hygiene than with taste. Thus, Chinese residents leveraged British
fears over health by questioning whether the well water’s high levels of
fluorine made it palatable. According to some studies at the time, fluorine
was thought to have contributed to mottled teeth. The British, in turn,
conducted scientific studies of the water to confirm that the well water was
indeed more sanitary. They studied the effects of water on the teeth of for-
eign children residing in the concession. When that did not satisfy Chinese
residents, they sent the water to Britain to be tested by “a panel of scientists
and experts.” The experts determined that the water was excellent, albeit
with a “mineral taste” that was “more noticeable when heated.”111
Chinese residents refused to give in on the salty water. One Chinese
property owner put taste into economic terms. Mr. Zao Jiuyou complained
that the high cost of bad-tasting water was driving prospective Chinese
residents out of the concession, depressing rental incomes: “People are
not inclined to reside in this Area on account of the salty taste and high
cost of the water supply.” Zao feared the problem would cascade: “If it
were not for the drop of house rentals suffered by the property owners, it is
to be feared that more houses would remain vacant. Furthermore, the loss
of each resident will mean the loss of the Council of his portion of revenue
due to rental assessment, electricity and water receipts.”112 In this colonial-
capitalist fight over water, Chinese male property owners used the
colonizer’s discourses of hygienic modernity and economic rationalism to

wield their economic power as property owners and their political rights
as rate-payers. While years earlier, Chinese rate-payers had spoken in Chi-
nese to gain a voice on the council, in the debate over water, they instead
used the so-called universal language of science, economic rationalism,
and property rights, turning the discourse of foreign empire back onto
the colonizer, to be most effective. Due to these tactics and their persis-
tence, the BMC eventually conceded, allowing Chinese residents to
receive water from the Native City Water Works delivered by water carri-
ers, while British Municipal Council Water Works continued to pump
water through the pipes.113
In the fight over drinking water, Chinese male homeowners demon-
strated a new understanding of individual private property rights based in
the colonial-capitalist market’s division of public and private spaces, and
new cultural legal understandings of individual property rights. As the
real estate market divided the city into public and private spaces, both the
colonial and the new Chinese political systems appointed the male prop-
erty owner to serve as the individual political representative of private
property. These new understandings of private space and property rights
inspired new ways of thinking about the relationship between household
and state. In late imperial China, household and state were intercon-
nected, and the household had a responsibility to maintain order through
ritual practice. In treaty-port Tianjin, the district or concession was
responsible for supplying public services to provide comfort at home and
in its environs—from clean roads to a working sewer system and palatable
water—and property rights endowed owners with the right to demand
such services. When these services were not provided to Chinese property
owners’ liking in the British Concession, they turned private property into
a public issue, joining their individual voices on the municipal council
with a unified concern. While Chinese property owners could have stood
up to the BMC on a collective nationalist issue, such as British extra-
territorial legal rights on Chinese soil, instead they petitioned for an issue
that leveraged their individual property rights, and indeed, leveraged
them on an issue that was connected closely to their individual private
lives at home, palatable drinking water. As these men demonstrated, even
as colonial-capitalist and Chinese political notions of space and property
moved more toward a system of separate spheres and individual rights,

the modern urban home was never simply a sequestered place of private
domesticity; it was also central to notions of masculine self-identity.114
These debates on the British Municipal Council over drinking water
suggest that while Chinese lawmakers may have reformed property law to
bring about equal rights for Chinese women, the reforms may have gone
further in shaping individual masculine identities of Chinese men. The
new civil law granted Chinese women the right to claim a share of their
family property through inheritance or divorce, but it did not grant women
the right to act as public individuals on behalf of that property. As legal
understandings of property shifted from the extended family to the indi-
vidual, men became the legal representatives of the nuclear family’s prop-
erty and claimed the new political property rights that went along with it.
CONCLUSION
In early twentieth-century Tianjin, three forces shaped new ideas about

housing, property, and its connection to individual identity: the colonial-
capitalist real estate market, colonial property regulations, and the
Guomindang civil law. For Tianjin’s Chinese economic elites, property
became a source of masculine individual identity and political power. This
rise of individualism could have bolstered Chinese nationalism. Chinese
political reformers designed the civil code to favor the individual and
bring an end to the traditional Chinese family, but instead, the new indi-
vidualist private property regime in many ways undermined the national-
ist project.
One of the chief goals of legal reformers had been to bring about gender
equality, but by failing to grant women explicit property rights, the new
individual property ownership structure actually granted individual men
stronger political property rights by default. Moreover, the very nature of
individual rights promised by new ideas and practices of property owner-
ship undermined the collective project of the nation. With market forces
and legal reforms focused on the property rights of the individual rather
than on society’s need for housing, Guomindang reformers and foreign-
concession governments ignored a growing crisis in Chinese cities: the
housing shortage. Indeed, it was not until after World War II, when the
foreign concessions were returned and Tianjin became a wholly Chinese
city, that Tianjin’s government could focus on public housing, and the
Communists would make the right to housing, rather than property rights,
one of the central tenets of their governance.
4
Choosing a House
B
efore becoming a treaty port in 1860, the city of Tianjin
already had a sizeable population, and by the 1920s that
number had quadrupled to a population of two million.1
Tianjin’s native residents were joined by individuals and fami-
lies who migrated to the city seeking economic opportunities
or the safety of the foreign concessions, and Tianjin’s urban
elites grew to include natives and migrants, permanent resi-
dents, and temporary sojourners. When choosing a house, the
city’s elites faced diverse choices. While residents of Qing-era
Tianjin could select to live in or build a courtyard house, elite
residents of treaty-port Tianjin could choose to live in a quiet
villa in the residential Italian Concession, a row house in the
bustling Japanese Concession, a modernist apartment along
Rue de France, a semi-attached townhouse in the British gar-
den city, an alleyway house in the new Chinese municipality,
or a Qing-era courtyard house in the old Chinese city. Tianjin
urbanites faced choices but also limitations, starting with
their budget. A Chinese resident of Tianjin first had to decide
whether to rent or buy a house. Temporary sojourners may
have been more inclined to rent, and sometimes their employer
covered housing costs. Some people decided to purchase their
residence as a space for living; others decided to purchase
a residence as an investment. If a Chinese person wanted to
124 AT HOM E I N T H E WOR L D
reside in a foreign concession, they faced high rents and hefty purchase
prices and often regulations over Chinese ownership. Despite these obsta-
cles, Chinese people still bought and rented the majority of concession
homes. Even if a person had enough money, choosing a house was also
determined by availability. Tianjin’s housing market was growing rapidly,
yet demand outpaced the supply.
At first glance, choosing a house appeared to be market-driven, but the
structures and spaces of housing also were political. During the Qing
dynasty a single sociopolitical ideology drove design, and after the fall of
the Qing, Chinese nationalist ideology focused more on the demography
of the family than the structure of the house. But houses that represented
Qing-era spatial principles still stood in the old city and continued to be
constructed during the Republican era. At the same time, houses in the
foreign concessions were built according to each concession’s zoning reg-
ulations, which often reflected European notions of public-private and
domesticity. Foreign imperial expansion in Tianjin’s built environment
both deliberately and indirectly aimed to displace and replace the impe-
rial Chinese structural order, but even after foreigners tore down the
imperial city wall and so-called modern urban planning proliferated
across the city, courtyard houses continued to be built. Thus, when select-
ing a house, Tianjin urbanites chose from two political spatial ideologies:
Chinese courtyard house built by artisan-carpenters who followed late
imperial architectural ideals, or Western-style houses designed by archi-
tects or builders according to European housing principles. These two
technologies of space— courtyard house and Western house— coexisted in
Tianjin’s urban landscape and within the lifespan of its elite inhabitants,
who likely experienced both technologies during their residence in the
city. To dwell in the world meant not only to have multiple choices, but to
ultimately feel equally comfortable with either choice; in other words, to
be at home in the world.
Chinese individuals could choose where to live, but the Chinese munic-
ipal government, colonial governments, and real estate investors decided
what new housing would look like. Houses contained ideologies, held rit-
ual significance, embodied systems of belief, and framed social prescrip-
tions. Houses were shelters, divided by posts and walls, held up with
beams, and covered by a roof. They were constructed to keep out rain, let
in sunlight, and circulate air. But if Tianjin houses were structured in
Choosing a House 125
practical ways, they were also structured through politically driven engi-
neering. Tianjin’s multiple governments decided what circulated in and
through and out of these houses. New Tianjin houses included plumbing
to pump in municipal water, telephone lines to connect communication,
and electric wires to illuminate lightbulbs. Houses connected people to
the city and placed people within urban hierarchies, while the spaces
within a house prescribed gender roles, shaped generational differences,
and regulated social hierarchies. People could choose the type of house
they wanted to live in or decide how to decorate it, but they could not tear
down load-bearing walls. To choose a house was thus to select a particular
set of prescriptive social spatial practices.
How did Chinese people choose and adapt to different spatial technol-
ogies within their city and their lifetime, and in what ways did these dis-
similar technologies of house shape everyday life? These questions can-
not be answered by archives alone. Archives concerning the real estate
market or property ownership in Tianjin might hold some clues, but these
materials are not open to researchers. Real estate records can illuminate
how much people paid for housing, and who purchased or rented it, but
they cannot speak to why a person chose a particular house or how that
house shaped their everyday lives. This chapter draws from unrelated
archival records of the Republican era, but it focuses specifically on three
case studies to construct its own archive of the house and thus to trace
priorities and conditions involved in choosing a house. The case studies
include physical details of a preserved courtyard house, blueprints of a
house in the Italian Concession, and one woman’s memoir of the multiple
houses she lived in. The newly constructed archive of the house offered in
this chapter brings materiality to the two ideal types of socio-spatial
technologies— carpenter-built courtyard houses and readymade builder
homes—that framed the everyday lives of Tianjin urban elites during the
first half of the twentieth century. In treaty-port Tianjin, people chose
houses, but housing also shaped people.
A REPUBLICAN- ERA COURTYARD HOUSE
Very few courtyard houses remain in Tianjin. Most of the old city was
demolished to make way for a new old-style shopping district. But one
house has been preserved and currently serves as a museum. The house
stands on what would have been a busy street during the Republican
era, and there was likely a neighbor to either side. The house is actually a
compound that includes three courtyards seated along a north-south axis.
This three-courtyard compound is surrounded by a brick wall that sepa-
rates the inner space of the compound from the outer world of the street.
Indeed the street outside was probably quite bustling, as early photographs
of Tianjin’s old city depict the streets in front of courtyard houses as filled
with peddlers, rickshaws, barbers, and people loitering or passing by. A
visitor who approached the compound from the main southern entrance
would not have been able to see inside over the tall gray brick wall, and
passersby would have had little idea about what kind of household lived
beyond the wall until they came to the door.
The doorway offered a glimpse into the status of the compound’s occu-
pants. The height, the type of wood or materials used, the quality of craft,
and the ornateness or plainness of the decoration all gave clues as to what
kind of household dwelled behind the high wall. The doorway also served
as what Francesca Bray calls a “notice board” that announced the achieve-
ments of the inner household to the outer community.2 A fortuitous event
such as a wedding or the birth of a son was recorded on red paper and
pasted to the door, while a more somber occasion like a death was noted
FIGURE 4.1 Xu Pu’an house—stone screen. Photograph by the author.

on white paper. Doorways were portals between inner and outer, nei and
wai. Just like the mutual relationship between empire and household,
inner and outer were porous and interconnected, and doorways facilitated
the movement of people, things, good fortune, and even ghosts and energy
in and out of the household. Crossing the threshold of the doorway, a visi-
tor entered a small entry yard and faced a stone screen (figure 4.1). The
screen did not actually shield the interior from view since it faced a wall;
instead the screen blocked negative energy and ghosts from the outer
realm from flying into the compound, and it prevented positive energy and
good fortune from the inner chambers from escaping outside.
There were two ways to enter the compound. A household member
might have walked straight ahead through the open doorway to the left of
the screen and entered the north-south corridor that spanned the length
of the compound (figure 4.2). Visitors would most likely have turned to
their left and walked toward the doorway that led directly into the first
courtyard (figures 4.3 and 4.4). The compound consisted of three court-
yards lined up in a row along a north-south axis. Each courtyard was
framed by four single-story wings. The first (or southernmost) courtyard
and its buildings would have been considered the most outer space of the
house, while the third (or northern) courtyard would have been consid-
ered a more inner space. Guests were entertained or business took place in
the first courtyard, while the back (or innermost) courtyard rarely would
have received nonfamilial male guests.
There are no blueprints to explain how or why this courtyard house was
designed in this manner. The carpenters who built courtyard houses did
not use blueprints, but they did follow a systematic set of design and build-
ing principles. These principles would have been learned on the job until
they became embodied knowledge. The carpenters who built this house
most likely did not learn their trade from a manual, but treatises and man-
uals on architectural principles and building practices produced during
late imperial China can still illuminate shared spatial ideologies and
practices.
The Yingzao fashi or “Treatise on Architectural Methods” is the earliest
example of a late imperial architectural manual.3 In 1103, the Song imperial
court commanded Li Jie, the director of court construction, to compile a series
of architectural guidelines for building the capital. Li, who had overseen the
FIGURE 4.2 Xu Pu’an house— corridor. Photograph by the author.
construction of several imperial buildings, described a technological method

for building that was based on standardization and modularity. For the first
time, Li committed to paper the proportional system of measurement that
formed the foundation of Chinese post-and-beam construction.4 This stan-
dard of late imperial architectural measurement was based on a module
called a cai, composed of 15 units or fen in height by 10 units in width. The
Yingzao fashi outlined eight different grades of imperial architecture, all built
according to the 15-to-10 fen proportion, with the size of the fen differing
according to grade.5 The imperial building techniques outlined in the Yingzao
fashi were developed from the early Ming (1368–1644) when, according to
the historian Klaas Ruitenbeek, “there were hardly any changes in official
FIGURE 4.3 Xu Pu’an house— doorway into first courtyard.

Photograph by the author.
architectural style.”6 The Yingzao fashi did not instruct carpenters in how to
build houses, but, for the first time, it chronicled the imperial building system
that would form the core of building knowledge in China.
The practice of building houses was later recorded in a more popular
carpenters’ manual that chronicled the techniques and practices of every-
day building, from houses and stables to furniture. The Lu Ban jing or
“Classic of Lu Ban,” published during the Ming dynasty, with information
dating back to the Song and Yuan dynasties, is the best known of these
manuals and has survived even to present-day Taiwan.7 This carpenter’s
manual was named for Lu Ban, a fifth-century BCE craftsperson who
FIGURE 4.4 Xu Pu’an house—first courtyard. Photograph by the author.
became the patron saint of carpenters. In practice, the manual was less of
a guide for carpenters than a metaphysical embodiment of the spiritual
and ritual practices of carpentry. In his annotated translation of the Lu
Ban jing, Ruitenbeek suggests that most carpenters probably could not
have read the manual, but nevertheless kept a copy on hand as a talisman
to protect them throughout the building process.8 For those outside the
building profession, the Lu Ban jing included information on techniques
for constructing houses and furniture, as well as insight into the magic
and tricks that disgruntled carpenters were known to practice against
employers and clients.
Houses in late imperial China employed the structural technology of a
standardized system of building and engineering alongside the cultural
and political technologies of cosmological energy and Neo- Confucian
socio-political norms. Artisan-carpenters were masters of all three tech-
nologies: engineering, cosmology, and Confucianism. Carpenters studied
these technologies first by observing a master craftsman, often as an
apprentice, and second by imitating the master.9 Although building

knowledge was embodied knowledge, it also engaged the mind through
rote memorization; carpenters learned a series of mnemonic rhymes that
described everything from the wooden parts of a structure to the process
for laying bricks or building a roof.10 A master carpenter would have com-
mitted a standard building catalog to memory so he could design and
build a house without any drawings or models.11
The Lu Ban jing suggests how two types of technologies were insepara-
ble in building imperial houses: carpenters in late imperial China had to
be fluent in structural engineering, but they also needed to build houses in
accordance with popular geomantic principles of harmonious design.
Indeed, one of the more distinctive features of late imperial domestic
architecture was that regardless of region or the social, political, and eco-
nomic status of the owner, structures were designed and built according
to the same geomantic principles. Geomancy, also known as feng shui (lit-
erally “wind and water”), is a process of siting a building so that it is in
alignment with the energies of nature and the cosmos. Energy or qi circu-
lated through houses and (depending on construction) could contribute to
the long-term prosperity of a family or lead to chaos and ruin. In this
sense, the jia as house was a natural organism connected to the jia as
household.12 Since the auspiciousness of the house was central to the pros-
perity of the family, each step in building a house combined structural and
geomantic engineering. Ruitenbeek calls this an “imaginary architec-
ture,” a geomantic architecture constructed on top of structural engineer-
ing that is invisible to an untrained eye. Ronald Knapp, a leading scholar
of Chinese architecture and cultural tradition, has noted that geomantic
architectural design not only brought good luck but also created an aes-
thetic balance to a structure that “at its most elegant, . . . is a sculptural
expression of the cosmos.”13
In late imperial China, families often custom-built their houses. The
household head was involved in each step of the process, which first
required choosing an auspicious location—whether by consulting an
almanac, contracting with a geomantic expert, or hiring a knowledgeable
carpenter. The house would then be designed around that location, typi-
cally planned on a north-south axis, facing south, with a symmetrical
balance between east and west.14 A household built and expanded its
residence slowly over an extended period of time, which had practical as

well as cosmological implications: building a house slowly ensured that
each step was conducted at the most cosmologically correct and auspi-
cious time to facilitate a flow of positive energies and block negative ener-
gies; but it also allowed families to build a house in increments, which
made the best financial sense for most households. Since carpenters
designed and built houses according to a modular system, this expansion
could happen over time.15 Houses typically were designed with modules
that included a south-facing hall or halls (called a ting or a tang), arranged
on a north-south axis with jian (bays) on either side. A jian was the space
between four columns; a room could include several jian, or jian could be
added on at a later date as long as they remained proportional.16 Thus, the
jian allowed for simplicity, modularity, and the possibility for portions of
the house to be prefabricated offsite.
Courtyards were transitional inner-outer spaces located within a com-
pound’s walls that became multiseasonal living spaces in their own right.17
Typically, a courtyard was surrounded on three sides by a main hall at the
north and flanking wings on either side. In northern cities like Tianjin and
Beijing, a hall on the south side of the square (which thus faced north)
closed off the courtyard, completing a four-sided courtyard house known
as a siheyuan (literally a four-sided courtyard). The courtyard and sur-
rounding walls became a module in itself, and a Chinese house in Tianjin
might have had one or multiple courtyards, with each courtyard usually
constructed in a straight line along the north-south axis.
Once the location and proper time for building had been chosen and
building plans determined, construction began by tamping the ground. A
series of ritual practices were organized for this and every step that fol-
lowed.18 Hoisting the ridge pole (shangliang), the longest beam that held up
the uppermost peak of the roof, was a structurally and ritually significant
event. The homeowner first would consult an almanac to ensure that a
most auspicious day was chosen for the occasion, then depending on local
custom he would be sure to supply his workers with an abundance of
sweets, food, liquor, or cash to keep them satisfied and discourage them
from slipping an evil talisman into the pole or practicing other evil magic
on the house.19 Geomantic architectural technology took every line and
angle into account, and carpenters were experts in calculating auspicious
measurements, carrying a special rule named after the patron saint Lu

Ban himself, which included lucky and unlucky inches.20 Carpenters mea-
sured each window and door, sometimes adjusting just an inch to ensure
that the opening was cosmologically correct.
Houses were metaphysical shelters that could bring prosperity or desti-
tution to a family. Cautious household heads oversaw each ritual step in
the building process because disgruntled carpenters were known to use
their magical powers to bring harm to a family. Indeed, the Lu Ban jing
included just as many entries on magical carpentry spells as instructions
for building techniques, and household manuals intended for elite home-
owners included recipes for reversing their damage.21 The ritual negotia-
tions between homeowner and carpenter suggest that despite a carpen-
ter’s low social status, his skills and knowledge were highly valued, and
thus could be leveraged into better working conditions.22
When owners and carpenters designed houses with auspicious symme-
try, or when owners tried to remedy a carpenter’s cosmological trick, they
were not simply engaging in personal negotiations over a private family
house. They were also participating in a political project that linked the
household to the empire through a standardized building technology. The
standardization of building technology coincided with the rise of a new
socio-political interpretation of Confucianism, known among Western
scholars today as Neo- Confucianism. Confucius’s Great Learning (Da
xue), one of the four canonical Neo- Confucian books, linked stability in
the household to that of the state. For household architecture in imperial
China, this meant first that houses were responsible for spatially regulat-
ing social relations between gender and status hierarchies in the house-
hold, and second it meant that all architecture from the imperial palace to
the simplest residence was beholden to universal socio-spatial ideolo-
gies.23 Thus, as Bray notes, in late imperial China all houses followed the
same set of design principles, just to a different degree.24
These design principles prescribed a specific set of social relations. The
ancestral altar was the ritual center as well as the orientation for social
relations within a house. In this Tianjin courtyard house, the altar was
likely located in the first southern-facing hall of the first courtyard, as this
was typically the most auspicious location. Gender and status relations
revolved around this location. The household head, for example, would
have lived in the most auspicious south-facing hall closest to the ancestral
altar. The chambers for sons were laid out accordingly, with the eldest son
inhabiting the most favorable rooms. Servants’ storage rooms and kitch-
ens were placed in less favorable locations, facing east or west. The kitchen
would have been in the back of the house (usually the north) and servants’
quarters would have been located far away from the ancestral hall in the
front (usually the south) or back. This house includes a set of structures
built along the corridors and away from the main courtyards toward the
front of the east corridor and the back of the west corridor for this purpose.
Gender relations were prescribed according to inner and outer, with the
front being more outer, or masculine, and the more feminine inner cham-
bers located in the back.
What happened to late imperial design prescriptives after the fall of the
Qing dynasty, when the small family political ideology replaced the Neo-
Confucian preference for the extended family? Demographic evidence
suggests that ancestral and familial ties also continued to be important to
the Republican-era Chinese family, and thus even in the face of abrupt
political change, the ancestral altar was still the ritual center of many
twentieth-century Chinese houses. Knapp has noted that as late as the
1980s, houses in rural Zhejiang continued to set aside a space as the deco-
rative or entertainment center of the home, and although few households
displayed ancestral tablets, many hung photographs of deceased family
members.25 Moreover, with the fall of the Qing, Chinese households may
no longer have perceived the regulation of energy in a house to have politi-
cal implications, but the regulation of auspicious cosmic energies through-
out a home through feng shui practices was still central to an individual
family’s prosperity.
This lone remaining Tianjin courtyard house and its former owner
might offer some insights into how late imperial spatial practices contin-
ued into the Republican era. This courtyard house was constructed in the
twentieth century and likely after the fall of the Qing. Its owner Xu Pu’an
was a native son of Tianjin who worked as a comprador for the Chartered
Bank of India, Australia, and China (Jiali yinghang). Compradors, the
Chinese businessmen who assisted foreign enterprises in China, were
among the first professionals to come into regular contact with West-
ern traders; they were known to embrace foreign material culture, and
expected to reside in the foreign concessions, which most of Xu’s col-

leagues did. A house in the French or British Concession would have been
closer to the Chartered Bank of India, Australia, and China, a 1924 Beaux
Arts–style building located on Victoria Road in the British Concession, at
the heart of Tianjin’s financial district. Tianjin elites also tended to social-
ize in the concessions, and Xu was likely a member of such social circles,
as his name was listed among wedding guests in the Tianjin New Pictorial
(Xin Tianjin huabao) in 1940.26
Xu chose to live in, or at least own, “a Chinese style” courtyard house in
Tianjin’s old city. We may posit that Xu, a native Tianjiner, wanted to
remain close to his roots, even though at this time many well-to-do native
Tianjiners were leaving their natal homes in the old city for life in the con-
cessions. Or perhaps Xu felt that life in a courtyard house better suited his
family (although we do not know how many family members lived in the
Xu household). Xu may even have kept a separate apartment closer to his
work in the concessions, while his family lived in the courtyard house.
Any number of personal factors may have driven Xu’s decision to main-
tain his family house in the old Chinese city, but the decision itself had
two political consequences. First, even though Xu participated in and
benefited economically from Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist structure, in
selecting a courtyard house as his family’s primary residence, he exerted
individual autonomy from the system at a social and cultural level. Second,
even after the Qing Empire had fallen and Tianjin became a colonized
space, the courtyard house, which had been designed in accordance with
very distinct late imperial political technologies of space, continued to
shape the social relations and practices of Chinese urbanites like the Xu
family. Thus, while we may know little about Xu or his family life, we do
know that he owned a house that prescribed a specific understanding of
social relations through space.
Xu Pu’an’s courtyard house in Tianjin’s old Chinese city reveals that
early social-spatial relations did not disappear from Tianjin’s landscape
and from Chinese people’s lived experiences after the city was multiply
colonized and geographically and architecturally altered. How did Xu
Pu’an navigate the multiple special technologies of his city, from his court-
yard house in the old Chinese city, to the place where he worked in the
concessions? Did Xu separate work life in the concession from household
life in the Chinese city, or did he live in one of the foreign concessions,
only to return to the courtyard house when ritual prescribed? If there is a
record of Xu owning property in the foreign concessions, it is not accessi-
ble from archives. Although Xu’s house raises many more questions than
it can answer, it still fills in the silences of those archives. The remains of
Tianjin’s houses reveal that transitions in social life may not have been as
seamless as social scientific models assume.
A LIFE FRAMED BY MULTIPLE HOUSES
In 1917, Shen Yiyun (1894–1971) and her husband moved into a four-room,
two-story house that they rented for $70 per month in Tianjin’s Italian
Concession.27 (See figure 4.5.) The Western-style house featured a yard
with grass in the front, a separate kitchen built in the back, and running
water with a “modern bath.” Writing her memoirs more than forty years
later, Shen suggested that their decision to live in the Italian Concession
had been determined by availability rather than choice. According to
Shen, the Italian Concession had more vacant housing than other parts of
the city because of its remote location away from the city business center,
not to mention a micromanaging concession government that drove many
Chinese residents away.28 Indeed, keenly aware of the politics of colonial
space, Shen recalled that she did not particularly like “the idea of living in
a foreign concession,” but “had to yield to circumstances.”29 Even if Shen
had wanted to rent a courtyard house in the old Chinese city, she was an
outsider, not a native of the city, and she would have found it nearly impos-
sible; native Tianjin families still occupied the finest courtyard houses, or
at least maintained them as the family home. Though Shen may have cho-
sen reluctantly to live in the Italian Concession, she recounted little hard-
ship in adjusting to life inside a foreign-style house in Tianjin, despite it
being the “first time [she] had lived in a western-style house in China”30
Even for someone as flexible as Shen Yiyun, housing—its position on the
city street, its structure, its organization of social space, and the materials
in which it was fabricated—mattered. For Shen Yiyun, a seemingly simple
decision such as where to live formed individual subjectivity and shaped
everyday life.
FIGURE 4.5 House in the Italian Concession. Photograph by the author.
Shen was part of a new group of cosmopolitan Chinese urbanites who

forged their identities through dwelling in the world. In China, Shen was
equally at home in a Beijing siheyuan courtyard compound as in an Italian-
style villa. Moreover, she followed her husband’s career across the world,
living in multiple dwellings. Shen seemed to understand her everyday life
more through the houses she dwelled in than through the places in which
she lived. She framed and narrated her memoirs through houses, begin-
ning her account with her natal family’s stately merchant compound in
Zhejiang and ending with her daughter’s suburban house outside of New
York City. She interacted with the world around her through house and
home, forging her identity through where she lived.
Shen’s life story began in the Zhejiang compound that her grandfather
built after the Taiping Rebellion. Three rows of two-story buildings, with
three yards, all enclosed by a brick wall, housed the multigenerational
Shen household at the turn of the century.31 Each building had six suites,
three on each floor: ground-floor rooms were reserved for guests and com-
mon family use, while the second-floor rooms contained the family’s pri-
vate quarters, with each of the family’s four sons occupying an individual
suite with his wife and children. After marrying the prominent politician
Huang Fu (1883–1936), Shen lived in a series of houses and apartments
from Shanghai and Tokyo to Berkeley and Singapore before returning to
Beijing in 1916. Shen described her Beijing dwelling in detail as a “typical
Chinese house,” facing south, with a private bedroom and sitting room in
the back and more public rooms to receive guests in the front.32 She
recalled the paved courtyards as sunny and filled with potted flowers like
chrysanthemums in the fall, and indeed seemed reluctant to leave the Bei-
jing courtyard house for the Tianjin Italian villa.
Narrating her life through different houses, Shen conveyed a cosmo-
politan adaptability, feeling equally comfortable in a nineteenth-century
Chinese country house, an American apartment, an urban courtyard
dwelling, and a concession villa. Her ability to move from place to place
was facilitated by her membership in a particular social class. She hailed
from a family of Zhejiang silk merchants, and her father, also a scholar
and teacher, was later an editor at Shanghai’s Commercial Press. The
Shens educated their daughters, and Shen Yiyun won a scholarship at a
young age to the Beiyang Normal School for Girls in Tianjin. The Shen
family’s combined economic, educational, and cultural capital formed the
basis for their established yet progressive social network, which included
such prominent national political activists as Qiu Jin (1875–1907).33 In
keeping with practices of the time, the family confirmed and enhanced
their social standing through marriage, with the Shen daughters marrying
men who were successful in fields befitting their social group.34 Her sister
married the sociologist and Beijing University professor Tao Menghe
(1887–1960), while Shen’s militarist and politician husband Huang Fu,
who divorced his first wife to marry Shen, was a sworn blood brother of
Chiang Kai-shek.35 Huang served in several political posts, and at the end
of his life was the mayor of Shanghai.
As outlined in Shen’s memoirs, housing was equally important to social

networks in signaling individual and group identity. Shen described her
family house in Zhejiang as “typical of a middle-class family home. . . . It
was practical and comfortable without being luxurious.”36 What should we
make of her description of the Zhejiang home as “middle class”? After all,
it is highly unlikely that the merchant Shens would have described them-
selves as middle class at the turn of the century, especially since the con-
cept of “middle class” did not yet exist in the Chinese social imaginary.
Indeed, Shen’s description of an extended family with numerous sons
and generations inhabiting a multistructure compound hardly fits with
twentieth-century Chinese social scientific conceptions of the modern
middle-class Chinese family. If anything, her home in Tianjin’s Italian
Concession seemed to be more typical of how we might imagine middle-
class housing today than a sprawling compound in southern China. But for
Shen, writing from her daughter’s “typical” 1960s American “middle-
class” house, she imagined the modern home to be less about prescriptive
walls and family structures than about how a family inhabited a space—
their family life, their education, their comfort, and their close family ties.
Thus, while Shen recalled the many walls that had framed her life, how
she inhabited each space drove her narrative. Moreover, as she adapted
from one house to the next, Shen never described Chinese houses as less
modern or less comfortable than their Western counterparts, but actually
suggested the opposite. Through a combination of different dwellings in
the world—in China and abroad, and in Chinese and Western styles— Shen
came to understand herself as a cosmopolitan, or what she called “middle-
class,” Chinese woman.
Despite being integral to individual and social identities, dwellings are
all too often absent from historical biography. Compare Shen’s memoirs to
an entry on her husband in the 1925 edition of Who’s Who in China.37 The
Who’s Who biography of Huang focuses on the details of a political career,
a life encapsulated by educational achievements, diplomatic junkets,
learned writings, and honorary titles. In Shen’s memoirs, these sorts of
professional details are missing. Though the events of her husband’s polit-
ical career inform the background, carrying the couple from place to place,
Shen’s homes are more central to her biography than the kind of achieve-
ments usually outlined in a Who’s Who–style biography. Shen narrates
everyday experiences that the encyclopedic format of Who’s Who excludes.

For example, Who’s Who explains how Huang Fu’s clash with Yuan Shikai
in 1913 drove the couple into exile in Japan and America. Shen, by contrast,
focuses more on the daily details of life in exile, describing their Berkeley
apartment where, lacking domestic help, she had to shop for groceries and
do the cooking herself for the first time.
Who’s Who notes that after Yuan’s death in 1916, Huang returned to
Beijing, where he assumed a post as the representative of the Zhejiang
military governor. Shen never relates her husband’s exact political role or
title, but instead recalls how his new position impacted life at home,
requiring her to hire more than her original staff of four servants to take
care of their Beijing courtyard house and manage frequent visitors. In
1917, Huang escaped the political turmoil in Beijing and moved to Tianjin
to concentrate on writing. Who’s Who in China lists multiple publications
and lectures that Huang completed during his sojourn in Tianjin. Shen,
however, simply recalls that she only needed to hire two servants, a hus-
band and wife, to maintain their small Western-style house because they
received far fewer guests. Indeed, to pass the time during her husband’s
retreat from public service, Shen turned to sewing slippers and clothing, a
skill she had learned in her natal household, where the women practiced
embroidery and made all the clothes for family members.38
Huang Fu died in 1936, and Shen eventually moved to New York to live
with her daughter. In these final years, Shen recorded the details of her
private life for the public record. Encouraged by her friend Hu Shi, Shen
began working on her memoirs, which would eventually be housed in
Columbia University’s collection of Chinese oral histories.39 In exile dur-
ing the final years of her life, Shen felt an acute conflict—not between Chi-
nese and American lifestyles but in how new demands on her private life
took away from her professional work. In the United States she observed
that “people of the middle and lower classes [could] not afford servants.”40
Shen, who was more at ease managing a staff of servants than cooking
dinner herself, took care of the household for her working daughter. As she
tried to manage the house and write her memoirs, Shen “often found [her]
papers blown away while the pots burned.”41
Shen’s focus on the quotidian rather than the political forces that
shaped her narrative highlights how houses and everyday life are central
to the human historical experience. Shen was not simply a housewife. By

her own account, she was never comfortable with the kind of housework
that life at home in the United States required; moreover, she described
herself as her husband’s intellectual equal, a partner in discussing scholar-
ship and politics. Shen’s cosmopolitan world reached beyond the house-
hold, taking her miles away from her native place to school in Tianjin as a
young girl, and even farther during her husband’s years in exile to Japan,
the United States, and Singapore. Yet in compiling her unpublished mem-
oirs, Shen used home and place to mark the stages of her life. For Shen,
courtyards, flowers, housework, and servants were as important as social
and political ties and events in shaping her individual and social identity. 42
When we note how important dwelling was in Shen’s account of her life,
we can also begin to reevaluate the role of house and home in history.
Although public politics, social movements, and the rise of nations tradi-
tionally have framed the narratives of what has been considered to be
“history,” rooms and furniture, and likewise the dust and food within,
have framed the histories of individual experience.
Shen may have come to understand herself through memories of home,
but each house was also an actor in its own right, helping to shape her life. As
Shen noted, different architectural technologies and social environments
required different ways of living. Beijing courtyard houses required more
servants for upkeep than concession villas, while American apartments and
houses required household members to take care of cooking and cleaning
themselves. Thus, this chapter also argues that changing architectural tech-
nologies of urban houses forged everyday life in modern China: people
chose their houses, but those houses also shaped people’s lives.
A “SUITABLE” HOUSE
In 1923, Sung Sik, the acting deputy commissioner of the Tianjin branch of
the Chinese post office, moved to Tianjin with his family and chose to rent
a Western-style townhouse on Via Conte Gallina in Tianjin’s Italian Con-
cession. (See figure 4.6.) The house was convenient to his work and com-
fortable for his small family. A problem arose when the Belgian real estate
developer Crédit Foncier, which owned the house, had decided to raise the
FIGURE 4.6 Attached houses in the Italian Concession. Photograph by the author.
rent by ten Chinese dollars to ninety-five dollars per month. 43 A debate

with his employer over his housing benefits ensued, leaving traces in the
archives that reveal how a high-ranking civil servant justified choosing to
live in a particular house, how the people working with him conceived of
living in concession houses, and what the interior design plan of a conces-
sion house looked like.
Sung’s rent, first at $85 and later at $95, was quite high. To justify this
rental allowance, which was included in his employment package, Sung
and his superiors had to send a series of memos to supervisors at the cen-
tral post office when he first moved into the house in 1923 and a year later
when the rent increased. Sung’s rent was one of the more expensive items
listed in the post office accounts in 1924. For example, the post office paid
$118.80 (about $24 more than Sung’s monthly rent) for a Chesterfield sofa,
and $35 for a top-of-the-line icebox. The post office also recorded regularly
hiring a “coolie” or manual laborer, whom they paid a monthly salary
between $9 and $15. Sung’s high rent was more than six times the salary of
a laborer— exposing the gap between urbanites of the white-collar and
manual-laboring classes in treaty-port Tianjin. The post office did not
freely distribute funds, and indeed scrutinized the disbursement of every
last copper coin. 44 So how did Sung justify a rent that was expensive even
for a high-ranking bureaucrat in a Sino-foreign government institution?
While the correspondence does not mention it, the first consideration
was probably availability. Judging by the Cantonese spelling of his name,
Mr. Sung was not local to Tianjin, and likely from the southern province
Guangdong. New migrants to Tianjin rarely settled in the old Chinese
city, choosing to reside in the foreign concessions instead. 45 As Shen
Yiyun noted, the Italian Concession was often the first stop for new arriv-
als since it usually had vacancies due to high turnover. Moreover, hailing
from the south, Sung and his family may have found life in a northern
courtyard house to be just as foreign as living in a Western single-family
house.
The Italian Concession was also convenient for Sung’s postal work.
Located on the opposite side of the Hai River from the banking and com-
mercial centers of the city, and without any businesses of its own, the
Italian Concession was inconvenient for most Tianjin residents. But for
Sung, a postal commissioner, proximity to Tianjin’s train station made
the Italian Concession a desirable location. The rails had recently been
plagued by bandits and rioters, who slowed the trains and sometimes even
hijacked the mail. 46 Sung’s supervisor noted this situation in his request to
increase Sung’s rental allowance, suggesting that living on Via Conte Gal-
lina allowed Sung easy access to the train station (under fifteen minutes by
rickshaw) to troubleshoot at all hours of day or night. 47
Either of the two practical justifications for choosing a house in the Ital-
ian Concession—availability or location—probably would have sufficed for
Sung’s employers. Yet in the end, Sung offered a personal and seemingly
frivolous reason for selecting the house and requesting an increased rental
allowance. Echoing a commissioner’s statement made when Sung first
moved into the home in 1923—that the house was “considered quite suit-
able for Mr. Sung who has a grown-up family and lives in foreign style”—
Sung simply stated that “this house has proved suitable for myself and my
family.”48 In his request to increase Sung’s rental allowance once again,
the commissioner reiterated his sentiments from the year before, noting
that “owing to the present unsettled condition in Tientsin [Tianjin], a suit-
able house at the present rate is not obtainable.”49
The central post office must have found Sung’s request for “suitable”
housing compelling, as they approved the rental allowance increase shortly
after receiving Sung’s memorandum. On the other hand, his request for a
rickshaw allowance was denied.50 Certainly, for a man in Sung’s position,
who was expected to report to different parts of the city at a moment’s
notice, rickshaw transport would have been more pertinent to his job than
comfortable housing. But for many colonial and joint-venture enterprises
like the post office, “suitable” housing was considered to be a necessity
and not a luxury. The Hai River Conservancy Commission, which was in
charge of Tianjin’s bund and port, for example, saw to the domestic com-
forts of its top employees, providing housing, purchasing furniture, and
maintaining a list of household necessities from iceboxes to egg cups.51 For
foreigners, a house was a shelter from the “unsettled” city of treaty-port
Tianjin. Coming from the south to Tianjin, Sung was also an outsider; in
taking on the language of his supervisors and typing his request in Eng-
lish, Sung adopted a colonial concept of “suitable” housing to convince his
superiors to approve his high housing allowance.
Sung may have employed a colonial language of suitable housing to
gain leverage with his superiors and get a higher rent allowance, but his
spatial experiences and knowledge would have been much different than
those of his foreign colleagues. Having been born before Chinese families
could inhabit foreign-concession houses, Sung would have lived at least
part of his life in a Chinese house, most likely in his native Guangdong
Province, and while the southern house of Sung’s youth would have looked
very different than Xu Pu’an’s northern courtyard house, both houses
would have been structured using similar structural and cosmological
technologies of space. Thus, comparing Sung’s house in the Italian Con-
cession to Xu’s courtyard dwelling in the Chinese city not only illustrates
the different spatial technologies that coexisted in treaty-port Tianjin, but
also highlights the dramatically different socio-spatial prescriptions that a
Chinese urbanite might have within a single lifetime.
Rather than adhering to Chinese imperial notions of inner and outer,
the Italians designed their concession according to spatial principles of
public and private. Zoning laws prohibited businesses from setting up in
this residential district, and houses were designed to be private domestic
spaces. Thus, unlike Xu’s house, which was designed so that the outermost
courtyard could be used for conducting business or other public affairs,
the Sung home was zoned for private use. But without the high walls of a
courtyard house protecting it from sight, Sung’s privately zoned space in

many ways seemed more public. Facing the street with a prominent and
large glass picture window, Sung’s house proclaimed his family’s social
status to all who passed by. (See figure 4.7.) The grand façade announced
social status both in terms of economic capital (the financial ability to pur-
chase and maintain such a house) and cultural capital (the knowledge and
taste needed to choose a suitable house). The large glass windows invited
passersby to peer in even further at household furnishings and family life
inside. Indeed, window curtains became new necessities for regulating
private everyday life in Western-style houses.
The process by which Sung’s house in the Italian Concession was con-
structed was also different from that of Xu’s compound. Whereas the Xu
FIGURE 4.7 A house much like the one Sung Sik rented. Photograph by the author.
family compound would have been privately commissioned by its initial

occupants and built by a carpenter, the Sung family house was built by real
estate developer Crédit Foncier as an investment.52 Tianjin’s housing boom
and the growth of its speculative colonial-capitalist real estate market
coincided with the introduction of a new scientific knowledge about build-
ing according to architectural principles and structural engineering. Pro-
fessional architects emerged out of the elite social group that in the past
had commissioned artisan-carpenters to build their family houses.53 One
of the best-known architectural historians, Liang Sicheng (1901–1972),
came from a preeminent Chinese intellectual family. His father Liang
Qichao (1873–1929) resided in Tianjin’s Italian Concession in a house not
far from Sung’s. (See figure 4.8.) Liang Sicheng parlayed his social and
intellectual capital into places at the elite Chinese-foreign university
Qinghua and the University of Pennsylvania. Indeed, most of Liang’s col-
leagues claimed credentials from foreign universities, many having stud-
ied abroad with Boxer Indemnity Scholarships.54
As students abroad, Chinese architects forged a cosmopolitan social
network that they carried into China when they formed professional asso-
ciations with other architects such as the Society for Chinese Architects,
landed jobs in prominent Western firms, or in some cases founded their
own successful firms. They also published professional journals like
Zhongguo jianzhu (The Chinese Architect, Shanghai, 1933). Many of these
new professional architects considered structural engineering to be com-
patible with social and political engineering. They debated the importance
of a national architecture on the pages of Zhongguo jianzhu; others, like Lu
Yanzhi, built new national monuments in modern Chinese style; still oth-
ers, like Liang Sicheng, pioneered the academic study of architectural his-
tory in China’s modern universities. But none of these men concerned
themselves with housing. In his meticulous study of imperial Chinese
architecture, for example, Liang Sicheng focused on political and religious
architecture, but not domestic, despite its central role in the socio-political
technologies of space.
Professional architects did design some residential housing in Tianjin.
The Austrian-born Rolf Geyling (1884–1952), for example, designed sev-
eral impressive villas and a few modernist apartment buildings. But
when a local real estate developer wanted to design a modest row of
FIGURE 4.8 Liang Qichao house. Photograph by the author.
semi-attached town houses, they turned to a builder. The number of Tian-

jin builders grew in parallel with Tianjin’s foreign-concession housing
boom of the 1920s and 1930s. At the start of the 1930s, there were only
eight Chinese contractors in Tianjin; by 1937, there were more than thirty.55
Although both foreign and Chinese architects worked in China, builders
were always Chinese. Builders required knowledge on multiple planes.
They needed foreign-language skills if they wanted to work in the conces-
sions. They needed a solid understanding of the market, not just how
much housing should cost, but also the going rate for all building mate-
rials. They needed to be well versed in Western architectural principles
and understand structural engineering, and finally they needed to be able
to communicate that knowledge to and manage Chinese manual laborers.
While artisan-carpenters underwent an apprenticeship and Chinese
architects trained at universities in China and abroad, builders did not
have a single educational path.56 They did have trade journals, like Jianzhu
yuekan (The Builder).57 This Shanghai-based monthly magazine, published
between 1932 and 1937, included advertisements for building suppliers, a

regular column that introduced English architectural and construction
terms, articles on technical aspects of building such as how to lay bricks,
blueprints and illustrations of foreign suburban houses, and monthly
reports on the cost of building supplies and labor. In sum, with journals
like Jianzhu yuekan as their guide, builders translated the architect’s pen-
cil into the carpenter’s nail, deploying the developer’s capital with the
utmost efficiency.
The builders who constructed Sung Sik’s house in the Italian Conces-
sion did not design a home for a “typical Chinese family”; instead, they
built a living space based on efficiency and engineering. Moreover, while
courtyard houses were typically designed with a particular family in mind,
builders designed new speculative houses for the market. Sung’s house
was built as part of a row of attached townhouses each with identical, pre-
scriptive floor plans. Building housing in this manner was more efficient
than constructing individual houses, but it also meant that each house
replicated the same prescriptive vision of family and social relations.
Housing constructed for the Tianjin real estate market thus flipped the
architectural mantra “form follows function” so that form dictated
function.
The blueprints to Sung’s house reveal that before construction even
began, the builder had assigned a specific function to each room. (See
figure 4.9.) Moreover, this blueprint prescribed a specific idea of the mod-
ern family based on love, individualism, privacy, and close family bonds.
The new technology of social space was apparent as soon as you walked
through the front door into the drawing room. Although the drawing room
did not exist in courtyard houses, it functioned in Sung’s house similarly
to a first courtyard, as it was closest to the main entrance and the most
“public” room of the house. One moved through the drawing room to
enter the dining room, a new type of space for family and public meals. In
courtyard houses, for example, banquets would have been served in the
courtyard. Walking up the stairs to the first and second floors, one reached
the family members’ bedrooms, or the more “private” quarters of the
house. Unlike courtyard houses, where each stem family occupied a single
room, this Western villa included three individual bedrooms. This pre-
scriptive design of social space assumed a Euro-American idea of the
FIGURE 4.9 Floorplan of Sung Sik’s house based on blueprint.
TMA w2-295, 1924. Illustration by Clio Petrulis.
small nuclear family in which the loving husband and wife would share a
room while two children each occupied their own space. Family members
would then come together in the communal spaces of the house, such as
the drawing room and dining room.
Whereas in Sung’s Western-style house, walls framed a single room
with a single prescriptive function, function and space in courtyard houses
could be more flexible. An ancestral altar could not be moved, but the hall
that housed it, like other wings of a courtyard, could be altered. Inhabit-
ants could create different living spaces by putting up a screen or curtain.
Moreover, moving around furniture could change the function of a space
throughout a single day. Sung’s house reserved a room for dining, but in a
courtyard house, tables were stored in a stem family’s quarters and moved
out for meals. Similarly, in place of a permanent bathroom, courtyard
houses had a moveable washstand or chamber pot placed within a room.58
The Western-style house and the courtyard house both regulated social
relations but did so in radically different ways. Tianjin courtyard houses
arranged social relations horizontally on a north-south axis and in relation
to the family altar. The household head was situated closest to the ancestral
altar while servant quarters were farthest away, relegated to the far front or
back of a compound. In Sung’s house, status was guided by staircases. The
Sung family members slept upstairs in their individual private spaces, and
the servants lived in the downstairs basement, near the kitchen and next
to the coal storage, thereby establishing a hierarchy of status that liter-
ally placed master above servant. In both styles of housing, kitchens were
peripheral spaces that designated social, or servant status, not female gen-
der status. This was in stark contrast to the idea of the modern kitchen as a
female space, the housewife’s laboratory, which was taking hold in Europe,
America, and Japan at this time. While such ideas were introduced in home
economics education in China, in treaty-port Tianjin they never material-
ized in the spatial designs of urban housing.59 The kitchen in Xu Pu’an’s
courtyard house was located far from the ritual center. The kitchen in Shen
Yiyun’s Italian Concession home was located in a detached building behind
the house, and Sung’s kitchen was located in the basement. With all their
smoke and oil, kitchens were considered to be among the dirtiest and most
unsightly rooms in the house. According to a Chinese home economics
textbook published in 1940, for example, the two dirtiest rooms in Chinese
houses were the kitchen and the bathroom.60 But while the modern
bathroom enjoyed a facelift with ceramic and porcelain tiles, the modern
kitchen never followed suit. In a country where domestic labor was plenti-
ful and inexpensive, servants could do the cooking, and while the modern
housewife might plan her family’s meals or advise her cook, the kitchen
never became her social space.61
Choosing to live in the Italian Concession, Sung chose to live in a new
configuration of public and private. Unlike the old Chinese city, where the
streets that surrounded Xu Pu’an’s courtyard house were filled with ven-
dors and commerce, the Italian Concession was purely residential, and
businesses were not allowed to set up. In the Chinese city and inside court-
yard houses, inner and outer were relational and fluid. In the Italian Con-
cession and in Sung’s house, domains of public and private were clearly
delineated. Yet Sung’s public profession paid for his private residence, and
his private residence allowed him easy access to the public space of the
train station so he could perform that job. Sung chose to live in a com-
pletely residential district but still desired to live in convenient proximity
to conduct business.
Through Sung Sik’s request for a higher rent, archives reveal not only
how one man articulated his reasons for choosing to live in a foreign-
concession house, but also what the new spatial and social arrangements of
that choice looked like. Ultimately it was his and his superior’s claim that
the Western-style house was “suitable” that convinced the postal service to
pay the housing allowance. This “suitable” house presented a new set of
prescriptive spatial practices that Sung would not have experienced at the
beginning of his life—but Sung, like Shen, never described Western-style
houses and new spatial practices as alien or foreign. This signifies what it
meant to feel at home in the world. Feeling comfortable in a Western-style
concession house also signaled a particular social status. Sung does not say
so himself, but the archives reveal the cavernous socioeconomic difference
between Sung and the coolie laborers hired by the post office, whose yearly
wages were equal to just two months of Sung’s rent.
CONCLUSION
As two different socio-spatial practices existed simultaneously in Tianjin’s

urban landscape, different family forms inhabited different prescriptive
spaces that did not always align with their demography. Extended families
lived in concession houses designed for nuclear families, while nuclear
families and couples could find themselves living in a courtyard house
designed to hold much larger families.62 The case of Shen Yiyun, for
instance, shows that while living in a Beijing courtyard house with only
her husband, she hired four servants to help her manage the house. Space
was prescriptive, but Chinese people also adapted spaces. To use an exam-
ple from another resident of the Italian Concession, the playwright Cao
Yu’s family owned two adjacent European-style villas that they inhabited
much like courtyards of the same compound: Cao Yu’s father lived in the
front house with his own public sitting room and personal dining room,
while the rest of the family stayed in the back house until the family fell on
hard times and had to rent the front residence.
Not all Tianjin families could afford to choose the ideal prescriptive
space for the way they lived. In a crowded city with high housing costs,
urban families negotiated everyday life in the spaces they could find and
afford. People may not have been able to live in a perfectly “suitable”
house like Sung, but all literate urbanites could still learn about architec-
tural technologies and new prescriptions for social space in inexpensive
popular manuals and encyclopedias with titles like The ABC’s of Architec-
ture.63 These books introduced readers to the ins and outs of structural
engineering, but more importantly they instructed readers in new social
spaces, including floor plans of perfectly arranged rooms, each with a spe-
cific title and function. Popular architectural manuals also offered solu-
tions to the problems that arose when an urbanite’s rooms did not match
the necessary prescriptive functions. In the case of a missing dining room,
one manual recommended using a section of the living room (qijujian) and
not the kitchen, which was too dirty and smelled of smoke and oil.64 If a
house did not have a formal drawing room, or keting, the book suggested
using a corner of a living room to receive guests, and if a guest needed to
spend the night, a study could be transformed into a guest bedroom. But
while Chinese readers were learning how to pour concrete foundations
and frame high rises with steel, they could still purchase a geomantic
almanac to calculate the most auspicious days to construct or renovate a
house. In other words, late imperial building practices did not disappear
with the introduction of Western architectural knowledge.
Life in a Chinese urban house was often about coordinating and com-
promising between different spatial technologies. Xu Pu’an, Shen Yiyun,
and Sung Sik may have chosen to live in Chinese or Western houses for
different reasons, but they all experienced both of these architectural
technologies in their lifetime. Xu Pu’an owned a Chinese courtyard house
while working in a foreign building. Shen Yiyun adapted to life in multiple
styles of residences in several different countries, and Sung Sik most likely
grew up in a southern Chinese house before he claimed as an adult that
the only suitable house for his family in Tianjin was one in the foreign con-
cessions. Whether they were passing through, like Shen Yiyun and Sung
Sik, or whether they could trace deep local roots like Xu Pu’an, the resi-
dents of Tianjin inhabited a world in which Chinese and foreign ideas,
technologies, and styles coexisted. For these individuals, modernity was
not defined through Western progress and science, but rather through a
cosmopolitan combination of Western and Chinese temporalities and cul-
tures. To be modern meant to be comfortable dwelling in both of these
worlds.
5
Designing House and Home
W
hen residents of Tianjin chose a house, whether inten-
tionally or not, they also selected a set of spatial politics.
Choosing to live in a particular district or concession
meant living according to a distinct political vision of spatial
order and architectural design, from the grid of the old Chi-
nese city to the tree-lined streets of the British Concession’s
garden city and the civic buildings of the new Chinese munici-
pal district, Xin hebei qu. Moreover, floorplans of individual
houses prescribed a social vision for everyday life, whether in
the separate private bedrooms of an Italian villa or in the cos-
mologically designed wing of a Chinese courtyard house.
These politics of design were cemented in brick, wood, and
concrete. Chinese individuals could not reroute roads or tear
down load-bearing walls and beams, but they could refashion
façades, decorate interior spaces, and design furnishings that
represented a particular prescriptive politics of style. Thus,
while the Republican-era Chinese government did not regu-
late architectural spaces of the house, designing house and
home continued to be a political project.
China has a long history of linking visual and material cul-
ture to politics. In imperial China, design, style, and aesthetics
were linked to each dynasty and each emperor’s reign. The
court employed imperial artists and artisans. The imperial
Designing House and Home 155
kiln, for example, was located in Jingdezhen and produced ceramics

marked on the underside with the name of the dynasty and reigning
emperor. Wares produced in Jingdezhen during the Qing took on a differ-
ent design aesthetic than those under the Ming and Song; likewise objects
produced under the Qianlong emperor’s reign differed from those made
under Kangxi. Imperial styles influenced nonimperial objects produced in
the same area. Even today scholars define art and artifacts, from imperial
goods and high art to more common objects of everyday life, according to
the dynasties in which they were produced. Thus, material culture in late
imperial China functioned much like how Leora Auslander describes fur-
niture style in old-regime France: style was associated with a particular
reign, and furniture was a representation of political power.1 Auslander
argues that whereas style is political, taste is an aesthetic value formed in
“a complex interaction of desires for emulation, distinction, and solidar-
ity.”2 In other words, taste is the story of how and why people come to
desire particular objects. Tracing the history of style and taste in France,
Auslander argues that following the French Revolution, furniture con-
sumption eventually became democratized as “social power” through the
consolidation of bourgeois political identity, ending in mass consumerism
in the latter half of the twentieth century. China followed an alternative
historical trajectory after the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Taste
was democratized in the sense that Chinese people faced multiple choices,
but their choices were conditioned by the styles of the multiple colonial
powers and a new Chinese nationalist power.
While French citizens navigated a politics of style from the Ancien
Régime to the Republic, Chinese residents of multiply colonized Tianjin
dwelt within the multiple politics of the world. Walking along the city’s
major commercial street, today’s Liberation Road (Jiefang lu), a
Republican-era Tianjin resident would have navigated a street whose
name changed three different times in three different languages, from
Rue de France in the French Concession to Victoria Road in the British
Concession and Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse in the German Concession—
which itself changed when it was renamed Woodrow Wilson Road after
World War I. Continuing to stroll throughout the city, that resident would
have witnessed the high, gray brick walls of Qing-era courtyard buildings
in the old Chinese city, a Shinto shrine in the Japanese Concession, a
Beaux Arts bank in the French Concession, a neo-Gothic municipal hall in

the British Concession, the art deco club of the Italian Concession, and
onion domes in the Russian Concession. Inside each of these buildings,
depending on which country controlled the district, the walker would have
noticed different electric currents running through the wires, while
different-tasting water pumped through the pipes. Urban planning, archi-
tectural styles, and municipal utilities made the abstract politics of Tianjin’s
multiple foreign empires concrete to the city’s residents. These multiple
politics of style dictated Chinese tastes, yet they also created gaps in which
Chinese people could design a unique Tianjin modern style, which reflected
the fractured and mixed styles of the city. Through this process of creating
a Tianjin modern style, they also formed their own self-understandings on
and for the global stage.
As Chinese people chose a house to live in and decided on how to
decorate their home, they navigated multiple politics to develop their indi-
vidual taste. This taste in turn helped shape new individual identities of
gender, Chineseness, and social status. The desire, knowledge, and ability
to occupy a house, was determined by economic capital but also educa-
tional background, cultural knowledge, and social network. Likewise,
through designing the modern home, taste functioned as a form of dis-
tinction, a means to signal that a house’s residents belonged to a particular
social class.3 In treaty-port Tianjin, however, these understandings of
social class were still unclear. The Japan historian Jordan Sand argues that
in modern Japan, a growing bourgeois class enabled the rise of the modern
home. 4 In China, a fully self-conscious bourgeois social class had yet to
emerge; instead people produced status through taste formation. The
colonial-capitalist system in Chinese cities like Tianjin sparked a rupture
in Chinese social relations, not only by ushering in the end of the late
imperial status hierarchies that had centered around the imperial civil ser-
vice exam, but also by offering up new sites like the modern home where
new gendered and status identities could be articulated. During this
period of economic and political transition, there were no clear delinea-
tions of middle class. Instead, the modern house and home became sites
where Chinese people could experiment with social distinctions, leverag-
ing different forms of economic, educational, social, and cultural capital
to create a common set of tastes that signaled belonging to a particular
social group. In other words, Chinese people designed the social space of
the bourgeois home before that social class had developed; and designing
that social space led to new forms of social distinction.
Tianjin’s urban elites purchased and rented houses, but as they designed
the modern home, they articulated new social status through their aes-
thetic choices. Measuring class simply according to a household’s relation
to production, or to the male household head’s profession, reveals the
different kinds of status groups that composed Tianjin’s urban elites,
including militarist warlords, former Qing officials, compradors and bank-
ers, civil servants, and office workers. Examining social status through the
lens of taste, however, defines urban elite more broadly, but also reveals
the processes through which shifting and relational social strata were con-
structed. For example, a warlord had the economic capital to purchase a
large villa in one of Tianjin’s foreign concessions, but the educated daugh-
ter of a civil servant possessed the knowledge and cultural capital to
understand how to decorate and manage the modern home. During a
period when social classes were shifting significantly, the ability to per-
form social practices could be just as important as income in signaling an
individual’s membership in a particular social group.5
THE POLITICS OF STYLE
The multiple politics of architectural style that dotted Tianjin’s landscape,

as well as a new nationalist Chinese style of architecture that was emerg-
ing at the time, influenced the home design of Tianjin urban elites in the
Republican era. Unlike the consumers that Auslander describes who
democratized taste in modern France, Chinese consumers did not simply
forge taste through a singular national style. Instead, they had to navigate
multiple colonial styles within their city. Gwendolyn Wright shows how
architecture illuminates a connection between culture and politics in her
analysis of French colonial architecture. According to Wright, every orna-
mental detail on a colonial building and each municipal zoning regulation
pointed to a larger political agenda.6 The French colonial political agenda
for instance, was split between two approaches: assimilation and associa-
tion. Assimilation argued for the superiority of French and European
culture, while association respected cultural difference.7 An assimilation-

ist approach toward architecture in Hanoi meant that government offices,
the opera house, hotels, and residences were all built in grand European
style. On the other hand, an associationalist approach in Morocco meant
that colonial builders took the local architectural heritage into consider-
ation, constructing buildings with pointed arches, tilework, and white-
washed walls.8
Colonial politics in Tianjin were neither assimilationist nor associa-
tionalist. First, colonialism was multiple, but second, foreign powers never
clearly articulated a policy to rule over the Chinese population. Conces-
sion architecture often appeared to be assimilationist, but not because it
was part of a larger colonial political agenda to train the local Chinese in
the style and practices of the home country. Foreign empires in Tianjin did
not consider their concessions to be colonial settlements but rather were
commercial extensions of empire. Imperial powers France and Japan, for
example, never attempted to transform Tianjin’s local Chinese population
into imperial subjects; instead, formal and informal agents of the French
and Japanese Empires in Tianjin focused on making money. This was
reflected in Tianjin’s public architecture, which included more banks than
civic projects like opera houses and museums. But even if foreign govern-
ments did not pursue an associationalist colonial agenda, the consulates,
municipal halls, and banks built in the home country’s style still depicted
colonial power in a similar way.
In a city of multiple foreign empires, the local Chinese population was
not the only audience for concession architecture. Enmeshed in a compe-
tition that mirrored the rivalry among nation-states on the global stage,
concession governments designed their districts with other concessions in
mind. As the Italians planned out their concession, for example, they pro-
jected authority over a Chinese landscape, but they also broadcast Italian
power and modernity through design to the French and British Conces-
sions across the river. Several concession governments commissioned
municipal halls to be built in national style, from the Beaux Arts building
in the French Concession to castle-like Gordon Hall in the British; as late-
comers to European-style imperialism, the Japanese designed all but two
of their municipal buildings—a Shinto shrine and an exhibition hall—in
European style.
The nature of colonial real estate development in Tianjin further

enhanced this sense of political competition. Unlike in some French colo-
nial cities, where the colonial government established an urban planning
department or even a housing bureau to oversee the design and construc-
tion of houses, in Tianjin, concession governments turned to real estate
developers to build housing.9 Developers and concession governments
competed to make their districts desirable to wealthy Chinese investors or
renters, whose taxes would help fund the concessions. Foreign municipal
governments may not have designed their concessions to indoctrinate the
local Chinese population as subjects of empire, but they did plan their dis-
tricts to attract investors’ capital. Thus the British Municipal Council
declared itself to be a British garden city on Chinese soil, while the Italians
set zoning laws to ensure that their residential community would be built
only in European style.
The leading developers of what might be understood as associationalist-
style buildings were U.S. religious and educational institutions. This new
Chinese-style architecture was led by the U.S. architect Henry Murphy. In
1914, the Yale-in- China Program commissioned Murphy to design their
Changsha campus. Murphy later drafted plans for other universities and
mission colleges and the YMCA.10 Murphy’s designs complemented the
missionizing project of his clients by grafting Chinese designs onto a
Western architectural infrastructure. His buildings can be essentially
characterized by imagining a Chinese roof atop a Western Beaux-Arts
base. Murphy did not refer to his designs as associationalist; instead, he
called them adaptive.11 His goal was to apply Chinese tradition to modern
architectural design.
Murphy’s adaptive designs inspired a new Chinese nationalist architec-
ture. His style influenced the first generation of Chinese professional
architects, many of whom trained in the United States and went on to inte-
grate Murphy’s design ethos into their own work. Lu Yanzhi, who was born
in Tianjin, graduated from Cornell University with a degree in architec-
ture in 1918 and began his career in the “Oriental Department” of Mur-
phy’s U.S.-based firm, Murphy and Dana. Lu later returned to China to
head the firm’s Shanghai office, and eventually started his own firm.
Though Lu continued to work for foreign clients, he also began to convert
this foreign, Chinese-style institutional architecture into a national
design; his best-known design, the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing,

was completed shortly after Lu died in 1929. The focal point of the mauso-
leum is its blue-tiled roof.
Indeed, following Murphy’s designs, the roof became the focus of Chi-
nese nationalist architecture. Murphy had singled out the roof as the
essence of Chinese architectural design when actually the core principles
of Chinese architectural design emphasized post-and-beam construction,
modularity, and feng shui planning. Rooflines, by contrast, were regional,
and Murphy had based his “Chinese” designs on a northern Chinese
roofline with simple, extended eaves. Debates over rooflines would domi-
nate discussions on Chinese architectural aesthetics among Chinese
architects into the 1950s.12
The new Chinese nationalist architecture also diverged from late impe-
rial building practices through incorporating Western notions of public
and private. The newly professionalized class of Chinese architects, who
were often educated in the West or at least in Western architectural prac-
tices, were still very much interested in Chinese architectural history. In
1925, the Song dynasty imperial architectural manual, the Yingzao fazhi,
was published and made widely available. The architect and teacher Liang
Sicheng led the movement to study the Yingzao fazhi in order to under-
stand China’s architectural past, conducting fieldwork at the imperial
architecture sites that still existed.13
To transform Chinese late imperial architecture into a modern aca-
demic subject, Liang translated what he called “the grammar of Chinese
architecture” into the “universal” language and drawings of modern
architectural knowledge.14 In other words, Liang, who had studied under
Paul Cret at the University of Pennsylvania, applied the Beaux Arts uni-
versal architectural language to Chinese architectural designs, in order to
establish Chinese architecture as a technical system on par with the
West.15 This translation imposed a Beaux Arts understanding of public and
private onto Chinese architectural history. Although according to archi-
tectural principles in late imperial China, all buildings, from temples to
domiciles, were constructed according to a core set of design and struc-
tural values, Liang’s studies privileged temples and government buildings
over the private spaces of courtyard houses. In doing so, however, Liang
not only mapped a Western architectural understanding of public and
private onto Chinese buildings, but he also ensured that housing would
not be codified into the modern study of Chinese architecture.
As they articulated design practices, China’s first generation of modern
architects, Chinese and foreign alike, largely ignored housing. Henry
Murphy never designed housing in China, although in 1926 he did design
a housing development called the “Chinese village” in Coral Gables, Flor-
ida. In 1935, the editor of The Builder, a Shanghai-based trade journal, crit-
icized Chinese professional architects for debating the merits of Chinese
architecture while ignoring housing. According to the editor, architects
had only “superficial knowledge of palaces and temples” and did not
understand what society needed in terms of housing. He argued that if
Chinese society were to progress, housing needed to be improved to pro-
tect against the elements and disease and to promote modern hygiene.16 In
other words, housing could be a form of social engineering.
The Builder may have called for housing reform, but very few of its read-
ers (professional builders) took up the call, and while architects designed
new Chinese-style public buildings, they never proposed Chinese-style
housing. Faculty at Tianjin’s Nankai University held classes in an architect-
designed, modern Chinese-style building, but they lived in Western-style
bungalows.17 Moreover, while a few developers experimented with middle-
class housing in Shanghai’s suburbs, in Tianjin, government planners did
not propose middle-class housing until after World War II, when the city
became wholly Chinese once more.18
A few foreign architects designed houses or apartment buildings in
Tianjin, but for the most part, when it came to housing design, builders,
developers, and Chinese people were left to their own devices. Living in a
city with a patchwork of architectural styles, Tianjin urbanites negotiated
multiple politics of design, with influences ranging from foreign conces-
sion governments and civilizing universities to Nationalist architects and
real estate investors—not to mention the Qing dynasty’s politics of style,
which lingered in the old Chinese district of the city. But unlike in many
other colonial cities, these multiple, competing politics of style, and the
municipal neglect of housing that accompanied them, opened up a space
for Tianjin’s residents to design modern style at home. The French may
have established a Bureau of Economic Housing in Madagascar in 1929 to
regulate even what kinds of building materials should be used in building
new houses, but in Tianjin the French Concession contracted most of the
development to the Belgian bank Crédit Foncier.19 Although Tianjin’s
colonial-capitalist urban planning presented multiple politics of style, it
also exposed gaps that allowed personal taste to squeeze in between the
politics.
TASTE AND PERSONAL IDENTITY
To understand how Tianjin’s residents navigated the multiple politics of

style to design their houses, imagine visiting the British Concession in
1924. You are strolling along the sidewalk, under the trees, on Glasgow
Road. Once you reach the corner at Singapore Road, you cannot help but
notice a unique, newly built house. (See figures 5.1 and 5.2.) The three-
story modernist box shape, with its curved balconies and alternating
stripes of white plaster and brick, is strikingly handsome, similar to mod-
ernist, almost Bauhaus-style houses that were constructed in the British
Concession around the same time. What makes this particular house so
noticeable is an unusual structure on top of the roof: a Chinese pavilion
with a yellow glazed tile roof. If you are fortunate enough to be invited to
that rooftop to take a closer look, you will discover that boxy, white mod-
ernist columns support the tiled roof and decorative metalwork surrounds
the base. This unique design, which juxtaposes imperial-era yellow tile
with modernist white plaster, certainly would have caught people’s eyes in
1920s Tianjin. They may even have wondered how this house could have
been built in a foreign concession with some of the strictest zoning laws in
the city, laws that explicitly forbade the construction of Chinese architec-
tural style. In fact, this was the only house in the British Concession with
Chinese architectural details visible to the street.
How might a Tianjin urbanite passing by this house in 1924 have under-
stood the architectural style? And why did the owner who commissioned it
choose this design? If there were more houses like this, we might view the
design as a British associationalist attempt to control the local Chinese
population through adopting Chinese style in housing, but since it was so
unusual to incorporate Chinese design into the façade like this, the house
may have been linked to the owner’s individual taste. If that owner had
FIGURE 5.1 Chen Guangyuan house, British Concession.
FIGURE 5.2 Detail of the Chen house. Photograph by the author.

been a British colonial, the house may have represented an Orientalist con-
sumption of empire. But the house actually belonged to a Chinese man
named Chen Guangyuan, a militarist warlord turned real estate investor.
Chen commissioned this house, built in 1924, around the time that Tian-
jin’s concession real estate market was taking off. And when he chose the
design for his house, Chen may have been inspired by a similar home in the
Italian Concession, an Italianate villa adorned by two rooftop pavilions,
one Romanesque in style and the other Chinese (figure 5.3). The house in
the Italian Concession belonged to a warlord named Bao Guiqing, who
eventually headed a northern railroad company, and most likely chose to
live in the Italian Concession because of its proximity to the railroad sta-
tion. Bao bought the house in the early 1920s and renovated it to his taste;
based on the difference in the architectural details of the pavilions and the
main house, the pavilions likely were part of his later renovation.
FIGURE 5.3 Bao Guiqing house pavilions in Italian Concession.

There are no records of whether Chen or the builder based their design
on Bao’s design, nor are there any similar examples of public architecture
in Tianjin today that might have inspired these men. While a Chinese-
tiled pavilion atop a roof might seem reminiscent of Murphy’s or Lu’s
adaptive or nationalist designs, these rooflines did not reference the archi-
tectural history of China’s palaces or temples. Instead, pavilions were gar-
den structures, sites for personal contemplation or rest amid nature.
Indeed, in deciding to construct a garden on their rooftops, both men were
summoning a centuries-old practice in which scholar gardens were sites of
literati taste and masculine identity.20 But while literati-scholars of late
imperial China often obtained elite status through their mastery of impe-
rial sanctioned texts, neither Chen nor Bao was a learned scholar. Instead,
their economic capital enabled them to express their elite status through
individual taste, specifically by purchasing a large house in one of Tian-
jin’s foreign concessions and erecting a garden pavilion on its roof.
Rooftops were not the only place where garden pavilions could be found
in Tianjin’s concessions. Down the road from Chen’s house, the British
Concession’s Victoria Park included a Chinese-style pavilion that pro-
vided shelter for Chinese nannies looking after foreign children. The Brit-
ish Concession may have forbidden building in Chinese style, and they
may have constructed municipal and consular buildings to project a Brit-
ish national style, but they permitted a Chinese-style pavilion in the public
park. Moreover, while classical Chinese private gardens had been gendered
male, the foreign concession public parks were sites for the feminized lei-
sured labor of child-rearing. Indeed, many postcards and photographs of
Tianjin’s concession parks featured foreign children at play. Public build-
ings in the concessions that represented the masculinity of political and
economic power were almost universally built in Western style; the female
and childhood spaces of the public parks, by contrast, could incorporate a
Chinese pavilion as a public leisure space.
Then how should we interpret Chinese elements incorporated into the
façade of a house in the context of the concession built environment?
Looking at the American home in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, the historian Kristin Hoganson describes U.S. consumption of
the objects and styles of imperialism and their incorporation into inte-
rior design “cosmopolitan domesticity.”21 Like other historians of North
America and Europe who look at the consumption of empire at home dur-
ing this period, Hoganson argues that everyday practices, such as interior
decorating, consuming cosmetics and soap, and reading travel novels are
as integral to understanding empire as diplomatic treaties and trade
agreements, and that by consuming the world at home, American women
celebrated empire through everyday practices that reinforced the racial,
national, and gendered imperatives of empire.22
If the cosmopolitan domesticity of North American and European
women, who lived at the edges of empire, reinforced the power of foreign
empires, what did cosmopolitan domesticity mean for Chinese men like
Chen and Bao who lived at the very heart of the foreign imperial order?
When American women decorated their parlors with an Oriental rug from
Tianjin or Chinese porcelain from Jingdezhen, their Orientalist consump-
tion reinforced a global power structure that feminized the East. When
Chen and Bao placed Chinese style on the architectural façade of their
houses, they turned the Orientalist paradigm on its head. By taking the
East out of the feminized interior and installing it on the masculine façade,
they made Chinese style masculine, and the Chinese pavilions atop their
foreign-style houses projected the power and wealth that some Chinese
men could wield over the colonial landscape. The architectural designs of
houses like Chen’s and Bao’s illuminate the complexities of power rela-
tions under the colonial-capitalist system, in which foreign municipal
councils may have controlled building regulations, but nevertheless relied
on the capital of warlords-turned-businessmen like Chen and Bao to
develop the concession’s infrastructure and its businesses, thereby
empowering these two men to transform their economic capital and politi-
cal connections into an expression of personal taste that defied the strict-
est zoning laws in the city.
Chen and Bao may have chosen to juxtapose Chinese and Western archi-
tectural elements in their façades, but they did not invent this style. In fact, in
districts with more lenient or nonexistent zoning regulations, styles were
mixed across a variety of housing stock. For example, the Xu Pu’an house in
Tianjin’s old Chinese city assembled elements of Chinese and Western archi-
tecture into a Chinese-Western courtyard house that included a two-story
domed Western-style villa as one wing of the courtyard flanked by Chinese-
style halls.23 (See figures 5.4, 5.5, and 5.6.) The house mixed Chinese and
FIGURE 5.4 Xu Pu’an house in Tianjin’s old Chinese city.
FIGURE 5.5 Inside the walls of the Xu house. Photograph by the author.
FIGURE 5.6 European- Chinese courtyard in the Xu house.

foreign building materials, with foreign poured concrete embellishing gray

Chinese brick. The poured concrete dates construction to the 1920s, when
the material became more widely used in Tianjin. The gray Chinese brick,
already widely used throughout China, was produced through a different oxi-
dation process than foreign red brick. Moreover, the bricks were laid accord-
ing to Chinese bricklaying techniques that emphasized a uniform, seamless
wall rather than European techniques that displayed exposed mortar.24
The house also combined Chinese and Western architectural plans. On
one hand the compound was enclosed by a high gray brick wall in keeping
with surrounding courtyard houses, but on the other hand the dome atop
the Western villa rose above the wall to reveal a Western façade to pass-
ersby on the street. The main entrance to the compound was located to the
east instead of the south, and rather than a post-and-lintel doorway, typi-
cal of the surrounding courtyard homes, the main entryway was octago-
nal, a modest opening that was more in keeping with an entrance into a
Chinese garden than an entry-gate into a high-status house. While the

inhabitants of neighboring courtyard houses most likely projected their
status to the outside through the materials, carvings, and postings on their
doorway, this building projected the owner’s status much in the same way
that Chen’s and Bao’s villas in the foreign concessions did—through its
towering architectural façade.
But unlike villas in the foreign concessions, which could at most add a
Chinese pavilion, this compound included a sprawling complex of mixed
Chinese and European features. In addition to the Western-style court-
yard at the main entryway, the compound included a second courtyard to
the south that was constructed in Chinese style. The Chinese courtyard,
framed by the villa to the north and a Chinese post-and-beam building to
the south, was surrounded by a veranda covered in a tile roof, and adorned
with wooden latticework. An octagonal door on the Western side of the
Chinese-style veranda, which recalled the octagonal entrance to the com-
pound, opened onto a European-style arcade of arches and pillars, deco-
rated with ornate capitals, made mostly from concrete and plaster. These
arcades led to a glass-domed conservatory in the back garden, which was
topped by a spire identical to the one found atop the dome on the main
house. Viewed in the context of the entire complex, this building was not
simply a Western-style villa built in the old Chinese city. Rather, the villa
was a single structure in an architectural garden of Chinese- and
European-style structures.
In the Japanese Concession, the mixing of styles was more subtle, with
Chinese design elements adorning Western-style homes. One villa, for
example, included red-painted wooden doors carved in Chinese floral
motifs and red wooden latticework on the gateway to the street. Tianjin’s
new Chinese district included a cozy single-family bungalow hidden
behind a high wall reminiscent of the courtyard houses across the river,
while down the road, a series of identical alleyway houses, built by a real
estate investor, used poured concrete to attach Western-style columns and
ornate windowsills onto Chinese gray brick. (See figures 5.7, 5.8, and 5.9.)
Thus, the juxtaposition of Chinese and Western styles in architectural
design and façades was not the exclusive taste of a select few warlords but
rather part of a Chinese-initiated Tianjin modern style that spanned the
elite classes of the city.
FIGURE 5.7 Row house in Xin hebei qu. Photograph by the author.
FIGURE 5.8 Poured concrete columns on Xin hebei qu row houses.

FIGURE 5.9 Western-style window on gray brick row house in Xin hebei qu.
Combining foreign and Chinese styles to make something new seems in

many ways to be similar to the critical theorist Homi Bhabha’s idea of hybrid-
ity—a colonial-cultural crossover in which colonized writers expressed
themselves in the language and style of the colonizer, yet in doing so created
something new, thus displacing colonial authority.25 But unlike a typical
colonial hybrid, in which the two parts fused to form a single entity, these
architectural examples were more properly a chimera: a collection of unique
parts, all grafted together while maintaining the integrity of each individual
portion. The words hybrid and chimera refer to the science of cell fusion and
grafting. A hybrid results from the fusion of dissimilar genetic materials,
while in a chimera, the two types of genetic material remain distinct. The
chimera is also a mythic beast of multiple parts from ancient Greek mythol-
ogy: the body of a lion, the head of a goat, and the tail of a snake. This image
of a chimera could apply to this architectural style as well—a combination of
Chinese and Western styles and tastes, each maintaining its own
distinctiveness. In this juxtaposition of Chinese and Western styles, Tian-

jin’s Chinese urbanites produced a new modern Tianjin style that challenged
the claims of foreign empires to aesthetic authority over modern design.
SELLING AND CONSUMING FURNITURE
As urban real estate expanded in Chinese treaty-port cities, so did the

need and desire for new furniture. As one 1907 British guidebook stated,
“in no branch of commercial and industrial activity in Shanghai is there
greater competition than in the manufacture and sale of furniture.”26
Starting in the nineteenth century, Chinese and foreign businessmen set
up furniture shops along Shanghai’s Nanjing Road, offering imported sun-
dries and locally constructed furniture.27 Years later, when businesses
and families in Tianjin wanted to decorate their homes with Western-
style furnishings, they ordered from older Shanghai stores like the
Chinese-owned and -managed Tai Chong and Company, established in
the 1870s, or Shanghai department stores that had branch offices in
Tianjin, like Hall & Holtz. Tianjin consumers also shopped at local fur-
niture dealers like the Chinese-managed Sun Chong and Company,
located in the French Concession, or the foreign- operated Sims and
Company, in the British Concession, not to mention any number of work-
shops and stores in the Chinese section of the city.28
The market in Western-style cabinetry, dining tables, and sofas may
have been sparked by the demand from foreigners setting up offices and
residences, but foreign consumption alone could not have sustained these
businesses in a city like Tianjin. Foreign offices such as consulates, the
post office, and the customs house purchased furniture for their offices
and employees, but accounts suggest that they often pinched pennies.29
Chinese urbanites not only made up the vast majority of residents of
Western-style houses, but Chinese consumers also were more affluent
than their foreign neighbors. Indeed, foreign furniture companies seemed
to target Chinese consumers, often adopting a Chinese name with local
marketing appeal. Tianjin-based Sims and Company, for example, chose a
Chinese name that transliterated their English name while highlighting
the nature of the business. The Chinese name Senmu si not only sounded
like the English “Sims,” but it comprised the Chinese characters that
meant “forest” and “wood”—appropriate for a furniture company.
Situated in Tianjin’s British Concession, Sims and Company claimed to
operate the preeminent furniture factory in north China. The factory was
located on Racecourse Road at the outskirts of the concession, and the
office-showroom was on Victoria Road in the concession’s commercial
heart.30 Visiting the Sims showroom, consumers encountered a shopping
experience designed to cultivate the consumer as much as to sell products.
Tianjin was no stranger to China’s new consumer culture of mass-
produced and readymade products that were advertised in newspapers or
magazines and sold in department stores. The Sims and Company sales
experience, however, also suggested that modern consumption could also
be a conversation of taste-making between producer and consumer. Sales-
people at the Sims and Company showroom began a more personal con-
versation with consumers, showing them sample pieces of furniture on
display or offering catalogs for browsing. Sims and Company was not only
a furniture designer, manufacturer, and retailer, but also a social visionary
with a particular prescription of what furnishings in the modern home
should look like.
The Sims furniture catalog presented Tianjin consumers with a diverse
and global set of styles. The catalog suggested that each room was to be
decorated in a singular style with multiple offerings to choose from.
Some styles were listed simply by a number, such as B104 or A44; others
took the title of European furniture styles, such as the British “Sheraton-
style” or the French “Louis XVI, which elicited a foreign political regime.”31
Regardless of where a person lived in the city, they could select to decorate
their home in a different foreign style. Yet designing the modern home was
about function as well as style. Furnishings had to work in the rooms of the
new house. Starting with the entryway, Sims offered hat and umbrella
stands. They manufactured sofas and armchairs for the living room, din-
ing sets for the dining room, and desks, bookcases, and lounge chairs for
the study. To outfit a kitchen and pantry, they sold iceboxes, China cup-
boards, scales, and stoves; for bedrooms they offered bed frames, springs,
and mattresses of varying quality along with furniture such as wardrobes
and dressing tables.32 Decorating a house with all of the above necessi-
ties and in a consistent style came with a hefty price tag. In 1928, Sims and
Company estimated the cost of completely furnishing the newly remod-

eled home of the foreign secretary of Tianjin’s Hai River Conservancy Com-
mission at over $2,500.33 The Sims estimate for decorating a bedroom was
between $657 and $838, while the drawing room would have cost between
$345 and $419. Even the most financially secure Chinese families would
have found such a bill to be quite daunting, thus most families probably dec-
orated their homes over time, purchasing furnishings piece by piece.
One new furniture item that a Tianjin family would only have been able
to purchase from a furniture store like Sims was a sofa. The average cost of a
sofa was around one month’s rent in the foreign concessions. To purchase a
sofa, a family needed sufficient space in which to place it and sufficient dis-
posable income to purchase it. The sofa served as a primary signifier, trans-
forming a Chinese keting from its literal meaning of guest hall into a modern
sitting room. This single piece of furniture not only defined the function of
the room, but it also revolutionized the design of the space. Sofas were not
flexible pieces of furniture. At around seven feet in length, they took up a
considerable amount of space in a sitting room; and being made from wood,
horsehair, and thick, sturdy textiles they were also quite heavy. Although
people in late imperial China could quickly transform the function of some
rooms simply by rearranging comparatively light wooden furniture, the
sofa, given its weight and size, made it more difficult to change the function
of a sitting room. Also, use and the aesthetics of a sofa required new furnish-
ings to complement it. Sofas were lower to the ground than the high wooden
chairs of the vernacular guest hall. They dropped bodies down to a new
level, and thus required side tables closer to the ground. Sofas inspired a
new design aesthetic; they earmarked a significant amount of space, and
they were an expensive purchase. These factors combined to enhance the
sofa as a status item. Still, less affluent families, or those who lived in small
spaces without multiple rooms, could purchase a piece of modern seating
such as an upholstered armchair, or at the very least a rattan chair.34
FEMALE TASTE
The story of producing and consuming furniture suggests that designing

the modern home was far from arbitrary. The high expense of furniture
meant that Chinese people had to make deliberate decisions about
furnishing their homes, and as they made these decisions, they navigated
multiple politics of style including Chinese and foreign, and traditional
and modern. Taste was displayed through decisions in how to design the
home, and Chinese people forged their tastes through leveraging different
kinds of capital: economic, cultural, social, and educational. These pro-
cesses molded new social identities. A wealthy family may have been able
to afford the entire line of Sheraton-style furniture from Sims, but a civil
servant’s family could have decorated their home for less expense using
the knowledge an educated daughter could glean from reading women’s
magazines. Indeed, when viewed as aesthetic treatises, women’s maga-
zines suggest that designing the modern home was not an accident of con-
sumption but rather a deliberate production that generated new social
identities and relations.
If the walls built the modern house, then furnishings, interior decora-
tion, and everyday objects transformed the interior into a home. Women
were responsible for mastering the new knowledge of home. As they
designed the interior, women needed to master a new set of codes and
symbols, familiarizing themselves both with new styles that signified
modernity and with new tastes that distinguished the family’s social iden-
tity. At the same time, women needed to navigate the new material objects
that transformed the cultural and social practices of everyday life: light
bulbs that extended daylight, bathtubs that enhanced washing with new
commercial soaps and perfumes, and dining tables that brought families
together for meals.
In the early twentieth century, knowledge associated with the interior
design of the Chinese urban home became feminized. This was a change
from late imperial China, when taste was central to a literati man’s indi-
vidual identity, and men published manuals on aesthetic design and ency-
clopedias on household management.35 In the twentieth century, a rising
commercial popular press re-gendered this knowledge female, and wom-
en’s and family magazines became the new manuals of household taste
and management. Historians cannot always identify the authors and edi-
tors of these ephemeral magazines, and many were in fact men, or in some
cases men writing under female pen names. But whatever the writer’s gen-
der, the magazine’s contents, unless otherwise noted, were assumed to be
woman’s knowledge, gendering expertise over the modern household as
female.
The female-managed interior of the home signified social status differ-

ently than the exterior of the house. While men leveraged economic or
political capital to project individual or family status through the façade of
a house, women summoned cultural and educational capital to design the
modern home. It was not enough to be able to consume goods for the mod-
ern home; women had to know how to consume. In other words, when it
came to interior design, or household management, the daughter of a war-
lord like Chen or Bao was not necessarily better equipped than the daugh-
ter of a civil servant who had been educated in one of Tianjin’s several new
schools for girls. In fact, women and girls with a lower economic status
could have leveraged knowledge about the home’s interior by studying
new school subjects like domestic science and reading print material like
women’s magazines and domestic manuals to imagine themselves to be,
or even to participate as, members of the same social strata as the wives
and daughters of wealthy men like Chen or Bao.36 Thus, shifting the lens
from the property of the house to the design of the home, and from the
economic and professional status of the male household head to the edu-
cational and cultural capital of women and girls, reveals an even more
complex picture of social relations in colonial-capitalist Tianjin.
Engendering the analytic of social status through the lens of female
taste complicates previously held assumptions about social class in mod-
ern China, yet it does not broaden the scope that defined elite social status
in cities like Tianjin. Women cultivated cultural capital through the new
curriculum of coeducational and girls’ schools as well as through women’s
magazines. While female education and popular periodical literature may
have had the potential to equalize social strata in theory, in practice they
delineated class boundaries. Schools opened social spaces and introduced
new kinds of academic knowledge to young women and girls, but they did
not necessarily revolutionize female literacy. For one thing, women had
been reading and writing in the inner chambers in imperial China.37 More-
over, the girls who attended Tianjin’s new schools belonged to China’s
elite, like their grandmothers before them. Women of the laboring classes
in Tianjin had different educational opportunities. The Social Bureau,
which was part of the Chinese municipal government, organized night
school classes for working women. Not only did the curriculum differ, but
it is unclear whether this effort led to widespread literacy.38
Even if lower status women could read the magazines, they likely
lacked the economic and social capital to obtain a copy, as well as the cul-
tural capital to decode it. Unlike in Japan, where factory girls reportedly
read women’s magazines, in Tianjin women’s periodical literature was not
targeted to a working-class readership.39 Tianjin women’s magazines were
very much a product of their environment. Although the history of wom-
en’s magazines in China dates to the late nineteenth century, the first
women’s magazine produced in Tianjin was published in 1923, around the
same time that Tianjin’s housing market was taking off. Titled Kuaile jia-
ting (Happy home), this magazine was published twice a month for one
year, and cost 25 cents per issue, about half the daily wage of the carpen-
ters who built the modern house. 40 Kuaile jiating was targeted to the
women who lived in, or knew people who lived in, Tianjin’s new houses.
(See figure 5.10.) A material reference point could help a reader under-
stand the magazine, but she first needed to access it, leveraging either her
economic capital to purchase it or social capital to borrow an issue from a
friend. Kuaile jiating thus defined its readers as members of a distinct
social group and suggested that even when women may not have had the
necessary economic capital to consume all the trappings of the modern
home, having the necessary social and educational capital to read about
home in a women’s magazine marked them as members of this elite social
group.
Magazines like Kuaile jiating were connected to the material world in
which they were produced but they also instructed women on how to dwell
in the world beyond their city. Pages opened up a world of knowledge
including content on cleaning, menu planning, and child rearing. Many of
these articles were similar to those found in American magazines from
the time such as Ladies’ Home Journal and Better Homes and Gardens, and
in fact, Kuaile jiating and magazines like it often included translated arti-
cles from American magazines, along with features on the latest lifestyle
trends in Europe, and photographs from Japan. You might say that a wom-
en’s magazine put forth a new global vision of home. This vision also con-
nected to the global city where the magazine was published, and Tianjin’s
chimeric modern design was also featured on the pages of Kuaile jiating in
the juxtaposition of new foreign furnishings, like upholstered chairs, with
Chinese accessories, like ink-painted hanging scrolls.
FIGURE 5.10 Kuaile jiating [Happy home] magazine, issue 9 (Tianjin, 1923).
From the moment it was launched, Kuaile jiating instructed Tianjin

women in this chimeric modern design. The first issue included an article
on interior design with photographs of two different rooms. 41 (See fig-
ures 5.11 and 5.12.) The first room, described as “the arrangement of a
Western style library,” could have depicted an English country estate, a
Tokyo suburban home, or a Tianjin villa. 42 Being devoid of people, the
photograph of the library allowed the reader to enter the room and imag-
ine herself inside this global fantasy of the modern home. The second
room, described as “a hall in the style of Chinese furnishings,” was by
contrast self-referentially local. The accompanying text guided the reader
as she explored each of the rooms in the photographs.
The Western-style library had a “natural ceiling” with exposed beams
from which a “Greek-style chandelier” hung. While the chandelier may
FIGURE 5.11 “Arrangement of a Western style library.”

Kuaile jiating, issue 1 (Tianjin, 1923).
have lit the room at night, a large glass window provided natural sunlight
to read by during the day, and three fireplaces, as noted in the accompany-
ing text, provided warmth on a cold northern winter afternoon. An uphol-
stered armchair and a chair with a high wooden back were placed facing
one another by the fireplace whether for warmth or for a chat. Indeed, this
“library” may actually have been a room for socializing or relaxing rather
than reading; as the accompanying text suggests, the small seats in front
FIGURE 5.12 “Hall in the style

of Chinese furnishings.” Kuaile
jiating, issue 1 (Tianjin, 1923).
of the square table at the center of the room could easily be moved, allow-
ing two or three people to gather around the fire for conversation. While
the text claims that books were present, the photograph suggests other-
wise. There are no books in the photo, let alone a bookshelf; instead, the
photo shows large, framed paintings hung high on the wall and decorative
plates on the fireplace mantel. A vase of flowers sits on a table in the center
of the room, and a large carpet covers the floor.
No oil paintings decorated the walls in the photo of the Chinese hall;
instead, that room featured an ink-painted hanging scroll hung above a
table displaying a potted plant. A large armchair was placed next to the
table, and on the wall behind it hung a Chinese calligraphy couplet. 43 Two
lamps surrounded the chair— one hanging, one standing, and both “fas-
tened in silk thread.” A table and chair made of “famous Fujian lacquer”
with a “luster beyond compare” and other objects in the “ancient Chinese
style” decorated the room. The text noted that the room was “especially
lively and elegant, while being solemn at the same time,” claiming as well
that the furnishing and decorations were all of “ancient Chinese style.”
The arrangement, however, was distinctly modern. The crowding and
cluttering of furniture, lamps, artwork, and antiques offered a strong con-
trast with late imperial Chinese design aesthetics, which emphasized geo-
mantic symmetry and order. In a typical late imperial Chinese dwelling,
furniture and objects occupied particular places in the hall, leaving space
around them that accentuated the size and height of the room. Side tables
flanked wooden chairs that were placed against the side walls. The back
wall (reserved for display or an altar) usually featured a high, long table,
adorned by a plant, a ceramic vase, or another object, with a scroll hanging
above. A table surrounded by chairs would often be in the center of the
room. While the writer commenting on the photograph in Kuaile jiating
noted that “everything appears in perfect order,” to a late imperial eye, the
room would have seemed to be complete pandemonium. With couplets
hung side by side off in the corner instead of symmetrically displayed, and
with multiple styles of seating and too many lamps for such a small corner
of a room, this Chinese hall was chaotic and cluttered, a thoroughly mod-
ern space.
Even if the Chinese hall did not display classical Chinese tastes, the
article’s author suggested that Chinese style was “different but in no way
inferior to Western style,” so much so that “there is no reason for all people
to claim with gusto that [Western style] is more fashionable.” At first
glance, these words might seem to be a nationalist celebration of Chinese
style, but seen in the context of the article and its photographs they were
actually part of an aesthetic treatise on the chimeric modern, claiming

that Chinese style was just as good but not necessarily better than Western
style. Indeed, to understand the concept of chimeric modern design put
forth by Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating, the photographs of the Western library
and the Chinese hall must be viewed together. The modern is not found in
either room by itself, but in the juxtaposition of Western and Chinese
rooms—with lacquer next to glass, and a Chinese lantern beside a Greek
chandelier. In the modern interior, objects, which tend to be mistakenly
classified into binaries of new and old and Chinese and Western, are actu-
ally part of an organic aesthetic whole. Moreover, this modernity needed
the lingering elements of a not-so-distant past in order to define itself. The
chandelier was considered to be a new kind of lighting when juxtaposed
against a lantern; and yet the lantern gained its “Chineseness” only in
comparison to a foreign chandelier. They derived their meaning recipro-
cally, as part of a modern whole. Together these layers of newness and
Chineseness, glass and lacquer, formed the Tianjin modern aesthetic of
the urban interior.
Indeed, the way Kuaile jiating discussed modern home design was
more in keeping with the chimeric design of Tianjin’s architecture than
with depictions of interior design in similar women’s magazines published
in Shanghai. Shanghai magazines labeled visual depictions of interior
design as modern (modeng) and contemporary (xiandai) but never for-
eign. 44 As the modern metropole of China (and possibly even Asia), Shang-
hai kept pace in the global contest to represent universal modern style.
With the tallest building in Asia, Shanghai’s skyline rivaled Tokyo, and
with a thriving nightlife, its jazz scene compared with New York’s. 45 But
the global stage of modern culture and style was fraught with politics and
power. Thus, the literary scholar Shih Shu-mei examines this so-called
universal Shanghai modern in its semicolonial context, arguing that the
identity of modernist Shanghai writers was “bifurcated” between their
belief that they were participating actively in a universal literary globalism
and the reality of being constrained within the power structures of the
colonial-capitalist global system. 46
Tianjin urbanites never made such bold claims to represent the univer-
sal modern, and instead were always conscious of being on the periphery
of Shanghai and foreign modernities. Moreover, living at the center of
multiple foreign empires made Tianjin urbanites acutely aware of the sys-
tems of power that divided up the global modern stage. Unlike residents of
Shanghai who understood their city as a series of streets and alleyways,
Tianjin residents saw their city as a patchwork of colonial districts. Even
after World War II, when the concessions had been abolished, many Tian-
jin urbanites still gave addresses starting with the concession name, only
then followed by street names and numbers. 47 Thus the chimeric was not
simply a style but a way of understanding the space of the city as distinct
foreign and Chinese parts grafted together.
Tianjin never claimed membership in the universal modern but instead
invented its own chimeric modern—a local modern style in which a juxta-
position of foreign and Chinese styles was mobilized to challenge the aes-
thetic authority of foreign empires. Western tastemakers exercised not
only state hegemony but hegemony of taste: so that when they consumed
the spoils of empire in the “cosmopolitan domestic” interiors of the home
country, they celebrated their juxtapositions of Western and colonial as
aesthetically pleasing. Yet when Chinese people combined Western and
Chinese styles, Western tastemakers often condemned the new style as
bricolage or pastiche.
In 1928, the American journalist Nathaniel Peffer described the “typical”
Chinese interior as “lost in a tradition completely alien.”48 Peffer had trav-
eled to China, armed with a Guggenheim Foundation grant, to study China
as a civilization in conflict. Interior design was one of the areas in which he
located “conflict” between native/traditional and Western/modern ways.
Peffer condemned Chinese-built houses that attempted to use foreign
styles, decorating “with wooden floors and electric lights and bathrooms,”
furnished in “mongreloid furniture that is of no hemisphere but blends the
hideous in both,” and he attacked interior design that mixed both national
styles (an “Italian chromo” with an American “Grand Rapids mission
chair”) and periods (nineteenth-century Victorian doilies with twentieth-
century Arts and Crafts furnishings). 49 Peffer’s criticism underscores the
threat of chimeric design to Western tastes. Thus, the power of the chimeric
modern lay not only in its defiance of colonial zoning laws but also in its abil-
ity to challenge the aesthetic authority of foreigners by being offensive.
Peffer’s description of chimeric interior design in a home outside of
Tianjin also suggests that chimeric style may have been celebrated in
other parts of China as well. Indeed, in his study of modern material cul-
ture in China, the historian Frank Dikötter argues that it was precisely this
mixing, what he calls “creative bricolage,” that drove Chinese mass con-
sumption, and that Chinese consumers created cultural and stylistic
meaning by mixing (qipaos with overcoats), recycling (Western oil barrels
transformed into cook stoves), and inventing (Chinese/Western dishes
like eggs and tomatoes).50 Thus, while Peffer suggests that Chinese con-
sumers were passive, unschooled recipients of Western material culture,
Dikötter argues that Chinese people actively and eclectically engaged
multiple styles. Yet both Peffer and Dikötter overlook the methodical
knowledge required to consume modern material culture, a knowledge
prescribed in women’s magazines and by manufacturers themselves.
Indeed, the process of selling and consuming furniture illuminates the
multiple forms of economic, social, educational, and cultural capital that
Chinese urbanites leveraged to design the modern home.
PRODUCING CHIMERA FOR THE WORLD
Furnishings in treaty-port China were more than status signifiers for the
city’s Chinese residents. As products of a colonial-capitalist city, they had
a larger story to tell about China’s place in the world. As they designed
everyday life amid multiple empires, Tianjin urbanites produced the chi-
meric style by combining the new material culture of foreign empires with
lingering elements of an imperial Chinese past, thus creating a new Chi-
nese modern style that challenged Western aesthetic authority. The world
was in Tianjin, but women elsewhere were dwelling in the world. From
Tianjin to Tokyo, and from Boston to London, the new, urban modern
home was not only a global phenomenon, but more importantly, a site for
experiencing the world. Women who lived on the edges of empire, in
places like Philadelphia and Paris, consumed an imperial bricolage that
celebrated and confirmed the racial and nationalist imperatives of empire.
Thus, even if the mixture of objects and styles in a Tianjin sitting room
resembled those of a Philadelphia parlor, each arrangement in its relation-
ship to global power communicated a different message.
When people consumed the world at home, it was more than an act of
signification, articulating the connection between home and empire; their
domestic consumption drove global capitalism. American and European
manufacturers knew this, and they tried to crack a market of “400 million
Chinese customers,” while from the other side of the Pacific, the exotic
demands of American housewives fueled global trade networks.51 In some
instances, cosmopolitan domestic consumption even sparked new handi-
craft industries. The Tianjin carpet, for example, a Chinese product
invented by American and European Orientalist tastes, illuminates the
complicated networks of production, trade, and consumption that forged
global capitalism.52 Tianjin carpets initially were manufactured in Tianjin
for export to Europe and America, reinterpreting Tianjin’s chimeric tastes
for foreign consumers. (See figures 5.13 and 5.14.) The story of the Tianjin
carpet thus connects multiple sites of global empire, as rugs moved from
the dusty floors of Tianjin workshops to export companies’ halls of capital-
ism to the private interiors of European and American homes. Yet the
Tianjin carpet also reveals a more complicated story: though they were
first manufactured for export, Tianjin carpets later rode capitalist circuits
back to China: Chinese residents of Tianjin eventually adopted the export
carpets as modern furnishings and thus incorporated European and North
American Orientalism into the Chinese home.
The primary consumers of Tianjin carpets lived overseas, but as these
“foreignized” Chinese commodities found their way into local interiors,
such rugs were regularly depicted in photographs of the modern home in
Chinese women’s magazines, suggesting that, at the very least, they had
become an integral part of the idealized domestic environment.53 Before
Tianjin produced rugs, few local Chinese people decorated with them, and
in parts of China where people did have rugs, they typically were not used
as floor coverings. In imperial Beijing palaces, carpets were hung from
walls or draped on furniture. In northern China, rugs were placed on kang
or heated platforms. The photographs of both the Western library and the
Chinese hall from Kuaile jiating suggest that by the early 1920s, people in
Tianjin had imported the decorative ideal of carpets as floor coverings
from Europeans and Americans, for whom oriental carpets were foreign
and exotic to begin with. When Chinese people began to buy locally
FIGURE 5.13 Tianjin carpet template. Author’s collection.
produced carpets and covered their floors with them, they were incorpo-
rating global bourgeois tastes into their own ideal interior designs— even
when those tastes included a locally produced Chinese style that had been
invented for a global market. Moreover, when a women’s magazine like
Kuaile jiating could place the Tianjin carpet in both a Chinese- and a
Western-style room, it suggested that chimeric objects were flexible
enough to signify either Chinese or foreign style, depending on the
context.
FIGURE 5.14 Tianjin carpet template. Author’s collection.
CONCLUSION
Global markets and commodity flows allowed Tianjin urbanites to partake

in a global vision of middle-class domesticity, and the world also resided
within Tianjin where the global was local. The city’s urban landscape
reproduced the global stage where foreign empires competed to represent
the universal modern. As a result, style in Tianjin was assertively political,
with French Beaux Arts banks, Italian villas, Japanese modernist school
buildings, and the British garden city all claiming to stand for the pinnacle
of modern style. Yet this global competition of national styles also exposed
gaps that allowed a new Tianjin modern style to emerge. Juxtaposing
Western styles from the foreign concessions with Chinese elements from
the lingering Qing imperial city, the Tianjin chimeric modern challenged
the aesthetic authority of foreign empires. Moreover, when Chinese peo-
ple in Tianjin displayed this chimeric modern on the façades of their
houses, in the interiors of their homes, and through export commodities
like Tianjin carpets, they coproduced an image of China and Chinese style
for the global stage. Thus, while a Boston housewife may have understood
the Tianjin carpet on display in her parlor to be an authentic representation
of an unchanging traditional East, its style actually was invented through
the intersection of national styles and global tastes, tastes facilitated
through the interconnectedness of the modern global market. Thus,
designing house and home was truly a cosmopolitan experience.
Living at the center of multiple foreign empires, Tianjin urbanites were
dwelling in the world. In fact, while historians have long credited the rise
of the modern home elsewhere to industrialization or the development of
a middle class, in Tianjin, the modern home formed when Chinese urban
elites worked to navigate new global visions of the modern middle-class
home, creating a modern home before either industrialization or the for-
mation of a self-conscious bourgeois class in China. Instead, leveraging
different forms of economic, cultural, and social capital to encounter the
world at home, Chinese urbanites formed new social distinctions.
This use of taste and consumption as a means of distinguishing social
status was not entirely new to China. During the early modern period, for
example, a growing merchant class had tried to leverage economic capital
to enhance its social position vis-à-vis literati scholars, whose cultural and
educational capital assured them a place among China’s social elites, but
the shifting and uncertain economic and political landscape of treaty-port
Tianjin had destabilized social status. Warlords with large amounts of
economic capital could purchase their social position in the city, but
knowledge, or knowing how to live in a changing colonial capitalist and
global city, also became a valuable form of capital. In Republican-era
China, women’s magazines helped gender this knowledge female. Women
were not only responsible for designing the modern home, but they also
became proprietors of knowledge about all kinds of worldly goods that
entered the modern home. If life at the intersection of multiple empires
forced Chinese people to encounter the world at home, then Chinese
women became guides to that encounter, and women’s magazines were
their guidebooks.
6
Living at Home
T
he new Chinese word jiating could mean family, house,
or home, depending on the context. Meanings of family
and house could be mapped onto earlier understandings
expressed through the classical Chinese term jia, but home
was a new concept. If family expressed social relations and the
house was the physical space, home encompassed material
culture and affect. This concept of home was global, and the
vision of home that was articulated among Tianjin elites
resembled that of middling classes in other parts of the world.
In English the ideological and material practice of inhabit-
ing the bourgeois home is called “domesticity,” but this word
does not translate easily into Chinese.1 Most dictionaries
would translate it as jiating shenghuo (“home life”), but this
translation does not incorporate the ideological sense of the
English term “domesticity” that connects the home to the state.
Indeed, the Chinese urban home at this time was not the focus
of nationalist ideology, which was more concerned with the
demography and relations of the family than with everyday
life in house and home. Thus, while domesticity may not be a
useful comparative term, jiating shenghuo or “home life” can
be a useful concept for thinking about everyday life at home
across places.
Home life was a happy life— or at least it was constructed and cultivated
to be, as affective happiness needed to be attached to home, just as con-
sumers had been guided to attach happiness to household objects. Sarah
Ahmed argues that “certain objects become imbued with positive affect as
good objects. After all, objects not only embody good feeling, but are per-
ceived as necessary for a good life.”2 She notes that people are drawn to
certain objects as good and cites the “happy family” as one such an entity,
arguing that “we share an orientation toward the family as being good, as
being what promises happiness in return for loyalty.”3 The problem with
this understanding of the “happy family” for twentieth-century China is
that Chinese people were not oriented toward family as a site of happiness;
if anything, May Fourth ideologues had cultivated a negative image of
family. Likewise, the family as depicted in Chinese literature often was
the site of the individual’s angst and turmoil.
To manage the fact that these two sets of contradictory emotions
attached to the same Chinese term ( jiating), the affect associated with
the happy home needed to be simultaneously constructed and cultivated
in terms of its objects of affect, and this task fell to women’s periodical
literature. The first magazine published for the home in Tianjin in 1923
was titled Kuaile jiating, and although the editors did not provide an Eng-
lish translation for the title, more than ten years later a Shanghai maga-
zine of the same title, published from 1936 to 1949, called itself in English
Happy Home.
The invention of home as a site for happiness was central to the creation
of middle-class identities. The emotion of individual subjectivity and the
transformation of public and private spheres have been referred to as
markers of bourgeois identity. Lauren Berlant identifies the “problem of
living in capitalist modernity” as described by Habermas as the bourgeois
male who, as a “subject of emotion,” must navigate the separate spheres of
public and private as a split between the “man of the house” and the “man
of the market.”4 Scholars of China have also examined connections
between emotions, subjectivities, and a rising public sphere. The literary
scholar Haiyan Lee argues for the role of emotion and individual subjec-
tivity in Qing literature, while the historian Eugenia Lean has demon-
strated that female-gendered sentiment shaped the public sphere in
Living at Home 191
modern China.5 Both scholars argue for a distinct understanding of emo-

tion in the Chinese context centered on the concept of qing. Looking at the
affect of home life, I argue that there were more similarities than differ-
ences between how Chinese urban elites and their global counterparts
shaped emotive visions of home life, and also that the Chinese home was
not a mere copy of Western practices and beliefs. Moreover, while histo-
ries of Europe and the United States assume that the private sphere and
the bourgeois class that inhabited it were transformed through industrial
modernity, the history of home in China suggests that home and the mid-
dle class had to be deliberately constructed, and that this coproduction
enabled the emergence of both.
The relationship between home and the world was a radical departure
from the late imperial Chinese notion of nei and wai (inner and outer). The
nei-wai relationship made the late imperial jia political. A properly ordered,
female-gendered inner brought stability to the masculine outer realm of
the empire. The post-imperial jiating disconnected this relationship
between inner and outer, where politics, family, and home were inter-
twined. Instead, jiating as family could be a political site, called upon to
strengthen the nation, while jiating as home could be an apolitical and
private personal space. The shift from jia to jiating changed home in other
ways, too. The post-imperial home was a discrete space lived within the
interior of the house, whereas late-imperial ideas of inner and outer
were relational and could describe spaces and relations across or within the
walls of the house. For example, a room in the front of a courtyard house,
when used to conduct business, would be considered outer in relation to
the female inner chambers behind it. In contrast, home was a bounded space
with no clear relational counterpart, yet also was a site whose boundaries
were often porous, making home life potentially volatile. While the rela-
tional inner and outer maintained stability within the household and
within the empire, the porous borders of the home created chaos by allow-
ing the outside to come in regardless of consequence. The home emerged
as a site of boundary making and boundary breaking, and home life was in
a constant state of destruction and repair. The role of affect, then, was to
regulate these fluctuations in home life by turning home into an object of
desire in order to mask its volatility. Emotion made home life stable.
FEMINIZATION OF KNOWLEDGE
If property laws and real estate development had made the house and its
architectural façade male, urban China’s burgeoning female periodical
press helped to invent the concept of home and “home life,” and desig-
nated knowledge about everyday life within those walls as female. Chi-
nese women’s magazines first began publication in the late nineteenth
century, and they expanded with changes in print technology in the twen-
tieth century. Home emerged as a subject in women’s magazines and a
featured topic in newspaper advice columns. From magazines to newspa-
pers, this knowledge was presented as female, irrespective of the actual
gendered identities of the reader or author. The gender of all readers can-
not be confirmed, but both men and women edited and wrote for this new
female periodical literature, with male writers sometimes even assuming
female pen names. Regardless of who read and wrote about home life,
knowledge about home was gendered female, signaling an epistemologi-
cal shift from late imperial China, when such knowledge was gendered
male. In particular, encyclopedias known as riyong leishu had offered pre-
scriptive advice on how to decorate, conduct ritual, and live within the
household. While women may have read leishu, the intended audience was
male.
By charging women with the knowledge of how to live at home, the new
female periodical press endowed women with the prescriptive burden of
managing the household. But it also empowered women by entrusting
them with the responsibility of a new social space that came to signify cos-
mopolitanism, modernity, and social status. New houses, with their new
styles and spaces, required new knowledge about how to live in them, and
magazines served as guidebooks to everyday life within city homes, which
were increasingly designated as the modern ideal. While individual men
claimed the property rights of the house, women could claim the knowl-
edge of how to live within it.
Endowed with the responsibility for home life, women as tastemakers
could enhance their family’s social status. Reading about the multifaceted
home in women’s magazines helped female readers to accumulate the cul-
tural capital that distinguished them and their families. The U.S. historian
Jennifer Scanlon describes how social distinction was central to the Ladies’
Living at Home 193
Home Journal in the 1910s and 1920s, which depicted he ideal home as sig-
nifying inhabitants who were white, middle class, and native born.6 She
also notes how the popularity of the magazine was facilitated by the advent
of markers of middle-class modernity, including rising literacy rates,
increasing leisure and income, and the ever-broader reach of electricity
and postal service.7 Several of these markers were taking hold in urban
China, but just as the modern home was not a “natural” historical devel-
opment, new understandings of social status had to be invented. Tianjin
urbanites simultaneously invented both the signifiers and signified of
house and home as markers of social status. Women’s magazines not only
facilitated this process but also opened up a space for literate women to
gain cultural capital. Certainly, a wealthy businessman could display his
economic capital by building an imposing villa in one of Tianjin’s conces-
sions, but through accumulating cultural capital by reading a women’s
magazine, the educated daughter of an office clerk might better under-
stand how to conduct modern everyday life inside such a home.
Through navigating multifaceted depictions of home life in periodical
literature, women developed their own subjectivities and formed the
affect of home. Knowledge about home could be prescriptive or descrip-
tive, including instructions on how to live at home as well as the fantasy of
home. One page of a magazine might portray home as the site of new ritu-
als of everyday life, telling women how to cook for the modern family and
clean the modern home, while the next page might include photographs of
impeccably arranged rooms, luxurious furnishings, and opulent objects
that depict the home as a fantasy escape from the reader’s real-life home.
Women read about the ordered practical tasks of household management
and viewed images of perfectly curated home life that differed from the
messiness of their own lives. This discrepancy could have provoked anxi-
ety, but the magazines’ presentation of home life was familiar and happy.
MAGAZINES AS MATERIAL CULTURE
As products of a tangible, material world, magazines about home and

women reflected everyday life in the Chinese city. The city gave birth to
the magazines; the richness and diversity of urban life enabled the
technological and cultural expertise that made publishing women’s maga-

zines possible, yet also provided a growing, literate female readership.
Magazines also transformed the very social environment that created
them, offering prescriptive advice on everything from fashion to hygiene
and childcare. Even the fantasy world of images and articles revealed an
aspirational modern home that readers could reproduce on a smaller scale
in their own living spaces. The magazines were also objects of the city
themselves—pieces of modern ephemera that circulated across the city,
into the home, and into the new woman’s hands. The materiality of the
magazines, the format and size, offer clues as to how they moved, how
they were read, and who might have read them.
Magazines came in different sizes. The most common size for a wom-
en’s periodical during this time was about 7 inches wide by 10 inches tall,
running about 25 pages of content. Women’s magazines also came in
pocket sizes that could easily travel with women as they moved in and out
of their houses and around the city; the 1930s Shanghai magazine Ling
long, for instance, was about 5 inches tall and 4 inches wide. In an essay
titled “Talking About Women,” popular female Shanghai writer Zhang
Ailing noted that “every female student had an issue of Ling long magazine
in hand during the 1930s.”8 Zhang emphasized that Shanghai schoolgirls
carried, not read, Ling long. Thus, the object itself became as much a
marker of female identity as the knowledge contained within it.
Innovations in photographic print technology offered a vivid way to
bring the world into the home. Photography arrived in China in the nine-
teenth century, with portrait studios gaining instant popularity in treaty-
port cities such as Shanghai and Tianjin.9 These early photographs, however,
could not be mass-produced for the commercial press. Instead, during the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lithograph print technology
allowed for the mass consumption of illustrated images in pictorials such
as Shanghai’s Dianshizhai huabao (1884–1898).10 It was during the 1920s
that photographs finally replaced illustrations as the primary mode of
mass-consumed print visual culture in Chinese cities. In 1925, ten years
before the U.S. publisher Henry Luce launched Life magazine, Shanghai
publishers began production of China’s most widely read pictorial, Liang
you, or The Companion Pictorial (in print from 1926 to 1945). Tianjin pub-
lishers soon followed suit with their own local pictorial, Beiyang huabao
Living at Home 195
(from 1926 to 1937). Pictorial magazines were about twice the size of typi-
cal magazines, and too cumbersome to tote around the city or read on a
streetcar. Instead, large pictorials could be displayed on a coffee table or a
desk as a material signifier of the modern interior, bringing the city, the
nation, and the world into the home through photographs.
Titles displayed across the cover of women’s and home magazines fur-
ther connected the home to the world. Magazines often included bilingual
titles: Tianjin’s Jiating zhoukan (literally “home weekly”), for example,
also called itself The Chinese Home, while Shanghai’s Kuaile jiating used
the English title Happy Home. Notably, both titles used the English word
“home” rather than “family” when translating the word jiating, echoing
the titles of such North American and European magazines as Ladies’
Home Journal. Chinese women’s magazines even included articles trans-
lated from foreign magazines like the Ladies’ Home Journal. Bilingual
titles and translated articles signaled that Chinese publishers were align-
ing themselves with a global female knowledge of home life.
If Chinese women’s magazines took inspiration from their foreign
counterparts, they were also products of their local context. The Chinese
popular press was largely centered in treaty-port cities, especially Shang-
hai. Although it was an important port city, Tianjin did not shape cultural
production to the same extent that its southern counterpart Shanghai did.
From the modern ink painters of the nineteenth century, to the avant-
garde writers of the 1930s and 1940s, to the cinema of the early twentieth
century, Shanghai represented the cultural center of late Qing- and
Republican-era China.11 Indeed, most women’s magazines were born out
of this atmosphere of cultural and technological innovation. Tianjin
played less of a role in China’s print history. Of all of the women’s maga-
zines collected by local Tianjin libraries during the first half of the twenti-
eth century, and which survived to be housed in the Tianjin Municipal
Library today, only four were published in Tianjin. Moreover, a list from
Shanghai’s Ling long magazine of the Chinese women’s periodicals pub-
lished in 1933 included only one Tianjin magazine—Jiating zhoukan (Home
weekly).12 Indeed, Jiating zhoukan’s editor lamented the lack of northern
periodicals in the 1931 inaugural issue, stating that northern publications
were scarce, especially in Tianjin, because the northern printing industry
had just begun to develop over the previous ten years.13
The small-scale history of the Tianjin’s women’s press began on Janu-

ary 1, 1923, when the Guanghua Publishing Company (Guanghua yinshua
gongsi), located on Dagu Road in Tianjin’s Special First District (the for-
mer German Concession), published the first issue of the bimonthly Kuaile
jiating. Publication of Kuaile jiating seems to have ceased after one year.
Short runs of women’s magazines in Tianjin (and elsewhere) were not
uncommon.14 The Tianjin pictorial Xin funü (New Women Weekly), for
example, was also published for a single year, 1935. The short lives of these
women’s magazines were not due to lack of interest. The editors of Tian-
jin’s leading newspaper, the Dagong bao, felt women and family to be wor-
thy of a full-page column from 1927 to 1929. The Tianjin-published Jiating
zhoukan (The Chinese Home, a “home and family weekly”) enjoyed a total
run of eight years, first from 1931 to 1937 and then from 1946 to 1948, while
Funü xin duhui (Woman World) was published for about five years, starting
in 1939, and only ceased publication when its editor Yin Meibo proposed to
change it into a weekly publication called Tianjin funü ribao (Tianjin
women weekly).15 Tianjin presses may not have produced a wealth of wom-
en’s magazines, but the long runs of Jiating zhoukan and Woman World
and the column in Dagong bao suggest that people in Tianjin wanted to
read about women and home.
When Tianjin women tired of local publications, there were always
magazines from Shanghai. The women’s press in Shanghai was far more
established than Tianjin’s, with the Commercial Press’s Funü zazhi enjoy-
ing a fifteen-plus year run between 1915 and 1931. Technological advances
made nationwide distribution possible: printing allowed magazines to be
mass-produced, while the domestic postal system allowed Shanghai mag-
azines to be distributed to cities as close as Tianjin and as far away as Lan-
zhou.16 Indeed, women’s magazines circulated across individual cities,
throughout China and even to Chinese readers overseas. According to the
ten-year memorial issue of Shanghai’s Happy Home, the magazine aimed
to reach a mass audience, exemplified in the English-language slogan “A
Chinese Ladies Home Journal, Plus Direct Mail Idea, With a Guaranteed
Circulation of 50,000 Better Homes.”17 Shanghai magazines actively mar-
keted themselves to a broad audience of Chinese women, but the same
was true for Tianjin magazines such as Kuaile jiating and Jiating zhoukan.
Shanghai’s 1930s Ling long magazine may have had the widest circulation
Living at Home 197
of any Chinese women’s magazine; it included information on domestic

and even overseas subscription rates, and today copies that were collected
at the time of publication are still housed not only in municipal libraries in
Shanghai and Tianjin, but also the Columbia University Library in New
York City.18 But Ling long is the rare women’s magazine to have been saved
by a university library. Women’s magazines were never published for pos-
terity; they were pieces of modern ephemera produced for the moment—
printed on inexpensive paper that has yellowed and crumbled after years
of damp and dusty storage.
As pieces of ephemera, women’s magazines reveal the lives of people
silenced by the archive. When we hold a copy of Ling long magazine in the
palm of our hand we are closer to the woman who paged through that issue
after it was freshly published and the paper was still white, but we still do
not know her name or where she lived. Some magazines tried to include
readers on their pages, or even the cover, especially after the 1930s when
the technology of photographic printing became more readily available.
Pictorial magazines like Shanghai’s Ling long and Tianjin’s Woman World
included photographs of local women, often students. These photographs
suggest what the magazines imagined their readers to look like: young,
modern, educated, and members of the new urban middle class. While
scholars of Japan and Korea have argued that factory women read wom-
en’s magazines, in all likelihood, Tianjin factory girls did not, some Tian-
jin magazines explicitly stated that they were not meant for the laboring
classes.19
Unlike most readers, editors and writers leave their names in published
pages of the magazine, but historical records on them are limited or
absent. Editors and writers were both men and women, and since gender
is not always discernible from Chinese first names, female authors and
editors often added the title “lady” or nüshi to their name for clarity.20
Even so, we cannot be certain that these nüshi were actually women, as
sometimes men wrote under a female pseudonym. The fact that men
would write under women’s names, however, suggests that magazines
wanted to present knowledge as female even when it was produced by a
man. A magazine’s title also suggested the gendering of knowledge. Titles
often used the term “woman,” while some magazines took a more subtle
gendered approach. The title of Ling long, for example, used a Ming
dynasty aesthetic term that meant “elegant and fine,” an onomatopoeia

that referred to the sound of pieces of jade clinking together, and was part
of the aesthetic idea of qiao or female handiwork.21 Whereas Ling long
might have described a trinket of lesser value to a member of the male
Ming literati, the editors of this 1930s weekly used it to signal the clinking
of different opinions and ideas that created a unique harmony of female
modern knowledge. Articles published inside the magazine often assumed
a female reader. But Shanghai’s Happy Home (Kuaile jiating, 1936–1949, no
relation to the earlier Tianjin magazine of the same name), expanded their
target readership to include the entire family. The contents recommended
articles for each member of the family: psychology and education for the
husband, domestic science and technical arts for the housewife, social
relations and marriage for daughters, and biographical essays and articles
on self-cultivation for sons. Husbands or sons may have never actually
read Happy Home, but the editor clearly delineated the gendering of house-
hold knowledge female, charging women with home life or managing
everyday life at home.
Magazines were both a product of and a producer of the local. The
locals of Shanghai and Tianjin were globally connected and entrenched,
but the globally infused local world created in women’s magazines did not
represent everyone. Instead, women’s magazines were produced by and
for a cosmopolitan female middle class. And though Tianjin was not the
leading publisher of women’s and home magazines, it certainly was a cen-
ter of well-educated and well-connected literate elites. Tianjin developed
both as the gateway to Beijing, China’s capital until 1928, and as an entry
port to the bountiful natural resources of northern China— especially coal.
As a result, Tianjin attracted businessmen, politicians, warlords, and
exiles. Liang Qichao, one of the most prolific journalists in modern China,
erected a villa and studio in the Italian Concession. The deposed Qing
emperor Puyi lived in the Japanese Concession during the 1920s, while the
young warlord Zhang Xueliang lived in the French Concession. The city’s
celebrity elites were joined by middle-class families who flooded into
Tianjin’s concessions during the 1920s and 1930s, and the daughters of
these Chinese families likely attended one of the increasing number of
single-sex and coeducational schools throughout the city.22 Women’s mag-
azines became guidebooks for the women of the city’s growing urban elite
Living at Home 199
class to navigate life in the city and at home. Women’s periodical literature
thus represented the dual nature of home as the site of lived everyday
experiences and as an escapist fantasy of interior desire.
COMMON SENSE FOR EVERYDAY LIFE
The home was in the world and the world was in the home. Commodities
from across China and around the globe poured into the Chinese home,
bringing the messiness and chaos of modern life along with them. As
these objects broke through the boundaries of home life, advice columns
helped to bring order to the disarray and construct new boundaries.
Through this process of boundary breaking and making, readers learned
how to conduct home life and also developed positive associations with
the orderliness of home life. Advice columns created order, but they also
revealed a dirty side of modern life lurking beneath the perfectly polished
furniture. Hints about the material world that a magazine’s readers inhab-
ited were not to be found in the choreographed photographs of fantasy
modern urban life or in the didactic editorials that idealized home and
family in service to the nation, but they surfaced in these guides to the
quotidian. Although advice columns often helped to constitute the fantasy
world of social manners, clean homes, and perfect hygiene, they also
revealed cracks in the veneer, fissures in the fantasy of modern life that
illuminate the everyday material world.
Advice about how to live at home was part of a broader discussion about
urban everyday life in the Republican-era popular press. Published advice
on everyday matters was not new to Chinese print culture, dating back to
Ming-era encyclopedias, but the new knowledge of everyday life was
made more accessible to a broader audience through the popular press at
the same time that it was gendered female. Knowledge about everyday life
also had a new name: changshi, or common knowledge. A variety of maga-
zines published advice columns for women and home under the title
changshi, including Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating in 1923, the Dagong bao from
1927 to 1929, and Ling long magazine in the 1930s. Changshi designated
not only female knowledge but a broader constellation of knowledge
about everyday life in the modern city. Starting in the 1910s, Shanghai
publishing houses put out books on changshi topics that ranged from furni-
ture and family to airplanes and electricity.23 In the 1920s, Shanghai’s
“mosquito” press dedicated entire journals to the topic of changshi.24
While the word changshi is usually translated as “general knowledge” or
“common sense,” the editors of the 1928 journal Shanghai changshi chose
an English translation for their title that may be more apt: Shanghai Com-
mon Knowledge. “Common knowledge” is a literal translation—the charac-
ter chang means common and shi means knowledge—but it also captures
the essential meaning of the kinds of knowledge about modern life that
appeared in magazines: changshi was common or shared information
about daily life that modern city dwellers already knew or were supposed
to know if they wanted to consider themselves urbane. The range of every-
day experience that was presented as changshi ran from mundane lived
experiences like housecleaning and riding streetcars to fantastical exam-
ples of “everyday” modernity that included both high-society dinner par-
ties and new scientific machines such as robots and recording devices.
The latter inspired in the reader both aspiration for and anxiety over a
modern life she may not have had. The former was common in both senses
of the word—its ordinary qualities and its shared relevance. In both cases
the common was to elicit an affective feeling of the familiar, even in cases
of the unfamiliar.
Ordinary and shared types of common knowledge often centered on
home and family. Topics included protecting furniture, removing stains,
raising pets, cooking, and flower care. Different magazines published at
different times sometimes even offered the same advice, which suggests
that some household tips may have indeed been shared common knowl-
edge. Five years after Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating recommended that readers
lay their handkerchiefs out to dry on a glass or marble surface to prevent
wrinkles, the Tianjin newspaper Dagong bao published the same advice in
an article titled jiating xiao changshi (minor common knowledge about
home and family) in its women and family section.25
Starting with its fourth issue, Kuaile jiating published a regular advice
column titled Jiating xin changshi or “new common knowledge for the
home.” The column drew attention to “new” knowledge in two ways. First,
the column explored ways of caring for and dealing with new objects that
had just entered the home. Several columns discussed how to clean and
Living at Home 201
care for new types of footwear—leather shoes, canvas shoes, satin shoes.
The authors discussed how to clean new types of home decorations such
as glass mirrors and curtains. Advice also focused on how to make old
things new—how to freshen up an old rattan chair, how to stop flowers
from wilting, how to moisten a dry lemon, how to replace a record needle,
how to polish silverware, and how to get ring marks, white marks, and
burn marks out of wooden utensils. Advice columns also illuminated what
happened when global commodities entered Tianjin houses, offering real
solutions to the problems that attended foreign things. When cheese was
about to go bad, it should be wrapped in cloth. When Western ink seeped
through Chinese paper, one was to mop it up with sugar or table salt, and
when “chocolate” or “CoCo” (the magazine used English rather than Chi-
nese) stained a dress, borax and cold water could get the stain out.26
The Kuaile jiating column on common knowledge for the home offers
an indirect insight into the everyday life of its female readers in Tianjin.
Descriptions of how to clean and care for objects suggested a practical
lived experience of home, but the objects themselves in their newness and
foreignness were actually the fantasy of a modern life. In the descriptions
of stains, age, and dirt that surrounded the chocolate, western ink, rattan
chairs, shoes, and wooden utensils a picture of everyday life began to
emerge. Separating stain and dirt from commodities revealed traces of
motion, space, and time—the “social life” of the objects.27 Age faded
objects, use caused stains, and the circulation of people, things, and even
insects tracked in dirt, all challenging the clean and sanitary vision of
modern life.
Indeed, the material life of the modern everyday took place in the ten-
sion between modernity and its opposite: degradation. Reading the advice
columns for what the author attempted to conceal—by cleaning up or
brushing away—actually reveals the texture of urban life. In a column on
how to get rid of bugs, for example, the author noted that bugs became a
nuisance on a summer evening when the windows were open and an elec-
tric light was on.28 While the electric light and the glass window evoke a
sense of universal modernity, the bugs, the very thing the author tries to
eliminate, reveal the localness of place. Why open a window if bugs will fly
in? Because the summer nights in 1920s Tianjin were hot and humid; and
bugs, while unwelcome in a modern home, were a fact of life in a city
constructed along a river and on filled-in swampland in the British Con-

cession’s Extra-Mural Area.
FEELING HOME LIFE
Advice columns cleaned up the messes and covered the anxieties of every-
day life at home. They introduced the order that made the home an object
of desire and a site of affect. The material culture of home life as depicted
in magazines were the positive objects that directed the reader toward a
happy home. Since many of these objects were new and costly, readers had
to be taught first how to identify and second how to feel about these
objects. Readers could buy or borrow a copy of the magazine, but they
could not necessarily afford all the objects included on its pages. Common
knowledge made the home and its objects familiar, but they were also
aspirational.
Sofas were aspirational objects of modern home life. A sofa was a new
kind of seating that identified a modern sitting room, but it was also large
and expensive. A reader of Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating may not have owned a
sofa or even possibly experienced sitting on one, but nevertheless, the
magazine introduced this object to readers. Even the name for this newly
introduced object was not settled. Kuaile jiating, called sofas changyi, long
chair, pointing to the physical description of the furniture, or tangyi, chair
to recline in, describing one of its uses. Later women’s magazines used the
transliterated English term shafa, which has come to denote sofa today.29
Although sofas were a new form of seating, Chinese people had long been
sitting in chairs, moving from mat to chair in the Northern Song dynasty
(960–1127).30 Chairs in late imperial China were made from wood with an
almost architectural design of simple lines and geometric forms, but also
with a curved back that fully supported the body.31 As the art historian
Sarah Handler argues, the move to chairs in late imperial China inspired a
host of changes in the Chinese interior, affecting everything from furnish-
ings and decorations, to new kinds of tableware and social practices.32
Likewise, sitting in sofas in twentieth-century China required new social
practices, new understandings of the social space of home, and of course,
new decorations.
Living at Home 203
Upholstered sofas introduced contradictions into the modern home’s

interior. On one hand, as the centerpiece of the parlor, the most public
room of the modern home, sofas were sites for socializing among family
members and with guests. But sofas also made these public social interac-
tions more intimate, bringing guest and host together in a shared seat,
unlike the separate wooden chairs of the late imperial interior. A sofa
could even transform a public guest room into a private parlor, a respite for
interiority and contemplation. Describing a sofa in a photograph of an
“elegant western room” as a tangyi, or reclining chair, the accompanying
text in Kuaile jiating suggested that the sofa was “very comfortable” and
that laying upon it elicited a feeling of “joyful bliss.”33 “Comfort” was itself
a concept in flux: while wooden chairs had sometimes been draped in tex-
tiles in the past, upholstered sofas with horsehair cushions provided a new
sensory experience for reclining bodies that came to be described as
“comfort.” Likewise, new interior designs added to the visual, and some-
times olfactory, experiences of enjoying a comfortable sofa, as in the same
example from Kuaile jiating in which a vase full of flowers was placed on a
table in front of the sofa to inspire “delight.”
The magazine instructed readers how to decorate with the sofa, how to
socialize on a sofa, how to relax upon a sofa, and most importantly how
to feel a sofa. As an object of desire, the sofa promised positive emotions,
such as bliss, comfort, and delight. Beyond happiness, these emotions
ensured entrance into the leisure class. Whether or not readers could
experience the respite and pleasure of reclining on a sofa with a novel,
they could imagine what it might feel like. A reader’s family may not have
been able to afford the objects of desire, but by instructing readers in how
to feel the objects, the magazine endowed readers with the knowledge of
middle-class affect.
VISUALIZING THE INTERIOR
Nearly all women’s magazines published in early twentieth-century China

included photographs. Most images in Kuaile jiating depicted interior
spaces, while other magazines, such as Ling long and Woman World, mostly
featured images of women out in the city and few images of the interior.
Print technology allowed for the mass reproduction of images on the mag-
azine pages, and new camera technologies made small portable cameras
affordable to magazine readers, so that the photographs of women in
parks or on school grounds could have been taken by readers themselves.
Photographs of the interior required more sophisticated equipment and
lighting, and they appear to have been taken by professional photogra-
phers. While photographs of women in the exterior delivered spontaneity,
interior images felt carefully curated and planned.
As a new form of visual reproduction, photographs claimed to repre-
sent reality with a new visual accuracy, but whereas readers may have wit-
nessed some outdoor images of their city, photographs of the interior rep-
resented a fantasy of home that many readers would have never
experienced. These interior spaces set the stage for an imagined interior
world, where readers could escape from the dusty everyday life of home in
the city simply by turning a page. Though some readers lived in new, spa-
cious houses with multiple rooms to use and decorate in the styles of the
magazine, many more lived in crowded quarters that could not possibly
have contained the multiple rooms depicted in magazine photographs.
Readers had to learn how to view these images of the interior. Writing
about Europe in 1936, Walter Benjamin noted that film and photography
had changed how people saw things.34 The magazine also instructed read-
ers not only in how to see the interior but also in how to feel it. This lesson
began with a caption that would alert the reader as to the kind of room
they were looking at. Accompanying articles would deepen her knowl-
edge: an article on interior decoration that included a photograph in Tian-
jin’s Kuaile jiating, for example, suggested that in addition to considering
hygiene (weisheng), economics ( jingji), and finance (licai), one should take
feelings (xinli) into consideration when decorating.35 The “feeling” of a
room could be experienced by touch or by sight. The texts that accompa-
nied photographs of rooms instructed women how to reproduce that feel-
ing through viewing. Kuaile jiating explained the physical experience of
sitting in a chair or at a table, and since photographs in the magazine were
black and white, the text also detailed the aesthetic emotional experience
that particular color choices could elicit.36 The text encouraged viewers to
enter the photograph of the room and feel the furniture with her body
and fill her eyes with emotion. In short, the text encouraged a personal
Living at Home 205
subjective relationship between the room and the individual viewer that
was mediated by the photograph.
Articles in Kuaile jiating also encouraged readers to relate their subjec-
tive relationships with the magazine photographs to their experiences in
their own lived interior spaces, meaning that photography could also be
prescriptive. Articles that accompanied photographs often warned that
the aesthetic experience of the visual interior was far from spontaneous;
indeed, the aesthetics were carefully orchestrated, with room decorations
coordinated to match the type of room. According to an article in Kuaile
jiating, each type of room was to elicit a specific kind of emotion: sitting
rooms were formal and upright, a living room or bedroom quiet and com-
fortable, a meeting room orderly, and a library elegant.37 The article went
on to note how the proper atmosphere of a room could be ruined by a mis-
placed object—an armchair in an otherwise solemn ancestral temple, or a
Chinese scroll next to a western oil painting in a sitting room. According
to the author, such decorating mistakes created a mood of ridicule, and
were the sign of an ignorant decorator.38 Thus the photographs of interior
spaces in women’s magazines served a dual purpose: encouraging the
reader to enter a world of rooms and experience them subjectively, but
also generating the anxiety of modern life and its resolution—the idea that
although the modern individual was always on display and being judged,
she could navigate these judgments, and the new world around her, by
using the women’s magazine as her guidebook.
By the 1930s, women’s magazines were encouraging readers not only to
view the photographs on their pages, but to get in front of and behind the
camera themselves. Readers would find local women as well as film
actresses on the cover of Ling long magazine, and the magazine’s pages were
filled with photographs of ordinary women from Shanghai and elsewhere,
most likely readers themselves, posing in a park, standing next to an auto-
mobile, competing at a sporting event, or attending a charity luncheon. The
magazine also included advertisements for photography studios, portable
cameras, and Kodak film, encouraging women to have their photograph
taken or to take photographs themselves. Since the new portable cameras
did not have a flash, readers’ snapshots would have been taken outdoors—
like the majority of photographs of women depicted in Ling long. By con-
trast, photographs of interior rooms would have been taken by professional
photographers; and some photographs of interior spaces may not have been
taken in a house at all but instead staged in a photographer’s studio.
Lighting provides the first clue that the photo of a room was staged.
Although architects designed houses to light up naturally through windows,
commercial photographers used artificial lighting to simulate sunlight on
their sets, and they often lit their subjects from strange, even unnatural
angles. In a photograph of a sitting room that appeared in Ling long under the
caption “modern home decorations” (xiandai jiating zhuangshi), the room
first appears to be lit by the large full-length window at the corner of the
room.39 (See figure 6.1.) Yet the shadows cast by objects and furniture in the
room reveal that the window was a fake and that an external artificial light
source brightened the set. Like the window, an electric lamp, placed on a
side table next to the sofa, was also decorative. The lamp cast a large shadow
on the wall next to the window, suggesting that the light source was a spot-
light from the left rather than the window on the right or the lamp itself.
FIGURE 6.1 “Modern home decorations.” Ling long magazine, issue 256
(Shanghai, 1936).
Living at Home 207
Indeed, two large spotlights shone down on this corner of a sitting room, one
from stage right and the other from stage left. The light that was set up next
to the armchair illuminated the arms and cushions of the chair; the shadow
it cast was actually opposite to the shadow that the sun would have cast
through the window. The second light was placed next to the sofa, shining
on the forearm of the sofa and on the lamp and side table at the far end.
Unlike rooms in real houses, staged scenes did not necessarily have a
ceiling and four walls. In a second photograph exemplifying “modern
home decorations,” for instance, notice first how each piece of furniture
enters the photograph’s frame. (See figure 6.2.) The dark, curved uphol-
stery of the sofa in the center contrasts with the light colors of the sur-
rounding furniture—two side tables, an armchair, a bureau, a dressing
table, and two rugs—which draws the viewer’s eye into the room. This
composition is framed by three walls. An armchair, tilted toward the sofa
and with its back to the viewer, encloses the space almost as if it were a
fourth wall. But instead of a wall, there is a large empty space between fur-
niture and camera. The absence of a wall means that the photographer
could step back from the arrangement and photograph the room and all its
furniture in their entirety, a scene that would be nearly impossible to
FIGURE 6.2 “A modern sitting room.” Ling long magazine, issue 256
(Shanghai, 1936).
capture in an actual room with four walls. With only three walls and no
ceiling, this room was just like the fantasy of a movie set, allowing the pho-
tographer and the viewer to transcend the limitations of material space in
both the production and consumption of the image.
Now compare a photograph from the same series of modern home dec-
orations to a photograph of a small bedroom that appeared in Ling long
four years earlier. 40 (See figure 6.3.) The photograph of a “small bedroom
and dressing table” looks onto a corner of a room, including two walls and
the ceiling, and does indeed appear to depict a small room. The room
seems only wide enough to have included a bed, a side table, and dressing
table. The photographer, confined by the four walls of this small space,
had to choose whether to include the entire bed or the dressing table. The
photographer chose the latter, leaving most of the bed out of the frame.
With many of its photographs of interior rooms staged in a photogra-
pher’s studio, the Ling long home could have been anywhere, and indeed it
FIGURE 6.3 “Bathroom” and “Small bedroom with dressing table.”

Ling long magazine, issue 55 (Shanghai, 1932).
Living at Home 209
might have been. Copy books with photographs of interior spaces traveled
from Europe to Japan and China, allowing magazine editors to create a
world of ideal modern interior spaces simply by selecting a stock photo. 41
The global circulation of photographic images brought the world into the
women’s magazine’s imaginary home, and female readers into that world.
Photographs and images of home in Chinese women’s magazines had two
characteristics that disconnected images of home from the specificity of
place: unlike contemporary architecture or builder magazines, women’s
magazines rarely depicted the exterior architecture of a house or any
other image that could put the home in a specific place. 42 Additionally,
photographs of the interior spaces of the home almost never included
people. The empty sets of tidy, hygienic, modern rooms allowed for the
global circulation of images of home, but they also allowed the reader to
place herself in a fantasy world of the interior.
Although the home was the most intimate space of everyday life, the
absence of people in interior-design photographs made these images seem
universal, constructing the modern home as a shared global space. The
photograph’s claim to a shared global modern style was especially true in
Ling long magazine. While the Tianjin modern depicted the chimeric jux-
taposition of Western and Chinese styles, Shanghai modern, as depicted
in Ling long, was a universal global style that was never labeled foreign.
The magazine might introduce new foreign material objects such as a
French sofa or German stainless steel utensils, but editors never referred
to the spaces as German or French. Instead, they used a new lexicon of
modernity, calling the rooms xiandai (contemporary), xinshi (new style),
or modeng (modern).
The difference between how Kuaile jiating and Ling long explained
images of the modern depended on time as well as place. Though only
seven years separated the publication of Kuaile jiating and Ling long, the
magazines were positioned on either side of a major rupture in interior
design: the 1925 Parisian Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et
industriels modernes, which popularized art deco interior design. In his
history of home, Witold Rybczynski argues that art deco, with its break
from the past and focus on utility and minimalism, signaled the death of
comfort in domestic interior design. 43 For Chinese taste-makers, it offered
a design vocabulary through which they could communicate a universal
modernity for China. While Kuaile jiating had depicted modern style by
showcasing Western libraries and Chinese sitting rooms cluttered with
knickknacks, Ling long included pictures of stark rooms with clean lines,
sharp contrasting colors, and geometric furniture that were intended not
to be part of any particular national or regional style, but rather were to be
understood as universally modern.
The art deco interior design depicted in magazines like Ling long
complemented Shanghai’s art deco urban architecture, modernist writ-
ing, and popular culture, all of which claimed membership in a global uni-
versal modernity. 44 Tianjin also had its fair share of art deco architecture,
such as the French and Italian Clubs (1930s), the Leopold Building (1936–
1938), and the Great China Theatre (1934), but Tianjin never claimed
membership in the global modern. Instead, throughout the 1920s and
1930s Tianjin remained (and remains even today) acutely aware of being
on the periphery of Shanghai’s modern and of the global modernity on dis-
play in Tianjin’s foreign concessions.
While Tianjin magazines reminded readers of their city’s peripheral
locality, Ling long beckoned readers into a cosmopolitan modern world.
Whether it was a photograph of bobbed hair, an article about wireless
radios, or an advertisement for greyhound racing, articles in Ling long were
always self-referentially “modern” or “contemporary” and never “for-
eign.” Calling the images foreign would have distanced readers from them;
by calling them “modern” instead, editors invited readers to enter the uni-
versal modern through imaginary personal interior spaces. Photographs of
interior spaces in Ling long were welcoming and escapist, inviting readers
into a fantasy modern world of never-ending, sparely furnished, contempo-
rary rooms—a fantasy that contrasted starkly with the cramped quarters in
which many Shanghai women lived, since Shanghai’s housing crisis was
even worse than Tianjin’s. 45
Even if Tianjin readers may have enjoyed more living space than their
Shanghai counterparts, their houses could not possibly have contained the
countless rooms with innumerable functions depicted in Ling long photo-
graphs. Whereas a single wing in a late imperial courtyard house could
serve as a bedroom, washroom, dining room, or nursery, depending on
the time of day and the ever-moving arrangement of furniture, rooms in
the modern fantasy home each had a specific and unchanging function
Living at Home 211
denoted by the titles of the room and its corresponding furnishings. Cap-
tions to photographs introduced readers to these new single-purpose
rooms, including sitting or guest rooms (ketang, keshi, keting, huiketing),
living rooms (xiuxishi, qizuoshi, qijushi), bedrooms (woshi, qinshi), dining
rooms (canshi), bathrooms ( yushi), libraries (shushi, shufang, shuwu,
shuzhai). 46 While such rooms might also be featured on architectural
blueprints of actual houses, Ling long’s fantasy homes overflowed with
superfluous spaces, including make-up rooms (huazhuangshi), chil-
dren’s rooms (ertong jushi), breakfast rooms (zaocanshi), and even chat-
ting rooms (tanhuashi).
One room was notably absent from the photographs of the interior: the
kitchen. The modern kitchen was never integrated into the fantasy vision
of the Chinese modern home depicted in women’s magazines. Cooking
was usually relegated to servants, not housewives, and kitchens were not
always fully integrated into a house’s floorplan. Women’s magazines thus
reflected the lived reality of classed household labor and the materiality of
Chinese urban houses by excluding kitchens from their fantasy interior.
Kuaile jiating did not include photographs or images of the kitchen,
although Tianjin’s Woman World included a photograph of a Japanese
housewife in her kitchen, and Ling long magazine printed a cartoon of a
so-called new woman in her kitchen. 47 The cartoon from Ling long sug-
gests that the very idea of the modern woman cooking was comical. (See
figure 6.4.) Standing in the right foreground of the image, this ideal mod-
ern woman seems ready for business—she has pulled back her permed
hair and put on an apron to cover her patterned qipao. And yet she teeters
on high heels over a table, with a bowl and chopsticks in her hands and a
wok on a low coal stove placed at her feet, as she consults a book (one of
three on the table) on how to prepare this meal. Beads of sweat spring from
her husband’s face as he anxiously looks on from the doorway. His mother
stands beside him, her rounded mouth displaying surprise at her daughter-
in-law’s clumsiness in the kitchen. The older woman’s shock comes in part
from the fact that the younger woman seems not to be able to cook without
a manual. For the older woman, cooking might have been embodied,
something learned by doing. New women, on the other hand, needed to
read about it in books and magazines. The humor in this cartoon comes
from a double mocking: first of the new woman, for whom cooking does
FIGURE 6.4 Cartoon of the “new woman” in the kitchen.

Ling long magazine, issue 73 (Shanghai, 1932).
not come naturally, and second of the reader, who herself must consult
one of the magazine’s many articles on cooking and nutrition as a guide to
something that should come naturally.
The kitchen may have been excluded from the visual fantasy of the
modern home, but people still had to eat. Thus, magazines offered pre-
scriptive advice on how to conduct themselves in this everyday space.
Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating included detailed seasonal menus and a regular
column on cooking, which included advice on how a woman should
instruct her servants to cook for her family. An article on how to make
small dishes noted that while many wives went into the kitchen and
Living at Home 213
“watched” and “spoke” to what was going on, many others simply left
the business of their family’s food to the cook. 48 The latter were all too
willing to eat delicious food, but when the food was unpalatable, they
would lose their tempers. According to the author, if readers wanted to
enjoy food that tasted good, they had to understand how to make it. The
article continued by suggesting that this knowledge of cooking could
come either from the wife practicing it by her own hand or by directing the
cook in how to prepare dishes. Thus the kitchen was not an escapist imagi-
nary space but rather the site of everyday ritual. As the text suggested,
however, the ritual of cooking was not part of an elite urban woman’s daily
practice; instead, the kitchen was the site of her daily social ritual of
observing and managing household staff.
CONCLUSION
In the end, what does this fantasy world tell us about the material world in
which Chinese urban women lived? Did the black and white photographs
of perfectly arranged rooms mirror actual living conditions at the time?
Most likely not. In fact, compared to floorplans for the ideal modern house
that were hinted on the pages of architectural and building journals, the
never-ending series of rooms depicted on the pages of women’s magazines
could not possibly have fit inside a single house. But while urban Chinese
women in the 1930s may not have had a breakfast room, the fact that a
room with such a specific function had entered the visual imaginary of the
modern interior was revolutionary, something that these women’s grand-
mothers would have never imagined. Moreover, while twentieth century
nationalist ideologues claimed that women needed to break free from the
prison of the feudal household, women’s magazines presented an alter-
nate vision of jiating as home, the site of middle-class affect and individual
subjectivity.
This pristine and affective vision of home and its objects as the happy
life was not without cracks in the veneer. The lists of objects in circulation,
followed by dirt, stains, and bugs, exposed the porous nature of the home
and the insecurities of modern life and urban capitalism. Rather than dis-
rupt or overthrow this system, however, women’s magazines masked its
volatility through the advice of changshi, which offered familiarity and

security in an unfamiliar changing world, and through the photographic
fantasies of modern interior spaces, which allowed an escape from
crowded interiors. Transforming the anxieties of modern life into the sta-
bility of home life, women’s magazines ultimately stabilized the privileged
class position of their readers— China’s new urban elites. Female periodi-
cal literature thus placed home at the center of a constellation of urban
social spaces that shaped the social identities of elite urban women in
twentieth century China. The new woman did not need to flee her house-
hold to realize her individual subjectivity; she fashioned her gendered and
classed identities through jiating before entering other social spaces of the
city.
7
Engendering the Chinese City
T
he transformation of the late imperial jia into the mod-
ern jiating lay at the center of changing conceptions and
practices of social spaces in Tianjin that coincided with
shifting gender and class relations. Tianjin’s urban spaces
were produced through what Henri Lefebvre describes as the
relationship between “perceived,” “conceived,” and “lived”
spaces.1 Part 1 of this book introduced the planners, politi-
cians, social scientists, and real estate developers of Tianjin’s
domestic empires who conceived of social relations and spatial
design, while part 2 explored the lived spaces of Tianjin’s
cosmopolitan cultures at home. This chapter examines how
people perceived social spaces in their city. Chinese spatial cos-
mologies, like Chinese politics, were in transition during the
Republican era. Historians have employed multiple models to
capture these transitional forms, especially inner/outer, state/
society, and public/private. Indeed, each of these models was
evident in Tianjin’s architecture and urban planning: late
imperial courtyard houses in Tianjin’s former walled Chinese
city sat across the river from the new Chinese municipal dis-
trict Xin hebei qu, while Italian villas were near French Beaux
Arts banks. But while historians today have developed a
vocabulary to talk about these different spatial cosmologies,
people living in Tianjin at the time developed their own rich
218 C H I N E S E S O C I A L S PA C E S
vernacular to describe the transitional spaces of their city. The complexity

with which Tianjin urbanites thought about the spaces of their city was
born out of the triangular relationship of the conceived social and political
spaces of planners and politicians, the lived spaces of the new city, and the
perceived spaces of the local commentators who wrote about urban space.
Beginning in the late Qing dynasty, Tianjin was torn apart, decentered,
and rearranged by multiple foreign empires. Because of its proximity to
the capital city Beijing, Tianjin had been designated as an imperial city, a
strategic military garrison and trading post. But after foreign empires tore
down the city’s imperial wall and moved the city’s administrative center,
these imperial connections to the capital began to deteriorate. In 1927,
Chiang Kai-shek declared the former southern capital city Nanjing to be
the new capital of the Republic of China. Historians of modern China have
come to understand Chiang’s symbolic movement of the capital city from
Beijing to Nanjing as marking the end of the Warlord Era (1916–1928) and
the beginning of the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937). Moving the capital had
implications for the socio-spatial histories of China and Tianjin as well. By
moving the capital away from Beijing, the Guomindang further distanced
themselves from the cosmological center of Qing imperial power; yet in
establishing the new capital at the site of the former Ming capital, the
Guomindang still called upon the power of late imperial space for their
authority. With the new capital on the site of the former imperial capital,
the Guomindang embarked on plans to build a new, modern capital city
based on scientific methods of urban planning.2
As the Guomindang began plans for their new capital in Nanjing, rem-
nants of the Qing dynasty, the Warlord Era, and former Republican politi-
cal life exited the former capital Beijing and emptied onto Tianjin. As the
historian Madeleine Yue Dong has argued, when the capital shifted to
Nanjing, wealthy Beijingers increasingly invested in neighboring Tianjin
over Beijing.3 Indeed, by the start of the Nanjing Decade, Tianjin was
home to former Qing officials and Beiyang government ministers. As the
repository of the displaced political life of old Beijing, 1920s and 1930s
Tianjin has earned a reputation among many Chinese people and scholars
today as conservative and conventional, especially when compared to its
cultured southern counterpart Shanghai. This reputation stems in part
from how local writers at the time portrayed the cities. Shanghai writers
Engendering the Chinese City 219
embraced their city’s place in the universal modern, even at the risk of
ignoring colonial inequities, while Tianjin writers were very much aware
that their city was on the periphery of modern cities like Shanghai. 4 Living
in a peripherally modern city that blurred time, space, culture, and politics
actually allowed Tianjin residents to imagine a broader variety of urban
social spaces. Tianjin was close to the former Qing capital city but far from
the new Guomindang political center, and the city’s residents spanned the
political temporalities of Chinese history, ranging from members of the
Manchu imperial family to early Republic officials and warlords. More-
over, with urban spaces multiply fractured by colonialisms, Tianjin resi-
dents had no choice but to reimagine and re-engender social spaces in
their city.
Nationalist ideology may have been more concerned with the social
relations of jiating than the social spaces of house and home, but writers of
periodical literature and Chinese people themselves sought to understand
the relationship between home, the individual, and the city. Although
fragments of the past still marked the Tianjin landscape, new perceived
configurations of social spaces departed radically from earlier gendered
ideas of nei and wai. Scholars, popular writers, and Chinese people them-
selves employed a new lexicon to talk about space centered around new
conceptual terms of home and society, or jiating and shehui. These terms
were not fixed, and people proposed different ways of thinking about jia-
ting, its relationship to society, and even imagined new female-gendered
spaces onto the city. These discussions not only revealed changing percep-
tions of urban space, but also the intersectional relationship between gen-
der and social class in mapping the city.
COSMOLOGIES OF SOCIOPOLITICAL SPACE
In Tianjin, a Chinese city with multiple foreign empires, the gendered spa-
tial relations of imperial China lingered alongside the public/private divi-
sions of the colonial concessions. Tianjin urban planning and architecture
included two socio-spatial ideologies—late imperial Chinese and
European— each with a distinct vision for the spatial-political relationship
between the family or individual and the state. Spatial politics of late
imperial China proposed gendered orderings according to nei and wai,

inner and outer, female and male.5 Inner and outer referred to spaces
inside and outside the house but also the gendering of spaces within the
household. Tianjin’s foreign concessions introduced socio-spatial under-
standings of gender through urban planning that divided spaces into
commercial (or public) and residential (or private). As European spatial
relations separated office from domicile, both in location and design, Chi-
nese men who lived or worked in the European concessions experienced a
distinction between the public spaces of their workplace and the private
spaces of the home.
Tianjin included multiple forms of urban planning, including late impe-
rial spaces, European colonial spaces, and new Chinese political spaces
with the construction of the new municipal governing district Xin hebei
qu. Examining the Guomindang in Canton on the eve of the Nanjing
Decade, the historian Michael Tsin links urban planning and political
reform, arguing that as urban planners shifted from a dynastic- to a
European-inspired model, political practices also changed.6 According to
Tsin, the dynastic urban planning model maintained state power through
space. Officials located government structures strategically, placing them
on specific sites, in alignment with a political ideology to guarantee “a
stable and proper order.”7 Guomindang urban planners in Guangzhou
rebuilt the city at the same time that they restructured the relationship
between the government and its people. According to their new political
ideology, political legitimation was no longer to be found through strate-
gic cosmologies of space, but instead in constructing and mobilizing soci-
ety as a legitimizing source of political power. Tsin argues that the
Guomindang constructed a new sociopolitical relationship based on the
dichotomy of state and society rather than the inner/outer continuum that
placed the household and its individuals at the center of the imperial
world.
More than material spatial arrangements, people also began to per-
ceive individual subjectivities, social relations, and gender through the
lenses of public and private. The May Fourth (or New Culture) Movement
epitomized this distinction, as May Fourth reformers believed that a soci-
ety of autonomous individuals would become the social conscience of the
state, as well as the means for social reform. While several May Fourth
activists called for marriage and family reform as a means to changing

society, others viewed family as an oppositional and lesser sphere when
compared to society. Indeed, as a legacy of the May Fourth Movement,
histories of women and gender, and of modern China more generally,
often have elevated the public political lives of Chinese women and mar-
ginalized the lives of women in the home. When the historian Wang Zheng
interviewed women who had participated in the New Culture Movement,
for example, she noted that they were quick to distinguish themselves
from taitai (or wives) of scholars, businessmen, and bureaucrats who had
chosen a life of luxury and comfort by marrying elite men. According to
Wang, women of the May Fourth generation could have chosen the path of
taitai, but instead wanted to define themselves “by their career achieve-
ments in the public sphere rather than by their private lives.”8 Only partici-
pation in the public realm would allow them to achieve duli renge or inde-
pendent personhood.9 Thus Wang suggests that May Fourth women
understood the private as a female-gendered space of lesser value, and
public as a more highly valued and possibly male-dominated space. Yet in
their oral histories, the women themselves do not seem to have articulated
this public/private divide so clearly. They rarely refer to “private,” yet they
do use the term “public” to refer to the public arenas of work, activism, and
politics, or to the public opinion of media. This use of “public” is less a spa-
tial sphere that complements a private sphere than an articulation of a new
vision of a public-oriented society.
The focus on public over private is reflected in the historical scholarship
on China. While historians of Europe and America have devoted countless
monographs to the history of private life or the rise of separate spheres,
China historians have been more focused on debates over the public
sphere.10 Since the 1990s, China historians have debated if, how, and when
a public sphere developed in China.11 Their lack of consensus points to the
difficulties of applying Euro-American social structures to Chinese his-
tory. Still, most historians agree on the rise of some form of a Chinese pub-
lic. The historian Eugenia Lean has attempted to introduce gender into
discussions of the public by examining how sentiment—which she notes
historians typically have relegated to the private sphere—was mobilized to
transform a mass public during the Nanjing Decade.12 Lean’s work has
been critical in reorienting our understanding of the public/private divide
in modern China, and more important still in highlighting the complexi-

ties of public and private in China and elsewhere.
But while public and private may be useful structural categories for
understanding Chinese history comparatively, when Chinese people in
Tianjin talked about social space, they rarely used terms such as public
and private, or even inner and outer. Instead, they expressed similar con-
cepts through a socio-spatial vocabulary that included terms such as she-
hui (society), jiating (family/house/home), and jiaoji (the socializing
sphere). Social commentators understood shehui to be what we now call
the public sphere of commerce and politics. While they did not explicitly
gender shehui as male, they described a woman’s entry into the sphere of
shehui as a proud achievement that resulted in her gaining equal social sta-
tus or shehui diwei. Jiating, by contrast, was an unequivocally female-
gendered space, and social commentators described it as either the center
of shehui or as an oppositional space detrimental to women.
Jiaoji was a social sphere named for a social action. The term jiaoji can
be translated as communication or social intercourse. The term seems to
have first been used in reference to international relations. In the Tianjin
newspaper the Dagong bao, for example, the term first appeared in a head-
line in 1905 in an article on the difference between communication and
negotiation.13 This understanding of the term was echoed in the title of a
1918 article on Japanese/British communications.14 By the mid-1920s, the
paper introduced a new understanding of the term. A 1926 article reported
that the May Fourth intellectual Zhang Shizhao had been invited to Tian-
jin to give a lecture on the male-female jiaoji question (nannü jiaoji wenti).15
In April 1929 the National Hotel was reported to host a social dance ( jiaoji
wu).16 Yet another understanding of jiaoji entered the discourse of the
Dagong bao in the 1930s. This was the jiaoji mingxing (social star or celebrity)
and the jiaoji hua (social flower).17 The social star or social flower usually
referred to a young woman who was depicted as a kind of social butterfly.
As the meanings of jiaoji expanded, so did its usage in discourse. In the
Daogong bao as in other Republican- era periodicals, usage peaked in
the 1930s, with jiaoji appearing in headlines only three times in the 1900s,
and fifty times during the 1930s.18
The actions of the new jiaoji woman defined the new jiaoji sphere.
In 1927, the Tianjin periodical The Lady (Funü) published the article
“Twelve Things that the Social Star is Busy With,” which included the
following list:
1. Busy seeing guests

2. Busy dancing
3. Busy inviting guests
4. Busy watching plays and movies
5. Busy strolling through public parks
6. Busy going on friendly dates
7. Busy buying perfume, pearls, and jewelry
8. Busy taking photographs
9. Busy driving cars
10. Busy having fabric cut
11. Busy having hair cut
12. Busy playing ball19
The socializing sphere of jiaoji was defined by movement, transactions,

and exchanges, and these activities were tied neither to the home nor to
the workplaces of the elite women who participated in the socializing
sphere. The spaces of the sphere could mean two things at once: a depart-
ment store could be the site of public work for a female shop worker and a
place of leisured jiaoji for the women who shopped there. A person’s
actions defined the meaning of the space for them, and for jiaoji activities
were youthful, female, and elite. While married women could inhabit the
social network of jiaoji, the activities of jiaoji implied a social life before
marriage and children with an emphasis on dating. The article in The Lady
implied such romantic inclinations through the author’s name Yuan Hu,
likely a pen name meaning “mandarin ducks lake.” Mandarin ducks were
a symbol of love, always pictured in pairs, and they referred to a genre of
romantic literature known as mandarin duck and butterfly literature. If
socializing was about dating and finding a match, women in the jiaoji
sphere appeared to be designing what that should look like.
During the first half of the twentieth century, the term jiaoji had shifted
from largely referring to international relations to including new under-
standings of a female gendered sphere of social and romantic relations.
This widening of discourse suggests two things about everyday life in
treaty-port cities like Tianjin. First, whether the adaptation of a term used
for international relations to social relations was conscious or not, people
were engaging with global political discourses in their everyday lives as
they were dwelling in the world. Second, new understandings of gendered
social relations were being configured according to new understandings
of international relations. The Chinese term for international guoji
includes two characters—state and boundary. The character boundary or
ji is also found in jiaoji. Just as the understanding of international is formed
at the boundaries of states, the social intercourse of romantic jiaoji is
formed at the gendered boundaries of male and female. When a woman
purchased perfume or went on a date, she invented a gendered role for
herself that established and clarified these gendered boundaries of male
and female. But what happened when she drove a car or played basketball?
She may have been challenging the gendered boundaries of jiaoji, but she
was certainly establishing the classed boundaries of jiaoji as social space
for an elite group that enjoyed the privilege to be busy with leisure.
With the fall of the Qing dynasty and its Confucian socio-spatial pre-
scriptions of inner and outer, and without clear direction from the new
Republican state, Chinese people were left to define and engender social
spaces for themselves. Debates over the relationship between jiating and
shehui often took on nationalist political tones, drawing on both the Chi-
nese inner/outer continuum and European public/private. Jiaoji, by con-
trast, appeared at first glance to be anything but political, a frivolous space
of female leisure, but even the language of this new terminology was bor-
rowed from the political intercourse of international relations. Whether
consciously or not, as Chinese people in Tianjin managed their everyday
lives, they were navigating global and national politics in discourses in the
media and spaces in the city to forge a new sociopolitical spatial model of
gender and class relations.
THE SOCIAL SPHERE
On September 7, 1927, Isabel Chang appeared on the front page of the Bei-
yang huabao—three years before her husband Henry would write a letter
to the French Consulate demanding that she not be allowed to mortgage
their property in Tianjin’s French Concession.20 With her eyes cast down, a
dark shadow enveloped Isabel’s white face like a modern bob. Her bare
shoulder tipped toward the camera, framed by a soft, dark fabric covering
her arm and a string of pearls glistening across her neck. The bilingual
caption identified her as “Mrs. Henry Chang, the second daughter of Ex-
premier Tang Shao-Yi,” and named the photographer’s studio as B. M.
Joseph & Co.
The Beiyang huabao began publication in Tianjin’s French Concession
in 1926, a year before Isabel appeared on the cover. The pictorial magazine
was published for eleven more years, first weekly and eventually every
other day.21 The magazine ceased publication with the start of the Sino-
Japanese War in 1937. The Beiyang huabao was Tianjin’s first pictorial mag-
azine, although Tianjin readers already would have been familiar with
pictorial magazines from Shanghai such as Liang you (The Good Compan-
ion), which began publication in 1925. Tianjin resident Feng Wuyue
founded the Beiyang huabao to educate local Tianjin readers in knowledge
and the arts, but he was very much aware that his audience comprised
members of his own elite social group. 22 The magazine encouraged
audience participation, soliciting photographs of “rarely seen national
scenery,” “national customs,” “current events,” and “young ladies of prom-
inent families.”23
Each issue of the Beiyang huabao featured a photograph of a woman on
the cover. Sometimes these women were Chinese movie stars or socialites
from other cities, but more often they were young ladies from prominent
Tianjin families. These “cover girls” brought Tianjin’s elite social sphere
into focus. Captions described the family networks that connected women
to the elite sphere of socialization. Advertisements illuminated the urban
spaces where socializing took place, and photographic portraits connected
the cover girls to each other, to the magazine’s readers, and to the spaces
of the city where the magazines traveled.
The captions located below and alongside the photographs captured
the intersection of temporalities, Chinese culture, and cosmopolitanism
in treaty-port Tianjin. Until the last years of publication, even though the
magazine’s articles were all in Chinese, photograph captions were usually
bilingual, in English and Chinese. Both English and Chinese conveyed
similar meanings, but they were not direct translations. English captions,
for example, often referred to a woman as a “society lady,” but the Chinese
caption never actually used the Chinese neologism for society (shehui).
These women instead were representatives of the socializing sphere, jiaoji.
English captions used gendered terms, such as “lady,” “Mrs.,” and “Miss”
to refer to a woman. The Chinese captions employed multiple gendered
titles from a lexicon that spanned Chinese linguistic history, from the
classical Chinese term guixiu, meaning “cultivated woman” or “gentle-
woman,” to the modern term xiaojie, “little sister” or “miss.”24 Rarely did
Chinese and English captions refer to married women by their birth
names. When personal names were used, they usually referred to a single
daughter of a well-known man, a career woman, or a female celebrity. In
such cases, the woman’s name was usually accompanied by the title nüshi,
literally “female scholar.”
The socializing sphere depicted in the cover photos of the Beiyang hua-
bao was gendered female. Occasionally, a cover might feature a general or
a man posing next to his bride in a Western-style wedding photo, but most
photographs featured women only. Photography and visual imagery were
already playing a role in shaping female celebrity, fashion, and beauty in
China as elsewhere in the world, and the magazine included photographs
of international Chinese celebrities like Chinese-American Anna May
Wong, as well as famous beauties from Harbin and Shanghai. Still, if the
photography enabled the mass circulation of celebrity images, it was also
increasingly accessible to the readers of the Beiyang huabao, and indeed,
most covers included photographs of local women instead of national and
international celebrities, making these local Tianjin women visible to a
mass audience.
The journey into this visible social sphere of photographic reproduction
began in the photographer’s studio, where a woman would sit for her por-
trait. She might even select a photographer based on his work in other Bei-
yang huabao cover photos, since the photographer was always credited in
the caption. Once the photograph had been developed, it traveled to the
magazine’s editorial office, where it would be laid out on the cover page,
sent to the printer, printed hundreds of times, and finally dispersed to
houses, offices, hotels, and restaurants across the city. As a woman’s image
circulated across the city through the newly visible socialization sphere,
she joined a diverse company of women, ranging from the daughters and
wives of prominent Tianjin men to students recently returned from study

abroad, not to mention a variety of career women including medical doc-
tors, the first female diplomat, and the first Chinese head of a college for
girls. Thus, the taitai and the May Fourth new woman shared the same
social space on the pages of the Beiyang huabao.
The socialization sphere depicted on the pages of the Beiyang huabao
was far from an “imagined community” in which readers would never
know one another. Rather, the women featured on the cover of the Beiyang
huabao and its readers inhabited the same physical social spaces, often
connected through kinship and marriage.25 Isabel Chang’s younger half-
sister Edith, for example, appeared on the cover of the magazine a year
before Isabel did, and the magazine regularly featured photographs of
their former brother-in-law Wellington Koo and his new bride.26 Other
daughters of well-known men appeared across issues of the pictorial, with
captions noting both their father’s name, and, if the woman was married,
the husband’s name. Identifying a woman with reference to both her hus-
band and her father, the captions suggest that marriage and kinship played
a role in creating social networks in Republican-era China.27 According to
social norms in late imperial China, once a woman married, she became
part of her husband’s family and was no longer considered a part of her
natal family. But in the socializing sphere on the pages of the Beiyang
huabao, both Isabel and her sister Edith were identified through their hus-
bands and their father. Through the technology of photographic reproduc-
tion, women like Isabel and Edith became the public faces of both their
natal and marriage families in the socializing sphere.
While a woman’s beauty, artistic talent, or smarts could land her on the
cover of the Beiyang huabao, her father or husband’s title marked her
classed position in Tianjin’s social sphere. Captions often included a hus-
band’s or father’s profession as well as his name. By listing the male family
member’s profession, the captions were trying to set stakes that would
define the class boundaries of a shifting social landscape. In late imperial
China, neo- Confucian social ideals prescribed a very clear social order
with scholars at the top, but with the abolition of the civil service examina-
tion in 1905, the professional basis for the social order was no longer as
strong, and by the time of the Nanjing Decade, urban elites in Tianjin
called upon multiple forms of economic, social, and cultural capital for
social distinction.28 The urban socialization sphere thus became one space
where the city’s elite could articulate new understandings of social status.
The men associated with women in the Beiyang huabao socialization
sphere hailed from a variety of professions, including generals, warlords,
former ministers, a railway director, a telegraph director, the owner of a
department store, a magician, the deposed emperor Puyi, a newspaper
editor, a stamp collector, and famous scholars. The diversity of male pro-
fessions may have signaled that definitions of the male urban elite were
expanding, or perhaps, the linking of male profession to a female photo-
graph suggests that feminine charm and beauty helped expand the defini-
tion of elite social status in the jiaoji.
As photographs introduced the actors of Tianjin’s socializing sphere,
advertisements illuminated the spaces where social activities were taking
place off the page. The cover of the Beiyang huabao included ads for places
to shop, such as the Pathé Department Store in the French Concession and
the Chung Yuen Department Store in the Japanese Concession, as well as
places to dine and imbibe, such as the Fululin Restaurant, the Riche Café,
and the Yeho Yuen Restaurant, all in the French Concession. Isabel Chang
could have walked easily to these locations from her house in the French
Concession, or she could have driven in one of the Renault cars depicted in
advertisements for the automobile dealer Garage Central, which also
appeared on the front page. While department stores and cafes may have
been modeled on similar social spaces in Western cities, the businessmen
and restaurateurs conceived of these new spaces of jiaoji with Tianjin’s
Chinese urban elites, and not foreign expatriates, in mind. The Fululin
Restaurant, for example, advertised Chinese tea to be served with its
Western dishes.29 From Chinese names to the mixture of Chinese and for-
eign wares, these social spaces served up chimeric entertainment to a Chi-
nese clientele.
How did women navigate these spaces, and how did the classed nature
of the socializing sphere shape their gendered identities? Although pho-
tographs in the Beiyang huabao displayed social activities, such as a soci-
ety ladies’ picnic on the banks of the Hai River or a wedding at the British
Concession’s Gordon Hall, they offer little insight into how women nego-
tiated the sphere in practice.30 How did a woman enter the socializing
sphere? How did she succeed in becoming a “leading society lady”? How
did she navigate between jiaoji and other urban spaces like shehui and
jiating? These are questions women’s periodical literature can help us
answer.
SOCIETY, HOME, AND THE SOCIAL SPHERE
Almost two years after Beiyang huabao ceased publication, on June 21,
1939, a new women’s pictorial magazine was launched from Tianjin’s
French Concession. The Chinese title of the magazine was Funü xin duhui,
or “women’s new metropolis”; the English title was Woman World. Both
titles connected women to space, and connected the metropolis to the
world, thus highlighting the multiple layers that Tianjin women experi-
enced when they navigated everyday life at the intersection of local and
global spaces. Woman World inherited the readers and the socializing
sphere of the Beiyang huabao, but the editors and writers of this women’s
magazine had an additional mission: to explore the political roles women
could play through the spaces of home and society.
From its outset, Woman World aimed to describe and define female
spaces in the city. In the fourth issue of Woman World, the female editor
Yin Meibo opened a discussion on women, home, and society in a two-part
editorial on female social status:
In whatever city there are two sexes of animals. We give these animals a
name—humans. In so many places, the number of women is greater than
men from one third to over four times, but on the city streets, in the
shops, dance halls, schools, and public places, we often feel that there are
fewer women than men. In government meeting rooms or company
boards of trustees, one very rarely hears a woman’s voice. We can only
glimpse the shadow of a woman in a girls’ school that doesn’t admit boys
or a women’s factory that doesn’t let men past the door. Where do all the
women go? Isn’t this curious?31
Starting with this early issue, editor Yin proposed to reconfigure urban
space along gender lines, allowing women to play a more prominent role in
society (shehui) and the sphere of social status (shehui diwei). Yin
envisioned a city with women filling every corner of social space—from

dance halls to government halls.
While Yin lamented the lack of visible women in the city, the pages of
her biweekly pictorial suggest that Tianjin was already a new city of
women. The cover of each issue of Woman World, much like Beiyang hua-
bao, featured a picture of a local female student or society lady who had
been carefully posed in a photographer’s studio, alongside snapshots of
women out in the city: visiting Beijing parks, vacationing at nearby
summer beach resort Beihai, or attending a benefit gala at the Beijing
Hotel. Advertisements for pharmacies, dance halls, restaurants, and pho-
tography studios, as well as jewelry, clothing, bicycle, and automobile
shops, encouraged female readers to venture out and sample their wares
or services. The magazine also devoted one of its six pages to the latest
news in film and theater, including listings and advertisements for local
Tianjin theaters. In fact, the articles, photographs, and advertisements in
Woman World suggest that Tianjin was a city of well-educated women
who roamed the streets by day, frequenting parks and local businesses,
and filled their evenings with dancing, dining, and theater. Yin probably
overstated her case to make a point; still, how could her analysis of urban
life be in such discord with the images printed on the pages of her
magazine?
The discord arose from the fact that the social role of the urban new
women was not clearly defined at the time. Was she to achieve equal social
status as a career woman? Benefit state and society as an exemplary
housewife and mother? Or was she to be a social butterfly? Likewise, these
multiple possible roles did not always align with the binary spatial arrange-
ment of society (shehui) and home ( jiating). To understand women’s new
social roles, the writers of Woman World also needed to remap urban social
space. As one writer noted, “everything throughout the world changes
according to thought and environment.”32 Woman World’s writers thus
attempted to unify the conceived spaces of social theory, as they under-
stood it, with the material world of the city in which they lived, all in order
to portray their vision of an ideal social order with women at its center. If
they could describe and define the building blocks of a successful urban
life for the modern woman, then perhaps they could help her to advance
her social status, benefit society, or at the very least buy their magazine.
Woman World’s editorial staff most likely forged their perceptions of

social space through the field of female education. Yin Meibo, the editor
and publisher of Woman World, was only thirty when she founded Woman
World in Tianjin’s French Concession in 1939. She also served as the head-
mistress of the Beijing Girl’s High School (Beijing yu qingnüzi gaoji xue-
xiao). In 1943, when she applied to the local government for permission to
change the magazine into a weekly called Tianjin funü ribao (Tianjin
woman weekly), she listed two other members of the editorial staff, both
women in their mid-twenties, as employees of the same school.33 Other
members of the staff included men and women drawn from local publish-
ing.34 With a staff hailing from the education field, the goal of the maga-
zine was to educate Tianjin women, who were seen to be peripheral to
modern women in both Euro-American cities and Shanghai. The first
issue of Woman World stated that its goal was “to introduce the moral
beauty of our countrywomen’s lives and of women all over the world to
point the way for how to live our lives.”35 Women from Shanghai or foreign
cities who had climbed career or social ladders were held up as examples
for Tianjin women to emulate.36 The implication was always that Tianjin
women could learn from them and advance their own positions in society,
but what this position should look like was the subject of multiple debates.
Coming from the field of female education, the young editorial staff
members of this Tianjin magazine were most likely aware of social scien-
tific definitions of the new Chinese term shehui (society) as well as new
forms of female education such as home economics. In Keeping the Nation’s
House, the historian Helen Schneider argues that home economics educa-
tors in China saw home as the center of society; through learning to keep
house, women could save the nation.37 Woman World editor Yin Meibo,
however, perceived a different relationship between home and society,
arguing that home was the enemy of female social status, and that women
needed to find a way to enter society. Still, Yin opened up her pages to the
complex and often contradictory debate on the meaning of home and soci-
ety, as well as women’s roles in both.
Claiming that it was difficult to find women out and about in the city,
publisher Yin began by trying to uncover female space in Tianjin, and then
to categorize spatial and gender relations in the city accordingly. Women,
she said, could be found at home, where they “wait for their husbands and
take care of their children. They don’t have the time to go out to socialize,
or the time to go out and do things. That goes as far as not even having the
time to read a newspaper. Their world is the household ( jia) and not soci-
ety (shehui). Their service is limited to washing clothes and cooking and
not public affairs (gongshi). In this way, you see only a few women in soci-
ety.”38 In this description, Yin saw the household not as a part of society but
as a separate and lesser sphere. Using geographic language, she referred to
the home as the woman’s “world” ( jiating jiushi tade shijie), and without
going so far as to call the home a private space, Yin contrasted the work of
this space (cleaning and cooking) with the work of society (public affairs, or
gongshi). But if the household was not a part of society, then what was soci-
ety, the sphere lacking in visible women? Yin described society in spatial
terms. It included the streets, shops, dance halls, and schools, as well as
places of work, such as chemistry labs, offices, and even the halls of govern-
ment. According to this conception of society, it was not state and society
but rather household and society that were at odds, and high social status
(shehui diwei) could only be achieved by becoming a member of society.
Though Yin’s editorial voice resonated strong and clear, not all writers
for the magazine agreed. Some writers echoed Yin, arguing that women
could only achieve fulfillment by joining society and gaining social status
(shehui diwei). They were joined by writers who suggested that home and
society were indeed separate spheres, and that home was a woman’s place,
and others still who argued that home was the cornerstone of the nation,
and that to manage the home was to save the country.39 While the nation
was sometimes cited throughout these debates as a beneficiary (or victim)
of new female social roles, female identity and autonomy, not national sal-
vation, drove the discourse. In other words, Woman World attempted to
map out a new understanding of society that placed women at the center,
not the nation. The debate over home and society in Woman World sug-
gests that even during the Sino-Japanese War, nationalistic calls for
women to reform home and family to save the nation did not resonate with
all Tianjin urbanites, and, moreover, that the boundaries and meanings of
home and society were still being defined. Furthermore, the multiplicity
of voices that sounded throughout the debate, even to contradict the mag-
azine’s editorial stance, suggests that women’s magazines like Woman
World were open, diverse, and intellectually creative forums.
Regardless of their stance in the home-versus-society debate, all writ-

ers viewed society to be a male-dominated space, the space of political
action but also the space of work. According to an article on career women,
women who worked “benefited society” and “benefited country.”40 The
article noted that while Tianjin was starting to follow the European way of
being more open to “male-female equality, freedom, liberation” and even
“dating,” in terms of female careers, “a lot of people study it, but very few
people practice it.” The article encouraged the “women of our country” to
“stand up and take their place . . . to be able to achieve an independent
livelihood.”41 Articles such as this encouraged women to seek a career in
general terms, but the magazine was often at a loss when it came to giving
specific advice to Tianjin women on how to enter the workplace.
One problem was that the social order mapped out on the pages of
Woman World was more complicated than “home” versus “society.” To
start with, the working world was also divided along class lines. While the
multiple definitions of female gender roles proposed in Woman World may
have been fluid, class boundaries were much more rigid. The magazine
clearly defined its audience as elite educated women. An article on skills
for career women, for example, suggested while both an educated woman
and a factory woman were “career women,” there was a difference
between the two, and that this article, like others in the pages of Woman
World, addressed “educated women” (zhishi funü) to the exclusion of fac-
tory workers. 42 While factory women worked for necessity or livelihood,
educated women were encouraged to work to establish individual auton-
omy and gain social standing.
A local educated career woman whose article was published in one
magazine described how she transgressed this class divide by working out
of necessity. Although the title of the article, “The Freedom of a Typist,”
suggested that the author had sought a career as a form of emancipation,
she began her narrative by noting that “in order to take care of my mother,
I took a job as a Chinese typist in a bank. This was after leaving school, and
with diploma in hand, I stepped into society, and began to make money
and return home. I was very excited and at the same time proud.”43 While
the author talks about “stepping into society,” she also notes that the
impetus for taking the job in the first place was to take care of her mother.
The author soon discovered the “hardships of seeking a livelihood.”
Unlike the women on the covers of Beiyang huabao, who entered the public
sphere of socialization attached to the names and professions of their hus-
bands and fathers, the career woman in this story entered the public
sphere of work without the class status of a male family member’s pro-
fession. The ambiguity of her class status made her vulnerable to sexual
harassment, and the pride of the author’s first day was soon diminished
when she realized that her education had not prepared her for the work-
place. She noted that “when I first stepped into society, I was unfortu-
nately lacking in the ability to handle work.”44 Luckily a colleague named
Mr. Wang offered to show her the ropes. Unfortunately, Mr. Wang’s
kindness turned into office gossip and the casual sexual harassment of
male colleagues who “placed their hand on [her] shoulder” and offered
“impolite” words. And yet the author persevered, all the time thinking of
her responsibility to her widowed mother and not “daring to do
anything.”45
There is no way to verify whether the article is true, but archival evi-
dence does suggest that Tianjin women rarely worked in middle-class
jobs—and when they did, the motivation often seemed to be to support
their families financially. According to a 1931 survey of Tianjin municipal
workers, only twenty-nine women worked in city government. 46 And
according to a 1946 sample of eighteen women workers, most were
employed as typists or secretaries. 47 All but one of the women in that group
were single. These women seemed to provide the primary income for their
families: fourteen of the eighteen women lived with at least one parent,
and in most cases took care of those parents; in some cases, their salaries
also supported their siblings. Likewise, six women who responded took
care of widowed mothers. Thus, whether the article depicted a genuine
personal account or a fiction, it nevertheless reflected the social reality in
Tianjin that elite women rarely worked, and those who did often worked
out of financial necessity. Moreover, the article issued a warning that elite
women who defied class boundaries and entered society through the
workplace would be sexualized. This alarm bell echoed throughout
Woman World, as in an earlier article that warned career women against
being mistaken as a “flower pot” or plaything in the workplace. 48
Discouraged from society sphere’s workplace by discrimination or
because they were already financially secure, Tianjin’s elite women found
more success in the socialization sphere. According to editor Yin, the

socialization sphere was not the “society” of career and government, but
rather the “stage of social interactions” (shejiao chang). In an article on
what it meant to be a modern woman (xiandai funü), Yin once again raised
the society/home distinction. She wrote that there were two kinds of
women: those who entered society (dao shehui qu) and those who returned
home (hui jiatingli). Although she gave advice to both home and society
women, she specified that the women of society could be confident when
entering the socializing sphere. 49 In contrast to society, the place of work
and government, the socializing sphere was fun, filled with dancing, skat-
ing, and dating.50 As one author proclaimed, dating was not about carnal
desire but was instead an integral part of “social activities.”51 In contrast to
Woman World’s ambiguous advice on how to enter society, the magazine
gave detailed explanations on how to prepare physically for the socializing
sphere, offering tips on appropriate makeup and fashion for social activi-
ties such as a date.52
Women may have enjoyed more success in the socializing sphere than
in society, but on the pages of the magazine, it was not always clear
whether these accomplishments warranted praise or criticism. In one arti-
cle, an old man lamented his son’s choice of a wife, complaining that there
were two types of women: those who are lots of fun and those who know
how to run a household. And young men of the day only wanted to marry
the former.53 Indeed, as articles in Woman World continued to describe
and debate these different social spheres and types of women, married
women who crossed over into the social sphere came in for increasing crit-
icism. One cover story noted, “Unfortunately, many women go into soci-
ety and forget about the goals of their family. Whenever you see middle-
class (zhongchan) women, they don’t know how to manage a home. . . .
They are nothing more than a man’s plaything, and therefore today’s
housewives must have home management skills.”54 The subtitle of the
article, “in today’s society the household is still the root of the country,”
signaled a way of talking about home and society in Woman World that dif-
fered from Yin Meibo’s earlier editorial comments. Instead, it echoed dis-
cussions about the home’s role in state-building among reformers and
politicians.55 In this configuration, the home became a part of society, with
the state as architect.
As these different and often conflicting ideas about home and family in
modern Chinese society suggest, theoretical ideas about social structure
did not clearly map onto the social reality of Republican-era China.
Indeed, home was a chameleon that could take on whatever shade of
meaning a social critic wanted to assign. Home could be described as a
part of society, the cornerstone of the nation, but also separate from soci-
ety, a place that women ran either toward or away from to seek refuge or
liberation. In reality, home was the center of a complex web of relation-
ships and spaces that constituted everyday life in Chinese cities. This web
was constantly changing and shifting, and thus could not be captured by
rigid social descriptions.
At first glance, Yin Meibo’s break from the orthodoxy that saw home as
the core of national strength seemed not to be in keeping with the times.
In 1937, Japanese forces invaded Tianjin, an event that could have renewed
the nationalist discourse often said to categorize this period in China’s
history. In fact, according to the literary scholar Nicole Huang, in Shang-
hai the opposite was true: there, the war encouraged female literati to turn
away from the politics of national salvation.56 Female writers in Shanghai
during the 1940s increasingly focused on everyday life, turning inward
toward an alternate “domestic” reality as a strategy for coping with the
realities of war. Yin Meibo and several of her Woman World writers took a
different tack: they turned outward, imagining a new role for women in
society. Still, in both instances, women turned away from standard nation-
alist discourse to carve out spaces of their own.
The chaos of wartime China may have opened up a space for women to
create new narratives, but such women were also products of a longer his-
tory of female education, everyday urban life, and dwelling in the world,
modern women who had the background and resources to see the city and
the world outside of a nationalist framework. Although Shanghai’s female
wartime writers such as Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang) and Su Qing
approached the question of female space differently than the Tianjin pub-
lisher Yin Meibo, they were all educated young women who had come of
age during the Republican era. For them, the idea that a feeble, oppressed
Chinese woman with bound feet could be the enemy of national salvation
was a fiction of a constructed feudal past. These urban, middle-class
women saw education as a form of self-cultivation rather than national
improvement. In their minds, individual subjectivity and identity were as

worthy of attention as national salvation. Thus, Yin Meibo could craft an
identity through her role in society and her career, while Shanghai writers
like Zhang and Su could find subjectivity in the practices of everyday life.
Through this diversity of approaches, Chinese women engendered the city
from the inside out and from outside in, rejecting the orthodox definitions
of the modern woman and jiating as captive to the nation.
JIATING AS THE CENTER OF

FEMALE SUBJECTIVITY
As the editors and writers of the Beiyang huabao and Woman World focused
on engendering the public spaces of society and the socialization sphere,
they largely ignored the private realm. Neither magazine described jiating
as a private sphere and center of individual subjectivity. The Beiyang hua-
bao described jiating as a kinship network that connected women through
social class to the socialization sphere, while in Woman World, jiating was
either the enemy of society and individual autonomy or it was the public
and female political center of national reform. In both cases, jiating might
have served as an individual’s private refuge from the public spheres of
socialization and society, but neither magazine depicted it as such. But
these mass media depictions were at odds with the personal and individ-
ual narratives of jiating that were written by women out of the public eye.
In contrast to the magazine depictions, individual women’s narratives
portrayed jiating as both a public space of social reform and as a private
sphere of intimate experience and affect.
In 1948, after World War II had ended, and on the eve of Communist
“liberation” of Tianjin, a group of young women prepared to enter the
Home Economics department at Tianjin’s Hebei Women’s Normal Insti-
tute (Hebeishengli nüshixueyuan). As part of their entrance, they were
asked to write an essay about their family.57 Their essays navigated the
sociopolitical ideologies of both the inner/outer continuum and the pub-
lic/private divide and yet also revealed their personal perceptions of fam-
ily and home. Entering home economics, an educational field that placed
home at the cornerstone of national reform, the students were familiar
with the political rhetoric asserting that family reform could save the
nation. But as young women on the precipice between childhood and
adulthood, they could not help but feel a personal connection to and nos-
talgia for members of their families and the spaces of their houses. Thus
for these young women jiating was complicated, simultaneously an inner
sphere of political reform, a bridge between state and society, and a pri-
vate space for individual sentiment.
A young woman named Zhang Mei began her essay by describing her
early life in the countryside of Liaoning Province, where she was born into
a “large feudal family.”58 This was a signal to her professors that she, like
many of her classmates, understood the discourse of family size and
modernity. Like Zhang, most students noted in their essays that they
hailed from a “large feudal family” ( fengjianshide da jiating) or a “lovely
small family” (ke’ai xiao jiating). In fact, Zhang experienced the transition
from large to small family in her lifetime: as she described in her personal
narrative, her household eventually disbanded, and Zhang’s grandfather
and father headed south to try their luck in the booming coastal city of
Tianjin, where they eventually moved their smaller family into one of the
city’s new single-family houses. Zhang demonstrated that she understood
the discourse of family modernization, but she also did not condemn her
family of the past. Zhang actually seemed to like her large, feudal family,
and described her early years with nostalgia and warmth. As one of the
youngest additions to a household that included over one hundred mem-
bers, she explained how she was frequently doted on by elders as she
played in beautiful gardens enclosed in a sprawling compound. Like her
classmates, Zhang knew to frame her family essay in nationalist rhetoric,
but her descriptions of family relations and household spaces were inti-
mate and personal. Indeed, few of the students who came from large feu-
dal families like Zhang told stories that aligned with the nationalist myth
of the traditional Chinese family system, in which the large family begat
individual oppression and deep-rooted misogyny. Instead, they joyfully
recalled playing with their many cousins or fondly remembered the love
and attention that family members had showered on them.
If anything, some young women found the transition from the sprawl-
ing courtyards of the large extended family to the confines of the single
family urban house to be lonely and isolating. Twenty-two-year-old Liu
Haidi told the story of her family’s transformation from da to xiao.59 Born
into a “large feudal family,” Liu moved out with her parents and two sis-
ters to form their own small family. While Liu’s language showed that she
knew how to write about the evils of the large family system, she longed
for the days when she played with her little friends and sisters. Life in a
xiao jiating, according to Liu, was simply boring. Liu’s sisters were older,
married, and far away; her father was busy all day with work. So for the
past ten years, all Liu had done was go to school and stay home with her
mother. In the absence of cousins to play with, Liu found other things to
fill the emptiness of her single family urban home, describing how she
managed her time alone, enjoying listening to phonograph recordings of
operas or playing with her cats.
While students overwhelmingly agreed with the public rhetoric that
nuclear families were ideal, their private lives revealed that the transition
from da to xiao was not seamless. Family living patterns were often based
less on ideal type and more on solutions to individual needs. One eighteen-
year-old student noted, for example, that after her father died, her brother
took over as head of household and cared for her and her widowed
mother.60 In other cases, large extended families seemed to best exem-
plify the values of the modern middle-class nuclear family. Twenty-year-
old Sun Xiuying, for example, lived in an eleven-person household with
her parents, grandparents, four brothers, and two sisters.61 Featured in her
school portrait with chin-length permed hair, a round face, and almond
eyes, and wearing a dark qipao, Chen was well educated, having com-
pleted both elementary and secondary education. Her parents had also
been educated in Western-style schools (Mr. Sun at Columbia University),
and her father was a modern business professional. By all sociological pre-
dictions, the Sun family should have seen itself as a five-person nuclear
unit. Yet according to Sun Xiuying, their family consisted of eleven people;
and despite her family’s size, she believed that the Sun household was
thoroughly modern, rooted in modern bourgeois ideals of love and respect.
Drawing on inclinations that were partly bourgeois and partly Confucian,
she described her parents with affection, noting that “she grew up quickly
under their nurturing.” Indeed, she displayed deep filial respect for her
mother when she described her admiration for her mother’s gentle sensi-
tivity, a characteristic she aspired to duplicate.
The personal essays written by Zhang Mei and her classmates at the
close of China’s Republican era suggest that while women in urban China
negotiated multiple ideological concepts of social space, they also created
spaces of their own. If read quickly, the essays might seem to confirm the
nationalist interpretation of jiating. Drawing on a nationalist rhetoric that
placed reform at the center of national salvation, they suggest the success
with which ideological prescriptions about social spaces and social rela-
tions had been disseminated through education. But when read carefully,
these essays also revealed the diversity of the world women were making
in Republican Tianjin. They described a wide variety of demographic
backgrounds among middle-class urban families, the very social group
that ideologues and social scientists argued would embrace the small fam-
ily ideal. Indeed, the essays suggest that by the end of the Republican era,
ideological prescriptions for social change had not necessarily translated
into social practices. But more importantly, the nostalgia with which
female students described the feudal family they had left behind, and the
affection with which they portrayed relationships in an extended urban
family, suggests that for these woman jiating was neither an oppressive
force to escape nor a social space they needed to reform. Jiating was rather
a space of personal relations and intimate affections, a site where these
young women could forge their individual subjectivities and sense of self.
CONCLUSION
By the close of the Republican era, Tianjin urbanites had formed new
complex perceptions of gendered space. New gendered and classed con-
cepts of social and political spaces broke from the late imperial inner/
outer continuum, but they cannot be easily explained by historians’ retro-
spective models, such as state/society or public/private. Tianjin urbanites
engendered their city to reflect their lived experiences in a Chinese local
city at the center of the world. They drew on national and global political
discourses as they navigated cosmopolitan local spaces to forge new con-
cepts of social space. Women from elite families redefined class distinc-
tions in new spaces of social interaction, from restaurants and hotels to
department stores and photography studios, and they returned home to
domestic spaces which in many cases, in keeping with new concession

zoning laws, were disconnected from commercial spaces. According to
social discourse, this female-gendered home space could either build a
nation or destroy female social mobility. In practice, however, the discon-
nection of jiating from shehui allowed home to become a personal retreat,
a space of individual sentiment and nostalgia during a tumultuous period
of political chaos and war.
The nationalist focus on jiating as the demography of family rather
than the spaces of home allowed for a new engendering not only of home
but of the Chinese city itself. Chinese people invented and reinvented the
social spaces of shehui, jiating, and jiaoji through public discourse and
social practice. Discussions about these spaces and their interactions
often focused on the role of women within them, but more than engender-
ing spaces, they were establishing the classed boundaries of social space.
Whereas the social space of the household was theoretically available to
all strata in the inner/outer continuum of late imperial China, the female
realm of the home in Republican-era China was a distinctly bourgeois
space. Likewise, while female sales assistants and waitresses labored in
department stores and restaurants, these spaces were only available to
elite woman as the socializing sphere of jiaoji when they transformed
them through their leisure activities. Thus, by the end of the Republican
era, although the gendered construction of social spaces within the Chi-
nese city was still in flux, the classed nature of spaces was increasingly
coming into view.
8
The Chinese Bourgeois Home
in the Socialist World
T
he nationalist ideology of xiao jiating assured social
mobility through demographic change. The small
nuclear family promised a prosperous middle-class life
and was central to a theoretical vision that an ideal demo-
graphic formulation could be both the result of and a condi-
tion for social change, modernization, and nation building.
Jiating as house and home, by contrast, was constructed to
prescribe the behaviors and define the boundaries of the social
status of a new urban elite. Anyone could become a small fam-
ily, but only the social elite could enjoy the privileges of house
and home. Moreover, while historians of the bourgeois home
in other places have argued that the middle class gave rise to
ideas and practices of home, in China the formation of class
identity and the construction of home were simultaneous
and mutually constitutive processes. Middle-class men culti-
vated their masculinity, individuality, and political identi-
ties through owning the house as private property. Women
found new gender roles at home, where they were charged
with managing the affect and knowledge of domestic space,
and in the socializing spaces of the city, where they repre-
sented the household through social leisure. Through defining
these social spheres as bourgeois, Tianjin’s urban elite became
bourgeois.
The Chinese Bourgeois Home in the Socialist World 243
As the urban elite transformed house, home, and the socializing

sphere into spheres of privilege, these sites became places of power. They
were empowered in part by the fact that Tianjin’s working classes were
denied access not only to the spaces but also to the debates over the rela-
tionship between shehui, jiating, and jiaoji. Elite women could discuss
choosing to work in order to gain social status in the public sphere, but
women from the laboring classes worked for economic survival. Mothers
and daughters slipped in and out of public places of work depending on
their household’s economic needs, and in many households, women and
men labored within their houses.1 Elite men could purchase or rent a
house to project their economic capital, while working-class men faced
fewer options to rent housing. A male migrant worker usually moved to
Tianjin by himself, but if his family joined him, he would not have been
able to afford to purchase or even rent a single-family house. If he was
more fortunate, he could have rented a single room in a brick courtyard
house with a tiled roof. 2 Much like the courtyard houses of the elites, the
conditions of the interior would not have been visible from the street, but
once inside a visitor would have found multiple families living around a
single courtyard. A less fortunate family would have lived in a house fash-
ioned out of unbaked clay with a roof of sorghum stalks. Landlords were
unlikely to keep residences in good repair, and leaking roofs and crum-
bling walls were common.
Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist real estate market deliberately neglected
public housing for the laboring classes. The working classes rarely lived in
the foreign concessions. One family, for example, labored in a walnut fac-
tory in the British Concession but lived across the river in Hedong qu, or
“east river district.”3 Foreign concessions promoted a real estate market
that built high-end, high-return houses and ignored public housing. Like-
wise, the Chinese municipal government did little to address the housing
needs of the city’s working and lower classes. It was not until Tianjin
became a wholly Chinese city after World War II that Tianjin’s local
Guomindang (GMD) government proposed public housing, and not until
after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) takeover in 1949 that public
housing became a reality.
The story of the Chinese bourgeois home in the socialist world thus
begins in 1947, not in 1949, and begins as a story of de-colonization and
continuity. Tianjin’s multiple colonialisms created the postwar housing

crisis, but they also launched the laboratory that invented the house and
home, which planners, even under the CCP, looked to when they proposed
housing. During a period of liberation and revolution, however, continuity
was neither inevitable nor desirable. The CCP turned to the bourgeois
house and home model because they recognized the potential of its power.
During the global 1950s, individual states were articulating new visions as
they built or rebuilt their relationship with society. To consolidate power,
the Chinese state, under the CCP, reconnected family, house, and home in
state ideology. But they could not simply adopt and reformulate the Qing-
era inner/outer continuum since the old feudal family was the founda-
tional strawman of leftist critiques of Chinese society. Instead, they
adopted the new model of jiating, the nuclear family and its house and
home. Moreover, in taking up this model, they took on the power of class
privilege that elites had mapped onto house and home during the Republi-
can era, translating it into patriarchal privilege and power for male citizen
workers and the Communist-led state.
PUBLIC HOUSING IN MULTIPLY

COLONIZED CHINA
As Tianjin grew in the 1920s and 1930s, the real estate market could not
keep up with the influx of families migrating to the city. Chinese and for-
eign residents alike complained about high rents and the shortage of suit-
able housing. 4 At the time, Tianjin lacked a single municipal government
that could field their complaints and effectively launch projects for afford-
able public housing. While the British, French, Italians, and Japanese were
interested in promoting real estate development to increase their tax base,
they were less concerned with housing the city’s people. If anything, con-
cession governments such as the British and the Italians wrote laws to
regulate what kinds of Chinese people would be allowed to reside in the
concession. In practice, Chinese residents were permitted as long as they
had the money to buy or rent concession property. This practice excluded
the people who swept concession streets and cleaned concession houses.
As far as the concessions were concerned, they could live elsewhere in the
city. In a city with multiple jurisdictions, housing for lower-status Chinese

people was thus largely neglected.
Tianjin’s real estate market did not fill the large and growing demand
for middle- and lower-end housing. Real estate developers in the conces-
sions seem to have been motivated by a belief that high-end housing would
produce the highest return. While new technologies could have been used
to address the housing crisis, developers built luxury residences instead.
New steel and concrete engineering technologies that had reached Tianjin
by the 1930s presented builders and investors with the opportunity to con-
struct high-density, reasonably priced housing. But the multistory, multi-
unit apartment buildings that were designed for Tianjin’s concessions
included high-end fixtures and amenities, making the apartments more
appropriate for a luxurious modern life than for economical family living.
Typical Tianjin apartment buildings built in the 1930s included hardwood
or polished-stone flooring, copper door handles, and basement-level car
parks, all suggesting that these apartments were designed for a discrimi-
nating elite consumer.5
Tianjin’s concession governments and real estate developers may have
ignored mid-range and lower-end housing, but in Shanghai, where the
housing crisis was especially acute, philanthropic organizations and even
some developers sought solutions to the housing crisis. Missionary groups
like the YMCA addressed the Shanghai housing crisis by reaching out to
urbanites who could not afford to buy a house. Central to this project was
the new global bourgeois belief that housing was an individual’s social
right. Missionary groups tried to support poorer Chinese families by orga-
nizing home expositions and promoting domestic education, encouraging
families to transform their houses into modern, healthy, hygienic, and
eventually Christian places.6 The YMCA took these lessons a step further
by building a “model village” in Shanghai’s Pudong district. Established
in 1926, the Pudong Model Village included “sanitary” housing for twenty-
four families as well as a community center, schools, and a playground.
Built as private, single-family homes with Christian ideals of domesticity,
each house included a sitting room, bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom.7
The village attracted attention both from prominent Chinese people and
foreigners. Even the Republic’s president Chiang Kai-shek was reported to
have made a financial donation to the village.
New ideas that home ownership was essential to middle-class identity

fueled the New China Bank’s (Xinhua yinhang) plan to develop more
affordable housing in Shanghai.8 In 1934, the bank proposed capitalizing
on crowded urban living conditions, rising rents, and the lack of housing
for sale with a plan to encourage middle-class home ownership.9 Accord-
ing to an article in a Chinese architectural journal, the bank planned to
build houses in a development named New China Village (Xinhua yicun),
located in the Guomindang government’s new Shanghai development. To
help urbanites purchase these houses, the bank introduced a home-buyers’
savings account. But while the bank’s plan aimed to cultivate home own-
ership among a Chinese citizenry in a new Chinese district of the city, the
homes were to be built in “Dutch, English and international styles,” and
indeed as multistory, single-family homes that conformed to a new global
ideal of bourgeois home ownership.10
While there is no evidence of municipal, philanthropic, or market proj-
ects to build mid-range housing in Tianjin before World War II, the local
Chinese government did present a proposal to build housing for the city’s
poor. In 1930, the Chinese municipal government’s Social Bureau’s (She-
hui ju) Benevolent Association offered a plan for poor people’s housing.11
The housing project consisted of a series of rows of single-story, single-
room residences, with each room measuring 3 by 3.2 meters square (9.9 by
10.5 feet) and 2.7 meters high (8.9 feet). Floor plans did not indicate sepa-
rate cooking facilities. Shared male and female toilets were placed in the
common gardens between the rows of rooms. These simple, single-room
dwellings were more in keeping with extant worker housing in Tianjin
than the multiroom, single-family houses proposed by Shanghai philan-
thropists and bankers.12 In other words, the proposed project emphasized
housing relief, rather than social engineering through sustained social
planning. The proposed project also indicates that Tianjin’s Chinese
municipal government was aware of the city’s housing crises even if it was
unable to fully address it.
PUBLIC HOUSING IN POSTCOLONIAL TIANJIN
Tianjin’s experiments in urban housing would have to wait until after

World War II, when the city and all its concessions had been returned to
China and Tianjin was unified under a single Chinese municipal govern-
ment for the first time in more than eighty years. The British returned
their concession to China during the war in 1943. After the war, the Japa-
nese government was forced to surrender their holdings in Tianjin. The
French relinquished their concession in 1946, followed by the Italians in
1947. With foreign powers no longer governing parcels of the city, Tianjin’s
Guomindang government finally addressed the longstanding housing cri-
sis that the war had exacerbated, and in 1947, Tianjin’s Guomindang gov-
ernment proposed a new municipal housing project.13 The plan to build
more than 150 attached single-family houses may have seemed simple
when compared to some of the townhouses in the former foreign conces-
sions, but the proposed housing was far more elaborate than the Shehui
ju’s single-room housing project from 1930. The new plan included six
housing blocks with five rows of houses in each block. Each house was to
be built out of brick, a material readily available in Tianjin, and would be
fully equipped with electricity and running water. The blueprints depicted
a peaked roof with a small window for ventilation atop each unit, with at
least two multipaned windows in the front. The floor plan epitomized the
middle-class housing ideal of single-family living, boasting a large sitting
room, two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Some units even included
a small garden; bushes and perennials were to be planted along each row
of houses.14
The proposal did not specify who would qualify to live in this housing.
While the municipal government planned to finance the sixty-million-
yuan project through the Agricultural Bank of China, they did not sug-
gest how much consumers would be expected to pay, whether they would
rent or buy, or what social group they would come from. The future inhab-
itants were simply called shimin (city people.)15 The term shimin suggests
that the proposal was not seeking to provide housing for the city’s under-
classes but for the new urban citizenry, a group for whom single-family
housing had become a political and social right but for whom the colo-
nial capitalist market and Japanese wartime experience had made this
ideal unattainable. In building housing for shimin rather than the city’s
poor, the Guomindang municipal government indicated a shift in politi-
cal and social policies from addressing the immediate needs of the hous-
ing crisis to using housing to shape a political and social relationship
with the urban citizenry. Moreover, when the Guomindang municipal
government designed their plan to promote the shimin individual’s right to

housing, they designed it as a two-story, single-family house, in keeping
with the global model of the bourgeois home. Urban planning in Tianjin
under the Guomindang was short-lived, and there is no archival or archi-
tectural evidence to suggest that the Guomindang ever built the shimin
housing village. On January 15, 1949, the People’s Liberation Army entered
Tianjin, making it the first former treaty-port city to be “liberated” by the
Communists.
Like the GMD before them, the Communists quickly set about address-
ing a housing crisis that had been produced by the colonial- capitalist
housing market and worsened by World War II and the Chinese Civil
War.16 Initially, official state housing policy was to confiscate and redis-
tribute enemy property, which in Tianjin was largely Japanese; and to work
toward stabilizing private rents. Tianjin’s municipal government, how-
ever, worked beyond state policy and introduced plans for new housing. In
1951, the Tianjin Building Company proposed a new kind of “economical
housing” for families.17 Each townhome would be two stories high, with a
kitchen, dining room, and living room on the ground floor and two bed-
rooms and a bathroom on the second floor, a front garden and a back gar-
den, all clearly labeled on the plans. Blueprints for these new economical
houses resembled GMD plans for shimin housing, and they seemed more
based on the bourgeois single-family house ideal than on models of social-
ist living. Indeed, the architects and planners of GMD shimin houses may
have continued to work under the CCP designing the economical housing.
The political scientist Kenneth Lieberthal argues that after the Commu-
nists took over Tianjin in 1949, the CCP lacked cadres with experience in
managing cities, and thus relied on local civil servants, many of whom did
not have allegiance to the GMD government officials who had arrived only
after the war.18 In terms of the people who planned and constructed Tian-
jin housing, the early postwar period most likely saw more continuity than
change in the transition from GMD to CCP governance.19
The single-family house ideal originated in early twentieth-century
China and crossed the 1949 divide, but it was also a concurrent ideal of the
global 1950s that spanned the political and geographic divides of the early
Cold War. Governments worked to address the housing crisis brought on
by economic depressions and World War II, and housing became central
to the relationship between the state and its citizens. The United States,
for example, introduced the GI Bill, which provided housing loans to many
returning soldiers, a measure that in turn stimulated the market in single-
family suburban homes. In the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev issued a
decree for single family housing in 1957 that led to central planning for
building new residences.20 Since the future of housing was only then
unfolding across the globe, Tianjin’s municipal government had no ready-
made models to turn to and instead had to plot their own strategies.
Responding to the particular context of their postcolonial and newly
Communist city, Tianjin planners first rejected the private housing market
of the city’s past. While the market had constructed housing that yielded
the highest profit, planners in the early 1950s discussed “economical”
houses or dormitories that could be built quickly, and at little expense.21
Municipal records from the first half of the 1950s discussed the nuts and
bolts of building housing, from planning to financing, but the Tianjin
municipal government rarely built the housing itself. Instead they offered
loans for companies to build housing for their workers and even allowed
“private” enterprises to apply.22 This concept of company-provided hous-
ing predated the establishment of the work unit or danwei system, but it
was not without precedent in modern China. Before World War II,
employers from civil offices to industrialized factories provided dormito-
ries for their single workers, while laborers in smaller workshops often
slept in their workspaces. Likewise, Nankai University campus included
faculty housing, while some companies or government offices provided
housing budgets for managers with families. In the 1920s, Tianjin’s Bank
of China even constructed an enclosed compound for its bank manager
and employees that included free-standing houses, apartments, athletic
facilities, and schools.23 Thus, the decision to grant government-sponsored
private loans for housing expanded on an earlier practice of employee
housing, but it also introduced a new role for the state in the distribution of
housing.
With housing in the hands of employers, housing type became even
more aligned to profession than it had been during the Republican era.
Instead of investors developing housing for a broad housing market, pri-
vate and public employers designed housing and selected a size and style
that they deemed appropriate for a particular profession. The Tianjin
municipal government required that all companies submit blueprints

along with loan applications, and applicants were required to describe the
intended occupants. Thus, while the GMD municipal government’s public
housing project had been unclear about who the shimin were, the loan-
driven housing proposed under the CCP clearly delineated the occupants’
professional status, and blueprints were aligned to that status. Moreover,
housing for professions formerly associated with the middle class was
much larger than that proposed for workers.
While the CCP may have been raising the position of the urban working
class in rhetoric, in practice, their housing was simpler than that of other
professional groups. In 1953, Tianjin University submitted blueprints for
new facilities to the municipal government, including housing for workers
and faculty. The proposed housing for workers was an improvement over a
typical Tianjin worker’s house before 1949, but it was significantly smaller
than a professor’s house. Workers’ housing consisted of a series of attached
single-story units.24 Each unit had two rooms and a kitchen. The plans did
not specify whether the rooms would be assigned as a set or individually.
Bathrooms and toilets were not included in the plans. Faculty, by contrast,
were to be housed in more spacious apartments in two-story buildings.25
While the façade of the workers’ housing was plain and just included win-
dows, the professors’ building included a streamlined modern light fix-
ture above the door, and balconies with metalwork that resembled apart-
ments in the foreign concessions. Each apartment included three rooms
with an exclusive-use bathroom and kitchen. Rooms were not labeled, but
one could imagine two of the three rooms in the professor’s apartment
used as private bedrooms, or a bedroom and study with the third room
functioning as a common room for dining and living. The blueprints
sketched a bourgeois space, the perfect private space for a nuclear family.
The lower-status university workers, by contrast, were to live in one or two
rooms without a private toilet.
Even within a single housing complex, the layout and size of apart-
ments could vary. Housing plans suggested hierarchies within the work-
place, with some positions warranting more space or amenities. A 1954
proposal for a set of apartment buildings for government cadres, built on
the edge of Tianjin’s former British Concession, included multiple apart-
ment layouts within a single building.26 Like Tianjin University’s faculty
housing, the cadre apartments included ornamentation on the façade, but

instead of using European styling, the cadre apartments employed a mod-
ern Chinese nationalist decorative style that had rarely been used on
housing during the Republican era. (See figure 8.1.) The three-story brick
buildings included Chinese roof lines and poured concrete ornamenta-
tion, such as octagonal windows, along with an entrance that was framed
in pillars. Each floor of each three-story building included multiple apart-
ment arrangements: some apartments had only one room and shared the
floor’s toilets and kitchen, while other apartments had two connected
rooms, with or without a balcony, and each floor included at least one
apartment with two rooms and a private kitchen and bath. Presumably
families of higher-ranked cadres would have been allotted the larger
apartments and those with private facilities. Although “bourgeois” terms
like “sitting room” were absent from these plans, the middle-class ideal of
single-family housing seemed to gain a new life under Chinese socialism,
as housing was connected to status even more concretely than before.
As China unleashed the First Five-Year Plan in 1953, the Tianjin munic-
ipal government was acutely aware that they needed to use housing as a
platform for launching the city’s productive forces. As government
FIGURE 8.1 Cadre housing in Tianjin. Photograph by the author.

documents noted, “this city is an industrial city,” and workers’ housing

was a “major problem.”27 Thus, while ideologically, workers were to form
the base of CCP legitimacy in the cities, in more practical terms they were
needed to implement the new planned economy. Workers’ housing needed
to be built quickly and economically. Early government plans for “eco-
nomical” workers’ housing featured dormitories with shared bathrooms
and a dining hall.28 Such plans best suited single workers. In 1954, the
Tianjin municipal government proposed a more family-oriented workers’
village in the south of the city, near the new industrial district.29 Unlike the
single-person dormitories that many factories were constructing, the
workers’ village was planned to offer public services for families as well as
a cultural life (wenhua shenghuo). The “quiet” and “hygienic” workers’ vil-
lage was enclosed by a wall with a single entrance so that no major roads or
traffic passed through, allowing children to safely walk around the area.30
Each of the seven apartment complexes in the village was built around a
garden, and the complex included a public park and sports field that added
to the “beauty” and “health” of the development. Plans also included a
nursery, a kindergarten, and an elementary school for the children who
lived in the complex. Tianjin’s utopian workers’ village actually preceded
the expansion of single-family apartments in the Soviet Union under
Khrushchev.31 Like Soviet housing from the late 1950s, the Tianjin com-
plex was designed to address the postwar housing shortage, and it was also
designed with the private nuclear family home in mind. Thus, while the
complex featured facilities to nurture resident children, it did not include
other communal facilities, such as a dining hall, to relieve mothers of their
domestic duties, as later Chinese plans for worker housing would.
VISIONS OF A HAPPY LIFE
While municipal governments were attempting to address the immediate

postwar, postcolonial housing crisis, propaganda artists were envisioning
the ideal and happy home life. Their visions were both a continuity with the
past and a vision for the future. The Shanghai-based artist Xin Liliang
depicted the happy home life in a poster published in March 1954 that fea-
tured a father and his three plump, rosy-cheeked children seated around a
table while a qipao-wearing, apron-clad mother served up a bountiful din-

ner of stir-fried vegetables, meat, fish, and egg and tomato soup.32 (See fig-
ure 8.2.) The home includes a rocking horse and ball for the children to play
with, a radio for family entertainment, and a clock so the father would know
when to head to work. The room was also adorned with luxuries—from a
blue-and-white porcelain vase filled with fragrant flowers to a framed black-
and-white photograph of a family portrait. The red characters printed at the
top of the poster read: “Chairman Mao gives us our happy life.”
This vision of a happy life mediated through consumable objects looked
very much like the affective picture of bourgeois home. Indeed, if it were
FIGURE 8.2 “Chairman Mao Gives Us Our Happy Life,” 1954. Courtesy of
the International Institute of Social History.
not for the father’s blue worker’s cap and his unbuttoned shirt, this image
might have depicted a white-collar Shanghai family during the Republi-
can era. Like most Chinese propaganda poster artists in the 1950s, Xin
Liliang began his career illustrating commercial advertisements in Shang-
hai in the 1930s.33 During this period, artists like Xin painted images for
advertisements, calendars, and New Year posters.34 After the Chinese
Communist Party took over Chinese cities in 1949, the party called on
commercial artists to redirect their art to further socialism. Xin and many
of his colleagues, who had once sold goods ranging from tobacco to
mosquito repellent, began to sell a socialist future.
The visual tools employed to sell the Chinese socialist home were in
many ways a continuation of commercial advertising techniques from the
Republican-era home, but they were deployed in response to a new global
postwar urgency to create a vision for future prosperity that transcended
socialist and capitalist divides.35 As states tried to rebuild their relationship
with citizens, the home and its commodities became central to their prom-
ises of prosperity in part because people were facing a shortage of con-
sumer goods and housing after the war. Whether in China, the Soviet
Union, Japan, or even the United States, governments faced crises in hous-
ing and shortages in food. They also shared a vision of what postwar pros-
perity should look like—a happy family and a comfortable home, but they
proposed divergent means to achieving it.36 The capitalist vision of pros-
perity included both the promise and the means to get there: a capitalist
future would be filled with new commodities; and consuming those com-
modities would drive the economic development of capitalist states like
the United States and Japan. Advertisements suggested that consumption
could bring happiness. In the United States, for example, a 1949 Magnavox
advertisement promised not only a comfortable home life but also
improved family relations through sitting around the television.37 At a
transitional moment when many people could not afford the joy of con-
spicuous consumption, advertisements promised that one day they could.
As a 1950s Sanyo advertisement assured Japanese citizens: “Sanyo elec-
tronics for a bright future.”38 In China, by contrast, production rather than
consumption drove the economic plan for the future, thus the message in
the poster of the happy life was not to shop to jumpstart the economy, but
instead to trust that Mao and the CCP would deliver a prosperous life to
the Chinese people who engaged in productive work outside the home.
In the 1950s, consumption could also be socialist. As Susan Reid has
argued for Khrushchev-era Soviet Union: “Mass consumption and images
of how and what to consume were not the monopoly of capitalist moder-
nity. They were also central to modern socialism.”39 In China, this new
socialist consumption built on the infrastructure and practices of colonial
capitalist cities. 40 Department stores continued to operate after 1949. A
poster of the Shanghai Number One Department Store from 1955, for
example, depicted socialist mass consumption with brightly clothed con-
sumers crowding the store’s ground floor and a CCP banner prominently
hanging above the escalator. 41 The store is crowded with people: visitors
line up around the escalator for a ride, factory girls in overalls stroll, girls
in minority dress join the crowd, and sailors and soldiers enjoy a leisurely
outing. Indeed, the spectacle of this department store is found not in the
commodities on display but in the pageantry of people who fill the scene.
Aside from a few bolts of cloth, the exact goods for sale are not immedi-
ately clear to the viewer’s eye; instead, a short poem underneath the image
explains how to view this scene of consumption: “The department store is
filled with all kinds of merchandise; Goods to your heart’s content; What-
ever you want, you can buy; Life is getting better year by year.”42 Here, the
department store represents the new Chinese Communist state, with the
multiethnic consumers as its nation. The 1955 department store, much like
the Chinese state, may not have actually stocked everything consumers
could possibly want to buy, but as the poster suggests, the state promised
to improve its citizens’ lives year by year.
The poster of the department store depicted a new relationship for the
Chinese state and its citizen, with the state positioned at the center of the
people’s livelihood and prosperity. This relationship was also articulated
in the title of the poster of the family seated around the table: “Chairman
Mao gives us our happy life.” Depicting the “happy life” through images of
the home and its objects in many ways echoed the affective happy home of
the Republican era. In explaining the affect of happiness, Sarah Ahmed
argues that “happiness functions as a promise that directs us toward cer-
tain objects which then circulate as social goods.” In the happy home or
kuaile jiating the objects promised happiness, but in the socialist home
Chairman Mao promised to deliver the objects and thus the affect was
directed toward him. These different conceptions of happiness can be
understood by examining changing terminology. Happiness in the social-
ist happy life was indicated by the Chinese term xingfu, whereas the
middle-class capitalist happy home used the term kuaile. Both terms are
translated into English as “happy,” but kuaile refers to the affective feel-
ings of joy, while xingfu denotes good fortune. In the xingfu shenghuo the
good feelings were thus oriented toward Mao, who was responsible for the
prosperity of the home. Indeed, a poster from 1953 titled “moving into a
new house” features a family hanging a portrait of Mao on the wall even
before they unpack their belongings. 43 (See figure 8.3.)
Propaganda posters from the 1950s presented a new ideological vision
of state-led patriarchy that united the three facets of jiating—the nuclear
family, public housing, and the prosperous home—under the party with
Mao as its father. Furthermore, this patriarchy established a lineage
between Mao, the male worker head of household, and his sons. This rela-
tionship is portrayed in the poster of the “happy life.” Father and son wear
the same male worker’s clothing, and father points to the portrait of Mao.
This new socialist patriarchy needed to distinguish itself both from the
FIGURE 8.3 Moving into a new house, 1953. Courtesy of the

International Institute of Social History.
feudal extended family that the May Fourth Movement had derided as the
enemy of individual agency, and from the middle-class happy home of
capitalist modernity. The past could be erased by methodically designing
the future, and the CCP began to take a much more active role in delineat-
ing and defining the domestic sphere of the household than the GMD
had. At the same time, however, they emptied the domestic sphere of any
political or productive agency and expunged its historic role in the econ-
omy, governance, and individual identity formation. Citizenship and class
identities were no longer to be forged in the private spaces of house and
home but instead in the public spaces of work.
The new roles outlined for women further cemented the state-led patri-
archy. Women could claim citizenship as a rural or urban worker, but they
could also be categorized as a dependent or jiashu of a working man. 44
According to Song Shaopeng, dependents were not considered to be full
citizens, and indeed often were called “parasites.”45 In theory, women
were supposed to be liberated by becoming productive members of society
and working in the public sphere. In 1955, Mao wrote: “In order to build a
great socialist society it is of the utmost importance to arouse the broad
masses of women to join in productive activity.”46 In reality, the majority of
urban women did not work in state-owned enterprises. 47 Moreover, when
CCP ideological discourse and propaganda attempted to work out the gen-
dering of the spaces of work and domestic life as well as the role of women
in both, it perpetuated images of the home as a female space. Analyzing
discourse from the People’s Daily Newspaper, Song argues that in the early
1950s, women were encouraged to join the workforce, but that between
1956 and 1958 they were mobilized to leave public work for housework, and
that beginning in 1958 political discussions focused on collectivization of
household labor. 48
While these campaigns may have been clearly delineated in the party’s
major newspaper, they were expressed unevenly in propaganda posters.
Posters in the early 1950s portray women both as model workers and as
household laborers. A 1954 poster featured a beautiful woman with rouged
lips and cheeks dressed in a unisex, blue worker’s suit. 49 The smiling
woman is surrounded by her three children; her son holds the certificate
announcing her achievement, while her baby and daughter reach for the
red and gold medal displayed proudly on her chest. The caption notes that
she is a “glorious model producer.” A series of children’s prints from 1954

titled “With labor comes happiness” featured a school worker making soy-
milk, workers building a house, and a mother making clothes at home.50 A
poster from 1954 titled “Help mom do work” depicted a mother washing
clothes by hand in a basin while one boy fetches a pail of water and two
siblings watch the baby.51 A 1956 poster, which may have been part of the
campaign to mobilize women workers to go home, included multiple pan-
els portraying a woman caring for her family and supporting her worker
husband while featuring the slogan “Do housework well and raise chil-
dren well.”52 Only the text accompanying the model worker mother
describes her work as productive. The Chinese words used to describe the
household labor of the women at home—zuo yifu, zuoshi, jiawu— do not
actually use the term for work. Thus, while the images of women working
at home may have depicted female productivity in the domestic realm, the
captions suggested otherwise—that housework was not productive work.
Housework was gendered female in order to diminish household space
in relation to public work space precisely because women had been
described as parasites or appendages of productive men. Under this new
ideology, the household was no longer to be an economic competitor to the
state-led public sphere of work; instead, the happy life at home was framed
as being dependent on productive work of the public workplace. In reality,
however, women continued to engage in productive labor in the house-
hold. The historian Jacob Eyferth, for example, has argued that rural
women made homespun clothing well after the socialist revolution in
spite of the state’s disdain for it.53 Because the public workplace was the
state-sanctioned productive sphere, male workers became citizens
through their relationship to this production. In contrast, a woman’s rela-
tionship to public productive work, and thus her political status, was
always tenuous. As quickly as a woman was mobilized into the productive
forces, she could be asked to leave to make room for male employees. The
gendered representations of work and home that began in the 1950s laid
the foundation for the dichotomy of going out to work and returning
home that continues to haunt Chinese women today. In other words, the
so-called traditional role of housewife that women were summoned back
to, especially after market economic reforms in the 1980s, is itself an
invention of the 1950s.
COLLECTIVIZING HOUSE AND HOME
In 1955 the CCP strengthened the link between housing and the state by
mandating that state or collective-run urban work units, danwei, must be
responsible for building, distributing, and regulating housing. Moreover,
the CCP actively began to seek ways to make all urban housing public.
According to the 1956 CCP “Report on Urban Housing Property and Sug-
gestions for Socialist Transformation,” over half of the housing in China’s
major cities, including Tianjin, still belonged to the private sector.54 Abol-
ishing private property by making housing public would bring about a
socialist transformation, connecting people to the state in their everyday
lives, and it would ideally improve housing conditions for workers.
The 1956 CCP report on housing identified overcrowding and poor liv-
ing conditions as major problems for workers; and indeed, some scholars
have estimated that per-capita housing availability in Chinese cities actu-
ally decreased during the 1950s.55 At the same time that the CCP issued
the report on the state of urban housing, they called upon individual work
units to investigate workers’ housing.56 The party’s attitude toward hous-
ing can be seen in their changing requirements for housing loan applica-
tions during the 1950s. While in the early 1950s, applicants for housing
loans from the city were asked to present viable building plans and an
appropriate budget, after 1956 work unit loan applications also needed to
demonstrate attentiveness to workers’ living conditions. A textile work
unit’s application, for example, happened to include a national govern-
ment memo that asked each danwei to investigate workers’ housing condi-
tions by recording how many people lived in each house and by measuring
the size of the house.57 The memo outlined four issues that demanded
close attention from the work units: (1) housing standards that did not
meet health requirements or were dangerous; (2) families of multiple gen-
erations living under one roof; (3) married couples unable to live together
in their allotted space; and (4) housing far from work. The memo reveals
how socialist policy continued to deploy bourgeois ideals, as the socialist
individual was endowed with the right to live in a safe and well-located
house, residing with his wife and nuclear family. Thus, while the socialist
transformation in housing had eliminated private property, it retained
many of the ideals of the bourgeois home that had developed alongside
new ideas of private property in the colonial-capitalist city. Indeed, two of

the four highlighted issues for housing promoted the bourgeois individual
ideal that husband and wife should live together in a nuclear family with-
out their parents.
In a society that increasingly valued socialist collectivity, plans for new
danwei housing still clearly distinguished individual private space from
shared spaces. A textile and clothing danwei’s application to build workers’
housing from 1956, for example, noted that to encourage a socialist trans-
formation of everyday life, they would need to pay close attention to public
amenities and services like transportation and a children’s school.58 More-
over, the work unit would be responsible for the maintenance of public
facilities and spaces in the housing buildings. Individual workers, however,
were charged with maintaining and paying taxes on their personal resi-
dences. A worker’s living space may have been his personal responsibility,
but it was not his private property. The work unit’s plans clearly stated that
workers could not rent or lend their housing to relatives or friends.
As the Chinese state rebuilt its connections to housing, and as the CCP
shifted from the practical, economy-driven Soviet-style planning of the
early 1950s to the ideology-driven Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s,
planners began to propose a new ideological understanding of jiating that
reconnected social relations to social spaces and linked everyday life at
home to the state. While Republican-era nationalist ideologues had
focused on transforming the demographic and social relations of the xiao
jiating in order to transform the nation, new socialist ideas about housing
suggested that new spatial designs could revolutionize social relations and
bring about a socialist transformation. In a 1958 issue of the Journal of
Architecture, the Tianjin Building and Engineering Bureau presented their
plans to build a shehui zhuyi da jiating in Tianjin.59 In his book on the
origins and spatial organization of the danwei system, David Bray trans-
lates this as the “Great Socialist House,” but the description of the project
in the article could just as easily suggest “great socialist family.”60 Indeed,
as the article suggests, late 1950s China saw the reemergence of a political
understanding of jiating that blurred the lines between social spaces and
social relations. Family and house were again integrated in the socialist
vision of jiating, a vision that represented a transformation of both the
imperial jia and the Republican jiating.
Rather than begin by describing architectural plans, the author of the

“great socialist family” first introduced the people who would make up
the “great socialist family.” The complex was slated to house 42 house-
holds with 176 people. The residents would include workers, cadres, stu-
dents, and 27 housewives.61 The author noted that liberation had yet to
change some old mindsets, with many women still laboring within their
houses. To liberate these women and release their productive labor, the
planners called for a new communal spatial arrangement to transform
social relations.
The great socialist house was centered on a large dining hall, which
would relieve women from cooking meals in individual kitchens, and also
included a nursery and cleaning department so women would no longer be
burdened by childcare and housework. In the great socialist family, elderly
women, who were presumably past their prime of productive labor in the
factory, would take over the domestic tasks of younger women—three
women were to be assigned to the canteen, three to the nursery, and two to
cleaning. This plan began to address some of the inequities in female par-
ticipation in public labor, and also proposed a new concept of family in
which household tasks could be outsourced to people outside the immedi-
ate family.
Connecting social relations to social space, the great socialist jiating
proposed a radical vision of jiating that departed from the individualistic
ideas of the Republican era xiao jiating and drew on some aspects of the
late imperial da jiating. Like late imperial households, the complex was
designed as a four-walled compound around a central courtyard, and it
seems to have been planned on a north-south axis. But while the central
room of the imperial household would have featured the ancestral altar,
the central room in the great socialist house was the large dining room
located in the center of the east wing. With socialism replacing kinship as
the force that brought people together, the dining room, like other every-
day services, was to be staffed by members of the new extended socialist
family. The new socialist household also proposed a radically new vision
of social space that departed from the late imperial inner/outer continuum
and the Republican-era public/private divide. Inhabitants of the great
socialist house would share communal household facilities like toilet,
bath, and laundry, but the complex would also introduce amenities
previously relegated to the outer world of commerce or public services,

such as a bank, an infirmary, a recreation hall, and a small shop.
CONCLUSION
Whereas early postwar planners had focused on building “economical”

housing, by the end of the 1950s planners were looking to improve “every-
day life” through housing. The great socialist jiating proposed an ideologi-
cal vision in which the collective was greater than the individual and in
which communal living improved everyday life.62 But while the socialist
da jiating aimed at a radical reform of the Republican-era xiao jiating,
many of the ideals of the bourgeois home proved resilient. For example,
the ideals presented in architectural plans were not always realized.
According to David Bray, when the Tianjin socialist housing complex was
completed in 1962, it lacked many of the promised amenities, and people
were forced to cook on their own, in the hallways.63 Moreover, the eco-
nomic failures of the Great Leap Forward and the ideological turmoil of
the Cultural Revolution slowed construction of new urban housing during
the 1960s. Thus, the socialist spaces that potentially could have trans-
formed social relations never fully materialized.
Still, while the CCP failed to bring about a socialist revolution through
housing, they nevertheless reconnected the social space of the household
to the political authority of the state by abolishing private property. The
danwei system of distributing housing built on and reinforced many of the
ideals of the bourgeois home. First, it asserted that an individual had a
right to housing, married couples should live together, and nuclear rather
than extended families should inhabit a single space. Perhaps as an unin-
tended consequence, the danwei system strengthened the link between
housing and social status. While property denoted status in Republican-
era Tianjin, status was still fluid, and could be defined by multiple forms of
capital. By the end of the 1950s, a danwei’s political and economic status
and a person’s position within it determined a housing assignment, mak-
ing housing a visible and material marker of social position. While Tianjin
University professors inhabited apartments, workers lived in dormitories;
while senior cadres occupied multiple rooms with private facilities, their
single or lower-ranked neighbors lived in single rooms, sharing a kitchen.

In the end, while Chinese planners, intellectuals, and residents of the
socialist world, much like their counterparts in the Soviet Union, had mul-
tiple global examples of experimental living to choose from, the single
model for housing to emerge in the early Cold War socialist world was
much like the ideal touted by their capitalist counterparts—the nuclear
family home.
Epilogue
Historical Erasures and China’s New Middle Class
B
efore midnight on August 12, 2015, a series of chemical
explosions went off in a warehouse storage facility in
Tianjin’s Binhai district, located along the Hai River
between Tianjin’s urban center and the port. During Tianjin’s
life as a treaty-port city, this area was little more than a salty
marshland, but in the 1980s, when the central government
began to promote market economic reforms, it was desig-
nated the Tianjin Economic Technological Development Area
(TEDA). TEDA did not take off until the early 2000s with the
establishment of businesses, hospitals, and satellite campuses
of Tianjin universities, and the Binhai district became an
enclave for Tianjin’s new middle class. The rapid growth of the
Binhai district meant that housing and commercial buildings
were constructed quickly alongside one another. The chemi-
cals that exploded that August evening were thus housed in a
commercial warehouse built dangerously close to a new resi-
dential complex of gated communities that included new flats
surrounded by green spaces and parks.
The explosions devastated the surrounding residential
area.1 More than 170 people were killed, and hundreds more
were injured. Property was severely damaged, and the air and
ground were polluted. Surviving property owners took to the
streets in protest demanding that the government compensate
Epilogue 265
them for their losses. They wanted to know why the government had
allowed hazardous chemicals to be stored so close to a residential area,
and they sought fair compensation for their damaged property. This trag-
edy and its aftermath seemed ready-made for the English-language
media’s liberal belief that China’s middle class would leverage property
rights for political rights. The Wall Street Journal, for example, proclaimed
that “the deadly blasts . . . put a deep dent in the compact between China’s
government and its middle class.”2 Would the Tianjin explosion be the tip-
ping point between state and society?
Less than one month after the explosion, an anonymous post appeared
on the Chinese social media platform Weibo that at first glance appeared
to answer this question affirmatively. The author, allegedly a young
woman about to enter Swarthmore College in the United States, claimed
to have been living near the epicenter of the explosion and to have sus-
tained severe injuries. The post received more than eight thousand shares
before it was removed, but it was reposted on Chinese-language websites
outside the People’s Republic of China and translated into English by the
Journal of Foreign Policy.3 The author had personal grievances—her inju-
ries and a delayed start at an elite liberal arts college in the United States—
but instead she spoke on behalf of her family and their property loss. As
translated in the Journal of Foreign Policy, she wrote: “I’m a Tianjin
native. . . . When the incident occurred, I was living in Vanke Harbor
City—the closest area to the explosion. I’m from a middle-class home. We
own one apartment—we sold the other one so I could study abroad.” This
statement was not, as the translation might suggest, a grievance against
the state on behalf of the author’s social identity as middle class, however.
In the original Chinese text, the author did not use the Chinese term for
middle class, zhongchan jieji. Instead, she used the term xiaokang shuiping,
which literally means well off or comfortable. The term xiaokang shuiping
is a political term rather than a social category. Deng Xiaoping first used it
in the early 1980s when he proposed economic development plans to bring
about a well-off or comfortable society in which people had adequate food
and clothing. The author used the political language of the state to make
her appeal, and later in the text, she referred to her family as members of
the xiaolaobaixing, the common people or the masses, a term that the Chi-
nese Communist Party coined in its early years to refer to the masses as
266 Epilogue
opposed to the bourgeois capitalists or the feudal landholders. Using the

terms xiaokang shuiping and xiaolaobaixing the author did not distinguish
herself as a member of the middle class in opposition to the state, but
rather appealed to the CCP and its promises. This appeal on social media
reinforced rather than challenged state power, and indeed the civil unrest
after the Binhai incident has died down with little political change.
The Binhai incident reveals the conclusion of the multilayered history
of property, the individual, and the state in modern China. This history
began in Republican-era China with the introduction of legal concepts
and legislation that tied private property rights to the individual, making
property central to middle-class, masculine identities. Whereas Tianjin’s
housing market in the Republican era grew in the political vacuum created
by multiple foreign empires and a weak Chinese municipal government,
housing in the People’s Republic of China ultimately was consolidated
under state control through the danwei system. After 1949, the CCP built
upon bourgeois concepts— of housing and legal rights, and of individual
identity and home—to make the distribution of housing and the promise
of an abundant home life central to the state’s relationship with citizens.
Moreover, under this system housing continued to denote social status
since it was connected to one’s place of work and one’s position within that
work unit. Eventually the danwei system of housing distribution gave way
to a second marketization of housing, but this too reinforced rather than
undermined CCP authority.
In 2007, the National People’s Congress passed legislation on property.
The first law revised the urban property laws on eminent domain, granting
the state authority to demolish danwei and private property for the public
interest. The second law granted private owners the right to use property
on state- owned land for seventy years. Foreign media outlets extolled
the legal protections over private property as strengthening a growing
middle class and suggested a corollary: that with property rights estab-
lished, the democratic political rights of the middle class would be right
around the corner. The New York Times, for example, proclaimed in a
headline: “China Backs Property Law, Buoying Middle Class.”4 But as
time has passed, the expansion of property rights seems to have bolstered
an economic elite who believe that a powerful state is necessary to protect
their investments. The historian Wang Hui has identified private property
Epilogue 267
as part of a bundle of neoliberal and ostensibly extra-governmental prin-

ciples that actually have become incorporated by state policy.5 He traces
the moment of entanglement of the neo-authoritarian state with neolib-
eral ideas to 1989, when a crisis in state legitimacy was answered through
pro-market radicalism. As a result, Wang suggests that today’s state is not
only responsible for expanding the market but also for protecting and
mediating the market in the face of globalization. The state may no longer
distribute housing, but the ability to own and invest in private housing is
central to the relationship between the Chinese state and its citizens.
A history of private property in China reveals that laws regarding prop-
erty have long benefited men over women. During the Republican era,
laws intended to bring about female property rights instead privileged the
rights of male individuals and forged the political ideal that the single-
family house was central to urban male citizenship. The CCP built on this
foundation when they introduced housing policies after 1949 to establish
their political legitimacy by constructing a system of socialist patriarchy
between the state and its male citizens. The heightened anxieties over
today’s property markets have only made visible these long-standing gen-
der and status inequalities of housing distribution and ownership. In her
book on China’s so-called leftover women, Leta Hong Fincher contends
that “many Chinese women have been shut out of arguably the biggest
accumulation of residential real estate wealth in history, worth more than
US$30 trillion in 2013.”6 Even though women are contributing to the pur-
chase of marital property, the vast majority of deeds are registered under
the male spouse’s name, and according to the 2011 marriage law, when
couples divorce, the property is bestowed upon the deed holder.7 Hong
Fincher argues that this situation represents a resurgence of gender
inequality. In many ways, however, the current housing market has simply
exacerbated and exposed long-persisting gender inequalities in property
rights and distribution. Thus, a history of family, house, and home in
twentieth-century China not only shatters the myth that capitalist pros-
perity is endowed by the state, but it also exposes the inequalities and
unevenness in how the state has delivered this prosperity and distributed
resources over time.
State legitimacy and the re-marketization of housing in Tianjin depends
on genealogies of prosperity that emphasize the role of the CCP in lifting
268 Epilogue
China out of poverty. These historical narratives transform the concession

houses once inhabited by Chinese people into the homes of foreign colo-
nials, and thus erase Tianjin’s Chinese middle class, who were the major-
ity of residents in Tianjin’s foreign concessions. To restore middle-class
Chinese residents to the histories of their former houses would be to
undermine the commonly held belief that the ability to purchase an apart-
ment in Tianjin today is a direct result of CCP economic policies. The idea
that the CCP is the economic savior of the Chinese people has deep roots
in Chinese Marxist historiography, and it has found new life in China
under market economic reforms.
In 2007, I presented my research on the Republican-era Tianjin home
to a packed lecture hall at Tianjin’s Nankai University. As students at one
of China’s top universities, the attendees were members (or future mem-
bers) of China’s elite. When I had finished speaking, a handful of these
students suggested that I find an alternate topic. Although I noted that the
history of Republican-era Tianjin had been under-represented in Western
scholarship, one student questioned why I had chosen to write on Tianjin
and not an even more peripheral, and therefore representative Chinese
city, such as Lanzhou, while another suggested that I should instead write
the history of “real” Chinese people, such as peasants, and not the urban
elites of a treaty-port city. These students failed to recognize that, rather
than being marginal, the history of Tianjin’s urban elite actually was cen-
tral to the founding and prestige of their own university. Not far from the
lecture hall stood a towering statue of Nankai’s most famous alumnus,
Zhou Enlai. Zhou attended Nankai in its early years when it was a private
institution founded to educate Tianjin’s growing urban middle class in
new global pedagogies. Indeed, Zhou, and his wife Deng Yingchao hailed
from the very same educated, elite Tianjin circles that my talk had intro-
duced. While the students undoubtedly knew the biography of their uni-
versity’s most famous student, the social historical context of his early life
had been erased from their popular historical memories.
My goal in this book has been to reinscribe these erasures: to write the
history of the modern home into the history of modern China, and to write
the history of Republican-era Tianjin and its elites into the history of the
Chinese city. This recovered history reveals both the deep structures of
inequality in urban life as well as the possibilities of alternatives. In
Epilogue 269
Republican-era Tianjin, gender was constructed through status, but both

of these social categories were in flux. A wealthy warlord could purchase
one of the finest mansions in the city, while the educated daughter of a
civil servant might have been better equipped with the knowledge of how
to live in it. As these young women grew to become wives and divorcées,
however, they would have confronted a legal structure that did not always
deliver on the property rights that the Chinese state or the foreign conces-
sion had promised women. And still, women could imagine an alternative
city with female-gendered social spheres. As the pages of Tianjin’s Wom-
an’s World suggest, the spaces of urban life in Republican-era Tianjin were
open to various gendered possibilities.
It is tempting to see a reemergence of the past, as China once again
embraces global markets, but dwelling in the world has changed signifi-
cantly for Chinese people. While the Republican-era state was weak, the
Chinese state today governs from a position of strength and sets its own
terms of engagement with the world. The nature of global commodities
has also changed as revealed through women’s magazines. Republican-
era Ling long magazine may have included advertisements for foreign cos-
metics brands like Cutex, but it also included recipes for readers to concoct
their own makeup. Moreover, advertisements were only a small propor-
tion of the magazine; just as important were the diversity of articles and
editorials that offered conflicting viewpoints worthy of the magazine’s
onomatopoetic name, the sound of clinking jade. By contrast, today’s Chi-
nese Cosmopolitan magazine, which is printed on glossy pages much like
its American parent magazine, includes more advertisements than arti-
cles, most of which feature foreign luxury brands. Whereas Republican-
era readers were invited to produce their world—participating in debates,
expanding common sense, fashioning their spaces and their selves—
today’s Chinese urbanites are left to consume theirs, facing a world of
packaged global commodities that leaves little room for personal design or
agency.
Revealing the erased history of jiating reclaims a moment of human
agency, when in the face of multiple foreign empires, and without a medi-
ating state, Chinese people designed modern everyday life for themselves.
But it is also worth remembering that this agency was unequal, particu-
larly at the margins: Tianjin’s Republican-era urban elites could only
270 Epilogue
design their own everyday lives at home because carpenters built them
and maids cleaned them. Here, again, today’s stories echo an earlier his-
tory of power and privilege, as the history of Republican-era urban hous-
ing illuminates how private housing markets by their very nature often
exacerbate social inequality. Indeed, to understand what these social
inequalities might have looked like in Republican-era Tianjin, one need
only visit Tianjin today.
When I began researching this project in Tianjin, I rented an apartment
in former danwei housing located in the shadow of a construction project
for a new upscale housing complex called “Class Dream.” When I returned
years later, I found that Class Dream had been completed, but many of its
apartments stood empty, owned by real estate speculators with no plans to
inhabit them. Staying in a serviced apartment down the road, I once again
lived in the shadow of a luxury skyscraper construction project, this time
being built as a high-end hotel, intended to house the capitalists who
would visit Tianjin now that the state had designated the city a priority for
national investment. Down at the foot of the skyscraper, in the deepest
shadows, the project’s migrant construction workers took their evening
meals on the sidewalk, delaying the moment when they would return to
bunkbeds in their makeshift dormitory for a short night of rest. For them,
and indeed for us, the long history of family, home, and housing has not
been erased but just hidden—a force that continues to shape who we are
and how we live in the world.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33–40.
2. Karl Gerth, China Made: Consumer Culture and the Creation of a Nation
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Frank Dikötter, Exotic
Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in China (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2006).
3. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New
York: Norton, 1976); Bonnie G. Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises
of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1981); Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place:
The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75, no. 1 (1988):
9–39; and John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle- Class Home in Vic-
torian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). For a revisionist
and global look at domesticity, see articles in “AHR Roundtable: Unsettling
Domesticities: New Histories of Home in Global Contexts,” American Historical
Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1246–1336.
4. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space,
and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003).
5. Marie- Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans.
Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
6. Bergère, The Golden Age; Xu Xiaoqun, Chinese Professionals and the Republican
State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor:
272 Introduction
Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2007).
7. Bergère, The Golden Age, 178– 86.
8. Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1986).
9. Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 101.
10. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
11. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in
the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Sklar, Catharine
Beecher; Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class; and Kerber, “Separate Spheres.”
12. Andre Gunder Frank, ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998); Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence:
China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000); and “Symposium: ‘Public Sphere’/‘Civil
Society’ in China? Paradigmatic Issues in Chinese Studies III,” ed. Philip C. C.
Huang, Modern China, 19, no. 2 (April 1993).
13. Elizabeth LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity in Chinese History and Histori-
ography,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1278– 89.
14. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-
Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Francesca Bray,
Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1997); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China’s
Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997); and
LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity.”
15. Susan Glosser, Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915–1953 (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2003), 15.
16. LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity.”
17. William T. Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796–1895
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989); Michael Tsin, Nation, Gover-
nance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900–1927 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1999); and Rebecca E. Karl, and Peter Zarrow, eds., Rethinking the
1898 Reform Period: Political and Cultural Change in Late Qing China (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2002).
18. Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House Domestic Management and the
Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011);
and Glosser, Chinese Visions.
19. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese
Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mann,
Precious Records; and Bray, Technology and Gender.
20. John Fitzgerald, Awakening China: Politics, Culture, and Class in the Nationalist
Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996).
1. Unraveling the Chinese Empire 273
21. Glosser, Chinese Visions.

22. Antoinette M. Burton, Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home, and
History in Late Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010): 251.
1. UNRAVELING THE CHINESE EMPIRE
Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 13.
3. Man Xu, Crossing the Gate: Everyday Lives of Women in Song Fujian (960–1279)
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2016); Ko, Teachers of the Inner
Chambers; and Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late
Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).
4. Janet Theiss, Disgraceful Matters: The Politics of Chastity in Eighteenth- Century
China, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). and Bray, Technology and
Gender.
5. Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
6. Madeleine Zelin, The Merchants of Zigong: Industrial Entrepreneurship in Early
Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 84.
7. Da xue, The Great Learning, in Sources of Chinese Tradition, 2nd ed., ed. Theodore
de Bary and Irene Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 330–31.
8. Bray, Technology and Gender; Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Mar-
riage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993); Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers; and Susan Mann, Pre-
cious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford
9. Tianjin tongzhi: Jiuzhi dian jiaojuan [Overall annals of Tianjin’s old gazetteers]
(Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 1999), 3: 434.
10. Liu Haiyan, Kongjian yu shehui: Jindai Tianjin chengshi de yanbian [Space and
society: Contemporary Tianjin City’s changes] (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kex-
ueyuan chubanshe, 2003), 36.
11. For an overview of Tianjin’s imperial history, see section 1, “The Development of
Tianjin Before the Modern Period, Yuan—1840,” in Jindai Tianjin chengshi shi
[Tianjin’s modern urban history], ed. Luo Shuwei (Beijing: Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences Press, 1993), 21–113. Also see Guo Fengqi, Tianjin de chengshi
fazhan [The urban development of Tianjin] (Tianjin: Tianjin guji chubanshe,
2004).
12. Man Bun Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin: State-Making and Civil Society in
Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), 12.
274 1. Unraveling the Chinese Empire
13. Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin, 16.

14. Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin, 21. Kwan notes that during the Qing, wealthy
Tianjin salt merchants purchased fine wines, silks, and porcelains from the
south. See also the new Qing historians who describe China’s “long eighteenth
century” as an economically prosperous and culturally rich period. Benjamin A.
Elman, From Philosophy to Philology: Intellectual and Social Aspects of Change in
Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); William
Rowe, China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009); Mann, Precious Records; and Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Diver-
gence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000).
15. Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin, 26.
16. Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin.
17. For comparison of 1842 official Qing census to U.S. census data for 1850, see Ruth
Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 54.
18. Yinong Xu, The Chinese City in Space and Time: The Development of Urban Form in
Suzhou (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000).
19. Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese
Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
20. Mark Edward Lewis, Construction of Space in Early China (Albany: State Univer-
sity of New York Press, 2006).
21. Lewis, Construction of Space, 118.
22. John Nieuhoff, An Embassy from the East-India Company of the United Province to
the Grand Tartar Cham Emperour of China (London: John Macock, 1669), 112.
23. Nieuhoff, An Embassy, 12.
24. George Staunton, An Authentic Account of an Embassy from the King of Great
Britain to the Emperor of China: Including Cursory Observations Made, and Infor-
mation Obtained in Travelling Through That Ancient Empire, and a Small Part of
Chinese Tartary (London: G. Nicol, 1797).
25. Staunton, An Authentic Account, 203.
26. Staunton, An Authentic Account, 185.
27. Staunton, An Authentic Account, 184, 201.
28. James Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney
Embassy of 1793 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 25.
29. Diplomatic and Consular Reports, China. Notes on the Foreign Trade of Tientsin
during the Years 1900– 03 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1904).
30. N. B. Denys, Notes for Tourists in the North of China (Hong Kong: A. Shortrede, 1866).
31. Feng Qihuang, Tianjin cheng xiang bao jia quan tu [Complete map of the commu-
nity self-defense system of the walled city of Tianjin and its environs] (1899),
http:// hdl.loc.gov/ loc.gmd/g7824t.ct002306, accessed June 15, 2020.
1. Unraveling the Chinese Empire 275
32. John Fairbank, “Patterns Behind the Tientsin Massacre,” Harvard Journal of Asi-
atic Studies 20, no. 3/4 (1957): 480– 511.
33. George Thin, The Tientsin Massacre: The Causes of the Late Disturbances in China
and How to Secure Permanent Peace (London: William Blackwood, 1870), 3.
34. George Thin, The Tientsin Massacre, 67, 68.
35. Joseph W. Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer Uprising (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1987).
36. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs of Herbert Hoover: Years of Adventure, 1874–1920
(New York: Macmillan, 1951), 48.
37. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs, 57– 58.
38. Herbert Hoover, The Memoirs, 51.
39. Frederick Palmer, “Mrs. Hoover Knows,” Ladies’ Home Journal 46 (March 1929): 6.
40. James Hevia, “Looting and Its Discontents: Moral Discourse and the Plunder of
Beijing, 1900–1901,” in The Boxers, China, and the World, ed. Robert Bickers and
R. G. Tiedemann (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 93–113; and “Top-
ics of the Time: Tianjin,” The Advance (October 4, 1900), 423.
41. Robert Bickers, “Introduction,” in The Boxers, ed. Bickers and Tiedemann,
xi–xxviii.
42. Bickers, “Introduction.”
43. Bickers, “Introduction,” xiv.
44. “Ethiopian Siege Recalls Boxer Uprising in China: Foreign Legations Stormed,”
Chicago Daily Tribune, May 5, 1936.
45. C. A. Bayly, “The Boxer Uprising and India: Globalizing Myths,” in The Boxers,
ed. Bickers and Tiedeman, 147– 55.
46. See, for example, “Powers at Odds at Tientsin: Russia Holds the Railway in Spite
Of England,” Boston Daily Globe, July 25, 1900, 1; and “Tientsin Horrors: Chinese
Atrocious, but the Russians Were Worse. Shocking Tales Told,” Boston Daily
Globe, August 7, 1900, 4.
47. Hevia, “Looting and Its Discontents,” 104.
48. See Esherick, Origins of the Boxer Uprising; and Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity.
49. For the history of TPG governance, see Lewis Bernstein, “After the Fall: Tian-
jin Under Foreign Occupation, 1900–1902,” in The Boxers, ed. Bickers and
Tiedemann, 133–46; and Lewis Bernstein, A History of Tientsin in the Early
Modern Times, 1800–1910 (PhD diss., University of Kansas, 1988), especially
chapter 5.
50. Charles Denby, China and Her People: Being and Observations, Reminiscences and
Conclusions of an American Diplomat (L. C. Page, 1906), 204– 05.
51. Minutes of the 23rd meeting of the Tianjin Provisional Government (TPG),
August 30, 1900, Procés-verbaux des séances du Gouvernement Provisoire de Tien-
tsin, translated into Chinese as Baguo lianjun lingshilu (The China Times, 1902;
repr., Tianjin: Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, 2004), 24.
276 1. Unraveling the Chinese Empire
52. Minutes of the 8th meeting of the TPG, August 10, 1900, Baguo lianjun ling-
shilu, 12.
53. Minutes of the 20th meeting of the TPG, August 27, 1900, Baguo lianjun ling-
shilu, 21.
54. Minutes of the 61st meeting of the TPG, October 29, 1900, Baguo lianjun ling-
shilu, 67.
55. Minutes of the 214th meeting of the TPG, October 25, 1901, Baguo lianjun ling-
shilu, 463. It is unclear why the TPG decied that the sanitation department could
not issue tickets in the Italian Concession. It is possible that the Italians were
already instituting their own system of fines.
56. Minutes of the 46th meeting of the TPG, September 28, 1900; 231st meeting,
December 6, 1901; 41st meeting, September 21, 1900; and 65th meeting, Novem-
ber 7, 1900, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 46, 509, 43, 74.
57. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity.
58. See Bernstein, “After the Fall” and A History of Tientsin.
59. When the Public Development Department decided to build a new road along the
river, it decided that residents along the proposed route would be forced to move
within a month. The TPG debated whether to compensate residents with money
or new land. Minutes of the 72nd meeting of the TPG, November 22, 1900; the
TPG decided to level roads in the minutes of the 181st meeting, August 7, 1901,
Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 373; Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 92. See also Bernstein, “After
the Fall” and A History of Tientsin.
60. Minutes of the 3rd meeting of the TPG, August 4, 1900; and 50th meeting, Octo-
ber 6, 1900, Baguo lianjun lingshilu, 6–7, 52.
61. Minutes of the 74th meeting of the TPG, November 26, 1900, Baguo lianjun ling-
shilu, 97.
62. Hosea Ballou Morse, The International Relations of the Chinese Empire (London:
Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 296. For biographical information on Morse,
see C. A. V. Bowra, “Hosea Ballou Morse,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of
Great Britain and Ireland, no. 2 (April 1934): 425–30.
63. Yinong Xu, The Chinese City in Space and Time.
64. Nancy Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 1999), 14.
65. Hevia, “Looting and its Discontents,” 100; Hoover, The Memoirs, 60.
66. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity; O. D. Rasmussen, Tientsin: An Illustrated Outline
History (Tianjin: Tientsin Press, 1925).
67. Tenney was dismissed in 1906 due to antiforeign sentiment. New York Times, Feb-
ruary 4, 1906.
68. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity; Stephen R. MacKinnon, Power and Politics in Late
Imperial China: Yuan Shikai in Beijing and Tianjin, 1901–1908 (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1980), 152.
2. Family in Ideology and Practice 277
69. MacKinnon, Power and Politics, 147.

70. Roger R. Thompson, China’s Local Councils in the Age of Constitutional Reform,
1898–1911 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 37.
71. Stephen R. MacKinnon notes that Tianjin became a site of Qing government
experimentation. Mackinnon, Power and Politics. On elections, see Thompson,
China’s Local Councils, 38.
72. Madeleine Yue Dong, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories, 1911–1937
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
73. Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City, 4.
2. FAMILY IN IDEOLOGY AND PRACTICE
1. Francesca Bray, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China
2. Bray, Technology and Gender, 380.
3. Bray, Technology and Gender, 57.
4. Patterns of deconstruction and reconstruction that began in the nineteenth cen-
tury were not always brought on by colonialism. Meng Yue looks at the impact of
internal migrations and reconfigurations of Shanghai due to the Taiping Rebel-
lion on the intellectual and cultural life of the city in Shanghai and the Edges of
Empires (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
5. Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005), 38, 243n1.
6. Joan Judge, “Citizens or Mothers of Citizens? Gender and the Meaning of Modern
Chinese Citizenship,” in Changing Meanings of Citizenship in Modern China, ed.
Merle Goldman and Elizabeth J. Perry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002), 23–43.
7. On Tokugawa-era schools, see Martha Tocca, “Norms and Texts for Women’s
Education in Tokugawa Japan,” in Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern
China, Korea, and Japan, ed. Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Pig-
gott (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 193–218. On women’s educa-
tion in twentieth-century Japan, see for example Yoshiko Furiki, The White Plum:
A Biography of Ume Tsuda, Pioneer in the Higher Education of Japanese Women
(New York: Weatherhill, 1991); and Barbara Rose, Tsuda Umeko and Women’s
Higher Education in Japan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992).
8. Koyama Shizuko, Ryosai Kenbo: Constructing the Educational Ideal of Good Wife
and Wise Mother (Leiden: Brill Academic Publisher, 2012).
9. Ueno Chizuko, “Formation of the Japanese Model of the Modern Family,” in The
Modern Family in Japan: Its Rise and Fall (Melbourne, Australia: Trans Pacific
Press, 2009), 63– 88.
278 2. Family in Ideology and Practice
10. Noboru Koyama, “Cultural Exchange at the Time of the Anglo-Japanese Alli-
ance,” in The Anglo-Japanese Alliance, 1902–1922, ed. Phillips Payson O’Brien
(New York: Routledge, 2009), 199–207.
11. Shimoda’s ideals still frame the mission of the school today. Jissen Women’s
University website, https://www.jissen.ac.jp/en/ideals/ideology/ideology.html,
accessed July 10, 2020.
12. Ono Kazuko, Chinese Women in a Century of Revolution, 1850–1950 (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1989), 55.
13. According to Joan Judge, conservative officials Rong-qing (1854–1912), Zhang
Baixi (1847–1907), and Zhang Zhidong (1837–1909) cited Shimoda’s textbook on
domestic science as the only foreign work “compatible with the Chinese way of
womanhood.” Shimoda advised Wu Huaijiu, the founder of one of the first private
schools for girls in Shanghai in 1901. Her professional network extended to the
Empress Dowager Cixi—who had expressed interest in meeting with Shimoda to
establish a women’s school—and to nationalist Sun Yat-sen, for whom she com-
posed a poem. Joan Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation: Chinese Nationalisms
and Female Subjectivities in the Early Twentieth Century,” American Historical
Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 765– 803. See also Ko Shimoda kōchō sensei denki
hensanjo (under the guidance of Fujimura Zenkichi), ed., Shimoda Utako sensei
den [Biography of Professor Shimoda Utako] (Tokyo: 1943), and Ono, Chinese
Women (1989).
14. The Society for Renewal published a journal along with translations of Japanese
books on domestic science and women’s education, including Shimoda’s Domes-
tic Science (Kasei gaku in Japanese, Jiazheng xue in Chinese). Judge, “Talent, Vir-
tue and the Nation.”
15. Two of Shimoda’s Chinese translations, a 1910 edition of Jiazheng xue and a 1939
edition of New Contributions to Domestic Science [Xinzhuan jiazheng xue], can be
found in the Tianjin Municipal Library: Shimoda Utako, Jiazheng xue [Studies in
domestic science] (Shanghai: Guangzhi shuju, 1910); and Xinzhuan jiazheng xue
[New contributions to domestic science] (Shanghai: Guangzhi shuju, 1939).
16. Judge, “Talent, Virtue, and the Nation.”
17. Whether or not Shimoda Utako was responsible for introducing the term katei to
China, jiating as a new category of feminine knowledge did not appear in China
until around the time her books were being published. The earliest entry in the
National Libraries of China database for a title with the term jiating, for example,
is a 1907 book called Jiating tanhua [Discussions on home] (Xuebu bianyi tushuju,
1907).
18. Jordan Sand notes that debates over the native family system (ie sei) and the mod-
ern idea of home (homu) occurred at the same time the Meiji Civil Code was being
drafted, suggesting that family reform was central to social reform in modern
Japan. The linguistic introduction of katei to replace homu extended the political
debate to a mass audience, which was more apt to digest Japanese neologisms
than foreign transliterated words. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan:
Architecture, Domestic Space and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003), 22–26.
19. Sand, House and Home, 25.
20. Shimoda Utako. Katei [Home] (Tokyo: Yumani Shobo, 2000) [reprint].
ography,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (2019): 1278– 89.
22. See, for example, David Chapman, “Geographies of Self and Other: Mapping
Japan Through the Koseki,” Asia-Pacific Journal 9, issue 29, no. 2, (July 18, 2011);
and Ueno, The Modern Family in Japan.
23. LaCouture, “Translating Domesticity.”
24. For example, Chen Shousun, a little-known scholar with no formal academic affil-
iation, published Dictionary of Social Problems [Shehui wenti cidian] in 1929 in
which he referred to family as jiazu. Chen drew from Japanese and English schol-
arship, attributing many of his entries to a Japanese volume of the same title—
Motoyuki Takabatake’s Shakai mondai jiten (1925)—and A. S. Rappoport’s Dic-
tionary of Socialism (1924), which was published in Britain. He also claimed to
have spent half of the 2.5 years he took to compile his Dictionary of Social Problems
in Japan. Chen’s affinity toward Japanese scholarship carried over into his other
work, which included a 1935 study titled War-time Economic Control [Zhanshi
tongzhi jingjilun or Senji to sei keizairon], coauthored with Japanese colleague Mori
Takeo. Chen Shousun, Shehui wenti cidian [Dictionary of social problems] (Shang-
hai: Intelligence Press, 1929).
25. James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1983).
26. Wang Hui, “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China: The Concept of Science and its
Application in Modern Chinese Thought,” positions 3, no. 1 (1995): 27.
27. Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 53– 57.
28. Pusey outlines how reformers from the Confucian Kang Youwei to May Fourth
activists Chen Duxiu and Hu Shi used the ideas of social Darwinism to express
their political agenda. Pusey, China and Charles Darwin.
29. Chung-hsing Sun, “The Development of the Social Sciences in China Before
1949” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1987), 42.
30. Before developing its own writing system, Japan had adopted Chinese characters,
and educated male elites continued to read and write in classical Chinese through
the Tokugawa period.
31. Lydia Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated
Modernity, China, 1900–1937 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).
32. Michael Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China, Canton, 1900–1927
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
33. Liang Qichao, “Xin dalu youji jielu” [Selected memoir of travels in the new world],
in Yinbing shi he ji [Collected writings from an ice-drinker’s studio] (Shanghai:
Zhonghua shuju, 1926), zhuanji 22.
34. In an essay titled “Learning from the West,” Yan Fu argues: “The difference
between Chinese and Western knowledge is as great as that between the
complexions and the eyes of the two races. We cannot force the two cultures to
be the same or similar. Therefore, Chinese knowledge has its foundation and
function. . . . If the two were combined, both would perish.” Translated in Ssu-yü
Teng and John K. Fairbank, China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey,
1839–1923 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 150– 51.
36. Jane I. Newell, “The Chinese Family: An Arena of Conflicting Cultures,” Social
Forces 9, no. 4 (June 1931): 564.
37. Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s House: Domestic Management and the
Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011);
and Ava B. Milam, A Study of the Student Homes of China (New York: Teachers
College, Columbia University, 1930).
38. Newell, “The Chinese Family,” 564.
39. Newell, “The Chinese Family,” 564–71.
40. If Newell did conduct original research during her years at Yanjing, she left no
record of it; according to contemporaries, she was better known as a department
factionalist than a researcher. Yung-chen Chiang cites Grace Boynton, an English
teacher at Yanjing, in a letter to her family as claiming that Yanjing was “a perfect
hornets’ nest” with Newell at the center. Yung-chen Chiang, Social Engineering
and the Social Sciences in China, 1919–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 237.
41. Wellesley Alumnae Quarterly (October 1920), 65.
42. Arland Thornton, Reading History Sideways: The Fallacy and Enduring Impact of
the Developmental Paradigm on Family Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2013).
43. Thornton, Reading History Sideways.
44. Fabio Lanza, Behind the Gate: Inventing Students in Beijing (New York: Columbia
45. Chiang, Social Engineering.
46. The New Youth 5 (1918): 637, quoted in Newell, “The Chinese Family,” 570.
47. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May
Fourth Movement of 1919 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 107. See
also Pusey, China and Charles Darwin.
48. Chen Duxiu, “Kongzi zhi dao yu xiandai shenghuo” [The way of Confucius and
modern life], Xin qingnian [New youth] 2, no. 4 (December 1916): 3– 5.
49. Chen, “The Way of Confucius,” 4.
50. Hu included a translation of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House in the special issue. Hu Shi and
Luo Jialun, “Nala” [A Doll’s House], Xin qingnian [New youth] 4, no. 6 (June 1918).
51. Chen Hengzhe (Sophia H. Chen Zen), ed., Symposium on Chinese Culture (Shang-
hai: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1931).
52. Katrina Gulliver, “Sophia Chen Zen and Westernized Chinese Feminism,” Jour-
nal of Chinese Overseas 4, no. 2 (2008): 258–74.
53. In addition to his work as a sociologist and as a cultural commentator in the New
Youth, Tao served as a professor at Beijing University, director of the Institute of
Social Sciences at Academia Sinica, and research secretary at the Institute
of Pacific Relations.
54. Chen, Symposium. A title search on the library database Worldcat lists 219 entries
for the book in an international list of libraries that includes Hong Kong, Japan,
Australia, Israel, Great Britain, and the United States. The historian Chen Heng-
zhe was comfortable writing in English and Chinese, publishing Chinese short
stories and essays in the New Youth as well as publishing books and articles in
English under the name Sophia H. Chen Zen.
55. H. D. Fong, Reminiscences of a Chinese Economist at 70 (Singapore: South Seas
Society, 1975). Fong, the second head of the Nankai Economics Institute, did not
join Franklin Ho at the 1931 IPR conference, but as Fong noted in his memoirs, he
attended the eighth IPR conference in Canada in 1942.
56. Chen, Symposium, 305. The article was also printed in the journal Pacific Affairs.
See Sophia H. Chen Zen, “China’s Changing Culture,” Pacific Affairs 4, no. 12
(December 1931): 1070– 81.
57. Chen, “China’s Changing Culture.”
58. Ernest G. Osborne, “Problems of the Chinese Family,” Marriage and Family Liv-
ing 10, no. 1 (Winter/February 1948): 8.
59. According to the historian Tong Lam, Republican-era China became a social lab-
oratory of modernity with Chinese and foreign social scientists experimenting in
a variety of practices to understand Chinese society. Tong Lam, A Passion for
Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation State, 1900–1949
60. D. W. Y. Kwok argues that Chinese intellectuals were concerned less with scien-
tific research than they were with using science to discredit traditional values
and support their social, moral, and political agenda, and that adherents to “sci-
entism” used “the respectability of science in areas having little bearing on sci-
ence itself.” Revisiting the “scientism” argument, the historian Wang Hui out-
lines a longer history of “scientific” intellectual inquiry in China, arguing that
nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers did not mistakenly impose the sci-
entific method on non-scientific matters; rather, they translated and debated
Western scientific ideas in the context of a Chinese intellectual tradition that
identified an “organic connection among the universe, the world, society, and
life,” with science defining people’s political and moral behaviors. D. W. Y Kwok,
Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1965), 3; and Wang Hui, “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science,’” 68.
61. Christian universities like Yanjing were pioneers in survey research in China,
with faculty such as Sidney Gamble producing multiple volumes of research on
Beijing society. Other American pioneers who worked in the field in China were
C. G. Dittmer at Qinghua College and John Stewart Burgess at Yanjing University.
See Chiang, Social Engineering.
62. According to Yung-chen Chiang, the development of the social sciences in China
in the twentieth century was driven by foreign funding agencies like the Rocke-
feller Foundation, which often drove research by only funding certain research.
In Chiang, Social Engineering.
63. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education in 1945, of the 311 foreign PhDs,
more than 40 had received their PhDs in the United States. The same report,
which recorded the highest degree obtained abroad including doctorate, mas-
ter’s, and bachelor’s degrees, recorded that a total of 108 Chinese social scientists
had studied in the United States, 42 in France, 38 in Japan (BA and other only), 27
in Great Britain, and 14 in Germany. Sun, “The Development of the Social Sci-
ences,” 349– 50.
64. Sun, “The Development of the Social Sciences,” 348.
65. Erik Grimmer-Solem, “Engel’s Law,” in Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture, ed.
Dale Southerton (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2011), 528–29.
66. For a criticism of Engel’s exclusive focus on the working class, see A. G. Warner,
“Engel’s Family Budgets,” Publications of the American Statistical Association 5,
no. 33 (March 1896): 58– 61.
67. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: A. M. Kelley, 1975)
[reprint].
68. See for example, Sidney Gamble, How Chinese Families Live in Peiping: A Study of
the Income and Expenditure of 283 Chinese Families Receiving from $8 to $550 Silver
per Month (New York: Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1933); Gamble, Peking, a Social
Survey Conducted under the Auspices of the Princeton University Center in China and
the Peking Young Men’s Christian Association (New York: George H. Doran, 1921);
Tao Menghe, Livelihood in Peking: An Analysis of the Budgets of Sixty Families (Bei-
jing: Social Research Department, China Foundation for the Promotion of Educa-
tion and Culture, 1928); Tao Menghe (L. K. Tao) and Yang Ximeng (Simon Yang), A
Study of the Standard of Living of Working Families in Shanghai (Peiping: Institute of
Social Research, 1931); H. D. Lamson, “Standard of Living of Factory Workers,”
Chinese Economic Journal 7 (1930): 1240– 56; Ava B. Milam, A Study of the Student
Homes; and Lin Sung-ho, Factory Workers in Tangku (Beiping: Social Research
Dept., China Foundation for the Promotion of Education and Culture, 1928).
69. Gamble, Peking: A Social Survey, xv.
70. Engel’s theory that clothing expenditures remained stable as income increased
did not hold for Gamble’s Beijing data, in which the percentage spent on clothes
increased with a rise in income. Moreover, on other expenses such as funerals or

weddings, Gamble noted that “the amount spent for the different items varies, of
course, with the tastes and social position of the family.” Gamble, How Chinese
Families Live, 203.
71. Gamble, How Chinese Families Live, 57– 58.
72. Gamble, How Chinese Families Live, 12; see also Sidney D. Gamble, The Household
Accounts of Two Chinese Families (New York: China Institute in America, 1931).
73. Tao and Yang, Working Families in Shanghai, 21. For the history of housing in
treaty-port Shanghai, see Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai
in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
74. Lamson, “Standard of Living of Factory Workers.”
75. H. D. Lamson, “Population Studies: Size of the Chinese Family in Relation to
Occupation, Age and Education,” Chinese Economic Journal 11 (1932).
76. Lamson, “Standard of Living of Factory Workers.”
77. Lamson even reported almost the exact same percentage spent on food by Shang-
hai workers as Tao and Yang (56 percent for Lamson and 56.6 percent for Tao and
Yang), in Lamson “Standard of Living of Factory Workers.” Tao and Yang, Work-
ing Families in Shanghai.
78. Lin, Factory Workers in Tangku, 55 and 71. The “greater” native place family and
the local resident family in Lin’s study are not the same sample group, although
there may be overlaps between the samples.
79. Milam, A Study of Student Homes.
80. Even this self-report survey constrained respondents’ choices: respondents could
decide whom to include in their family, but they were still confined to several
multiple-choice responses outlined in the questionnaire. Milam, A Study of Stu-
dent Homes.
81. Milam, A Study of Student Homes; Tao and Yang, Working Families in Shanghai, 23;
and Gamble, How Chinese Families Live, 20.
82. Milam’s respondents tended to be middle and higher class. Under “type of fam-
ily,” Milam also asked about class through occupational group—“student, official,
shopkeeper, farmer, or boatclass, etc.” Milam concluded that the majority of stu-
dents came from the “merchant class” (336), with the second- and third-largest
groups coming from the “student and teacher” (126) and “official class” (127).
Milam, A Study of Student Homes.
83. Lamson, “Population Studies.”
84. Lamson, “Population Studies”; Gamble, How Chinese Families Live; and Tao and
Yang, Working Families in Shanghai.
85. Lamson, “Population Studies.”
86. Margaret Sanger’s talk at Beijing University was covered widely in popular jour-
nals such as Dongfang zazhi (Eastern miscellany) and Funü zazhi (The ladies’
journal). Hiroko Sakamoto, “The Cult of ‘Love and Eugenics’ in May Fourth
Movement Discourse,” trans. Rebecca Jennison, positions 12, no. 2 (2004).
87. According to these comparisons, the “modern” countries of northwest Europe

and the United States were usually described as having families of between four
and five people. See, for example, Chen, Dictionary of Social Problems.
88. See Bettina Gransow, “The Social Sciences in China,” in The Cambridge History of
Science, vol. 7, The Modern Social Sciences, ed. Theodore M. Porter and Dorothy
Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 507; and Weili Ye, Seeking
Modernity in China’s Name: Chinese Students in the United States, 1900–1927 (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 180.
89. Sun Benwen, Shehuixue yuanli [Principles of sociology] (Taibei: Taiwan shangwu
yinshu guan, 1971) [Reprint of 1935 text].
90. Mai Huiting, Jiating gaizao wenti (Problems of family change) (Shanghai: Shang-
hai Commercial Press, 1935), reprinted in Zhongguo minzu xuehui minzu congshu
(Folklore and Folk Literature Series of National Peking University and Chinese
Association for Folklore) (Taibei: Dongfang wenhua shuju, 1973), vols. 82 and 83.
91. Mai, Problems of Family Change.
92. Mai, Problems of Family Change, 53– 67.
93. Mai, Problems of Family Change, 78.
94. Even after settling in the United States after the war, Lang never joined the ranks
of social scientists, instead studying Chinese literature and eventually teaching
Russian language at Swarthmore College.
95. Olga Lang, Chinese Family and Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1946), 16. Francis Hsu supported Lang’s assertions, claiming that recent field
studies had found the average family size to be about five. In Francis Lang-Kwang
Hsu, “The Myth of Chinese Family Size,” American Journal of Sociology 48, no. 5
(March 1943): 555– 62.
96. Conducting fieldwork in the 1960s, Myron Cohen discovered, by contrast, that at
least for the southern Taiwanese village of Yen-liao, large extended families were
common regardless of socioeconomic status. Myron Cohen, House United, House
Divided: The Chinese Family in Taiwan (New York: Columbia University Press,
1976).
97. First, Lang noted that families in industrialized cities like Hong Kong and the
treaty ports were more likely to be conjugal (81 percent, according to her count)
than families in non-industrial provincial capitals (51 percent) or in villages
(24 percent). According to Lang, in the cities, conjugal families were popular
on both ends of the economic spectrum— with poor workers who could not
afford to bring their parents to the city and with upper- class professionals, offi-
cials, and educators who had come into contact with Western-style learning
and ideals favoring conjugal families. Lang noted that in Beiping, economic
security led to joint family living for middle- class professionals in “tradition-
bound” careers, such as businessmen, landlords, and shop managers. Lang,
Chinese Family, 142.
98. Lang, Chinese Family, especially chapter 12, “The Type and Size of the Family.”
99. Myron Cohen notes that Lang introduced the terms “conjugal,” “stem,” and
“joint” to Chinese family studies in Cohen, House United, House Divided, 61.
100. Lang, Chinese Family, 14.
101. Olga Lang and Ba Jin, Pa Chin and His Writings: Chinese Youth between the Two
Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard East Asian Studies, 1967), 2.
102. Tianjin City Government, Tianjin-shi zhengfu zhiyuan zhuangkuang tongji [Statis-
tics on the condition of Tianjin city government workers] (1931).
103. Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao
[Report on the registration of family conditions], j2– 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815,
5816, 5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946). Sources from the Tianjin Municipal Archives
are hereafter referred to as TMA; they include the title and file number when
available. I visited the Tianjin Municipal Archives on several trips between
June 2005 and August 2011. I have listed the document information according to
how it was listed when I consulted it.
104. The surveys were most likely conducted in the spirit of what the historian Tong
Lam has termed “a passion for facts,” in which the social fact became an instru-
ment of government. Lam, A Passion for Facts.
105. When hiring survey takers from the Shehui ju, H. D. Fong of Nankai University’s
Economic Research Institute complained that he had to first train them in social
scientific techniques. Chiang, Social Engineering; and H. D. Fong, Reminiscences of
a Chinese Economist at 70 (Singapore: South Seas Society, 1975).
106. TMA, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao.
107. The sample sizes were 1,707 for 1931 and 808 for 1946. The 1946 results were tab-
ulated based on surviving copies of surveys in the Tianjin Municipal Archives.
The sample size for 1946 may have been greater than what is available in surviv-
ing surveys. Tianjin City Government, Tianjin-shi zhengfu zhiyuan zhuangkuang
tongji . and TMA, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao.
108. Comparatively, in 1940, the average size of the American nuclear family was 3.15,
and only about one-fourth of all families included adult relatives. United States
Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Sixteenth Census of the United
States; 1940, (Washington DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1944).
109. U.S. Census, Sixteenth Census (1940).
110. All names of private individuals appearing in the Tianjin Municipal Archives have
been changed.
111. TMA, Report on the registration of family conditions. The discrepancy between
police numbers and the rest of government employees could also be due to how
the surveys were administered. We will never know if different departments were
given different verbal instructions in how to fill out the forms.
112. Writing after World War II and in the midst of China’s civil war, the Chinese
American anthropologist Rose Hum Lee noted that due to the weak Chinese
state, Chinese people relied on the family rather than the state to provide services
such as local governance, business management, and relief provisions. Rose Hum
Lee, “Research on the Chinese Family,” American Journal of Sociology 54, no. 6,
(May 1949): 497– 504.
113. Lee, “Research on the Chinese Family.”
114. Tianjin tebie shi shehuiju (hereafter Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs), Annual
Report (1929).
115. Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs, Annual Report (1929). On night schools for work-
ers (male and female), see also TMA, Minjiaoguan funü yinranban (The printing
office of the people’s education), j113–107 (1939).
116. The Shehui ju conducted surveys especially of workers as a “social problem.” They
surveyed local industries and working conditions and wrote that “in a capitalist
system” one could “profit the individual and raise capital while at the same time
not ignoring the worker.” These surveys may not have been as “academic” as
those conducted by professional researchers like H. D. Fong. For discussion of
surveys in Tianjin, see Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs, Annual Report (1929), 268.
The Shanghai Shehui ju also conducted social surveys on workers. A survey on
worker families’ cost of living published in 1932, for example, was conducted in
response to the high amount of labor unrest in the city in 1927 and 1928. Shanghai
Bureau of Social Affairs, Shanghaishi gongren shenghuo fei zhishu minguo shiwu-
nian zhi ershinian [The cost of living index numbers of laborers: Greater Shang-
hai, January 1926–December 1931] (Shanghai: City Government Bureau of Social
Affairs, 1932).
117. Most night schools were targeted to women. See TMA, Funü shizi ban, funü buxi
ban [Female literacy, female cram school], j113–273 (1939); TMA, Guanyu funü
bianzhi ban [Regarding female weaving/knitting classes], j113–329 (1939); TMA,
Guanyu gezhong xuanchuan zhou [Regarding various propaganda], j113–389
(1941), 3–4; TMA, Minjiaoguan funü zhiye ban [People’s education, women’s job
school], j113– 93 (1939–40).
118. TMA, Funü jiujiyuan zaosong shijiu niandu linshi yusuan shu Tianjinshi shehuiju
[Women’s relief organization report on 19-year budget, Tianjin Bureau of Social
Affairs], j25–2987 (1931).
119. TMA, Funü jiuji yuan jisuanshu tianjinshi funü jiujiyuan [Women’s Tianjin City
relief organization account book, Tianjin women’s relief organization], j54–3313
(1929).
120. For an overview of Shehui ju activities, see Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs,
Annual Report. On housing for working women, see TMA, Benyuan funü buji
gongchang tiangai fangwu, Tianjinshi jiuji yuan [The women’s division of this
bureau building factory housing, Tianjin relief organization], j131– 815 (1939). For
night schools that taught classes to women ranging from basic literacy to mathe-
matics and the technical arts, see TMA, j113–273, (1939); TMA, j113–329 (1939);
TMA, j113–389 (1941), 3–4; TMA, j113– 93 (1939–40).
3. Property, Power, and Identity 287
121. TMA, Tianjin jiujiyuan guanyu benyuan funü suoyuan sheng zeye [Tianjin City
relief organization—regarding women selecting careers], j131–1-742 (1937).
122. See, for example, Tim Futing Liao, “Were Past Chinese Families Complex?
Household Structures during the Tang Dynasty, 618– 907 AD,” Continuity and
Change 16, no. 3 (December 2001): 331– 55.
3. PROPERTY, POWER, AND IDENTITY IN

A COLONIAL- CAPITALIST CITY
2. Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese
Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Bettine
Birge, Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960–
1368), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Patricia Buckley Ebrey,
Family and Property in Sung China: Yuan Ts’ai’s Precepts for Social Life (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); and Man Xu, Crossing the Gate: Everyday
Lives of Women in Song, Fujian (960–1279) (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2016).
3. Kathryn Bernhardt, Women and Property in China: 960–1949 (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1999), 123.
4. Liu Haiyan, Kongjian yu shehui: Jindai Tianjin chengshi de yanbian [Space and
society: contemporary Tianjin City’s changes] (Tianjin: Tianjin shehui kexueyuan
chubanshe, 2003), 111.
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 107–13.
6. Marie- Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans.
Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
7. British Municipal Council (hereafter BMC) Minutes, 1935.
8. Tani Barlow, “Colonialism’s Career in Postwar China Studies,” positions 1, no. 1
(1993): 224– 67; Gail Hershatter, “The Subaltern Talks Back: Reflections on Subal-
tern Theory and Chinese History,” positions 1, no. 1 (1993): 103–30; Shih Shu-mei,
The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic
Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2004).
9. Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (New York:
International Publishers, 1939, first published 1916).
10. S. W. A., “Review of Otto Hubner’s Geographisch-Statistische Tabellen Aller
Lander der Erde. 42. Ausgabe fur das Jahr 1893,” Publications of the American Sta-
tistical Association 4, no. 25/26 (1894): 46–48.
288 3. Property, Power, and Identity
11. Sun Yat-sen, “Lecture 2,” in Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 2, ed. William Theo-
dore de Bary, Wing-tsit Chan, and Burton Watson (New York: Columbia Univer-
sity Press, 1964), 15–16.
12. Mao Zedong, The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party (Beijing:
Foreign Language Press, 1954, first published 1939).
13. Pär Kristoffer Cassel, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power
in Nineteenth- Century China and Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012),
15.
14. Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 188.
15. On architectural design and urban planning in the French colonies, see Gwendo-
lyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1991).
16. Maurizio Marinelli, “Making Concessions in Tianjin: Heterotopia and Italian
Colonialism in Mainland China,” Urban History 36, no. 3 (December 2009): 399–
425; and Marinelli, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Colonial Italy Reflects on
Tianjin (1901–1947),” in “Global Cities, Transtext(e)s-Transcultures,” special
issue, Journal of Global Cultural Studies 3 (2007): 119– 50.
17. The Japanese school was the largest with 400 students in 1923, followed by the
British at half the size. Otto D. Rasmussen, Tientsin: An Illustrated Outline History
(Tianjin: Tientsin Press, 1925).
18. BMC Minutes, 1932.
20. In his memoirs of his Tianjin childhood, Brian Power, who was born to an Irish
father and Irish-French mother, recalls a local Jesuit brother instructing his
mother that her sons should have a Catholic rather than British education, thereby
resulting in his transfer from the British School to the French Jesuit-run Marist
Brothers School (where instruction was in French and English). Power, The Ford of
Heaven (New York: M. Kesend, 1984), 63.
22. Even in the face of the most urgent threats, such as restoring order after the Boxer
Uprising, there were stories of international fighting between soldiers. See vari-
ous reports of soldiers fighting in TPG meeting minutes, Procés-verbaux des
séances du Gouvernement Provisoire de Tientsin (Baguo lianjun lingshilu) The China
Times, 1902 [reprint, Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, 2004].
23. The contrast between Japan’s educational policy in its Tianjin concession and in
its Taiwanese and Korean colonies offers insight into the diversity of concession
colonialism. In Tianjin, the Japanese, like the British, set up a Japanese school to
educate Japanese children as subjects of the Japanese empire. In Taiwan and
Korea, by contrast, they instituted a school system for local children as part of an
increasingly authoritarian system to transform members of the colony into impe-
rial subjects. See Patricia E. Tsurumi, “Colonial Education in Korea and Taiwan,”
in The Japanese Colonial Empire, 1895–1945, ed. Ramon Myers and Mark Peattie
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 275–311; and Leo Ching,
“Between Assimilation and Imperialization: From Colonial Projects to Imperial
Subjects,” chap. 3 in Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Iden-
tity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 89–132.
24. Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity; and Rasmussen, Tientsin.
25. Elizabeth Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 1785–1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1989).
26. William G. Skinner, ed., The City in Late Imperial China (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1977), especially F. W. Mote, “The Transformation of Nanking,
1350–1400,” 101–54.
27. Italian Concession Municipal Government, “Notice for Land Auction” (1908);
Rasmussen, Tientsin; and Marinelli, “Making Concessions in Tianjin.”
28. Tianjinshi fangdichan guanliju (Tianjin Gazetteer Office), Tianjin fangdichan zhi
[Tianjin housing and real estate Gazetteer] (Tianjin: Tianjin Academy of Social
Sciences Press, 1999).
29. Herbert Hoover, a resident of Tianjin in the early 1900s, was also a member of the
founding board. See Liu Haiyan, Tianjin zujie shehui yanjiu [A study of Tianjin’s con-
cession society] (Tianjin: People’s Press, 1994), 50; and Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 70.
30. Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 93.
31. Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 735, 752.
34. Tianjin fangdichan zhi, 735. A prominent Manchu, Rong Yuan was the minister of
domestic affairs under the Qing and father to Gobulo Wan Rong, wife of Emperor
Puyi.
36. Bergère, Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, esp. 178, 182, 185.
37. Teemu Ruskola, Legal Orientalism: China, the United States, and Modern Law
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Jonathan Ocko, “The
Missing Metaphor: Applying Western Legal Scholarship to the Study of Contract
and Property in Early Modern China,” in Contract and Property in Early Modern
China, ed. Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2004): 178–205.
38. According to Neo- Confucian ideals of social order, scholars topped the social
hierarchy, followed by farmers, artisans, and merchants. In practice, however, as
Man Bun Kwan argues, by the late Qing, salt merchants in Tianjin had begun to
carve out an alternative social space for themselves, providing public resources
and services that the Qing government was increasingly unable to provide. Man
Bun Kwan, The Salt Merchants of Tianjin: State-Making and Civil Society in Late
Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001).
39. Liu Haiyan, Kongjian yu shehui.
40. Liu Haiyan, Kongjian yu shehui, 276.

41. By the 1920s, Chinese guidebooks were calling the former market district in the
northeast unsanitary (bu weisheng). Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, 204.
42. In a survey of Tianjin civil servants taken in 1946, respondents were required to
report their address. They listed addresses throughout the city. Some even listed
an address in the “former xxx concession.” In Tianjin Municipal Archives (here-
after TMA), Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao [Report on the registration of family
conditions], j2– 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815, 5816, 5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946).
While most compradors lived in the foreign concessions, Xu Pu’an, a native of
Tianjin, chose to live in a courtyard house in the old Chinese city. For more on Xu
Pu’an’s house, see chapter 4.
43. Italian Concession Municipal Government, Local Land Regulations.
44. In addition to Liang Qichao, Italian concession residents included warlords Chen
Guangyuan and Tang Yulin; government officials Cao Kun, Zhang Tinge, Cheng
Ke, Zhou Longguang, Qi Yaoshan, and Bao Guiqin; playwright Cao Yu; and cal-
ligrapher Hua Shiku. Marinelli, “Making Concessions in Tianjin,” 413–14.
45. BMC Report, 1920.
46. The Japanese concession included distinct areas for commercial and public ser-
vice building, and neighborhoods tended to be inhabited by residents with a
shared background in national origin and income level. This urban development,
however, does not seem to have been deliberately zoned. Moreover, the conces-
sion was much more densely populated than its European counterparts and
included such unsavory elements as industrial factories, gambling parlors, opium
dens, and brothels. Wan Lujian, Jindai Tianjin Riben qiaomin yanjiu [A study of
Japanese nationals in modern Tianjin] (Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Press, 2010),
109, 115–17.
47. On the mixing of residences and businesses in Shanghai alleyway or lilong neigh-
borhoods, see Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early
Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
48. Gustav Schwenning, “An Attack on Shanghai Slums,” Social Forces 6, no. 1 (1927):
125–31.
50. BMC Building and Sanitary By-laws, 1936.
51. Italian Concession Municipal Government, Local Land Regulations and General
Rules, 1908.
52. Madeleine Zelin, “A Critique of Property in Prewar China,” in Zelin, Ocko, and
Gardella, Contract and Property, 17–36.
53. Zelin, “A Critique of Property in Prewar China.”
54. Ocko, “The Missing Metaphor.”
55. O. F. Wisner, “The Experiment in Constitutional Government in China,” North
American Review 189, no. 642 (1909): 731–39; Chester Lloyd Jones, “Republican
Government in China,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social

Science 39 (January 1912): 26–38.
56. Wisner, “The Experiment in Constitutional Government.”
57. Most likely due to the scarcity of archival materials from the Tianjin local govern-
ment during the early years of the Republic, there has been very little research
done on how the local government structure changed from Yuan Shikai’s late
Qing government to the early Republic system under Yuan, and then to the Nan-
jing Decade system in the late 1920s and 1930s. Reports on national constitu-
tional reform suggest that there were changes in voter rolls in Tianjin during the
election of the National People’s Congress. According to an American observer at
the time, Tianjin had a turnout of 60,000 voters, including members of labor
unions and people who were not literate, as well as two-thirds who were classified
as “merchants and shop-keepers.” A “special order” limited this pool to directors
and heads of firms, which reduced the electorate to 30,000; only 17,267 votes
were cast in the end. John A. Fairlie, “Constitutional Developments in China,”
American Political Science Review 25, no. 4 (November 1931): 1016–22.
58. Wan Lujian, Jindai Tianjin Riben qiaomin yanjiu.
59. The French concession did not begin to discuss allowing Chinese property own-
ers to vote until 1928, at which time they looked to the British Municipal Council
as an example. Memo, Box 6 (1928), Archives diplomatiques du France (hereafter
ADF), Nantes, France.
60. BMC, Local Land Regulations and General Regulations, Tianjin, 1900.
61. Meeting of Landrenters and Ratepayers of the British Concession Tientsin, Feb-
ruary 29, 1916.
62. BMC Report, Tianjin, 1918.
64. BMC Report, 1922, 191.
65. BMC Report, 1922, 191.
67. BMC Minutes from the Extraordinary General Meeting of Electors, 1927.
70. BMC Minutes of the Eighteenth Annual General Meeting, 1936.
71. Margaret Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty: Marriage, Law, and Society in Early Twentieth-
Century China (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).
72. Bray, Technology and Gender.
73. Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty, 15–16.
74. Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty; and Kathryn Bernhardt, “Women and the Law: Divorce
in the Republican Period” in Civil Law in Qing and Republican China, ed. Kathryn
Bernhardt, Philip C. Huang, and Mark A. Allee (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 1994): 187–214.
75. Bernhardt, Women and Property, 102– 03.

76. Bernhardt, Women and Property.
79. Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty, 5.
80. TMA, Tianjin Municipal Government, Memo, August 1929.
81. TMA, tax records for: Ms. Wang C, 56– 6-4531 (1935); TMA, Tax records for Ms.
Zhang, 56– 9-11506 (1941); and TMA, tax records for Ms. Li, 56–1624822 (1931).
82. TMA, Ms. Wang; and TMA, tax records for Ms. Zhu, 56– 6-4531 (1935).
83. Bernhardt, Women and Property; and Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty.
84. ADF, Order Bureau of Foreign Affairs for the Province of Chihli, November 25,
1927.
85. ADF, Letter from Tientsin Trust Company on behalf of Client, November 4,
1938.
86. ADF. Letter from Tientsin Land Investment Company, August 26, 1937.
87. The French diplomatic archives provide insights onto disputes over property
located in the Concession. Archival materials related to private property in Tian-
jin before 1949 are currently not available to researchers at the Tianjin Municipal
Archives.
88. ADF, letter from Richard T. Evans Attorney at Law, March 1930. All Chinese
names of non-public figures listed in ADF files have been changed.
89. Myron Cohen, “Writs of Passage in Late Imperial China: The Documentation of
Practical Understandings in Minong, Taiwan,” in Zelin, Ocko, and Gardella, Con-
tract and Property, 37– 93.
90. Elite families in late imperial China often named their houses. The Peabody
Essex Museum’s Ming-era house Yinyutang is one example.
91. The family also may have been trying to avoid paying transfer taxes.
92. Kuo, Intolerable Cruelty.
93. Unfortunately, we do not know if and how the local Chinese court ruled on this
case since the Tianjin Municipal Archives has not opened any legal records con-
cerning property.
94. ADF, Henry K. Chang letter, May 1930.
95. “Obituary: Mrs. Henry Chang, Wife of Ex-Diplomat,” New York Times, April 20,
1957; and Werner Bamberger, “Henry K. Chang, 92: Chinese Nationalist Held
Envoy Posts,” New York Times, February 23, 1977.
96. Contemporaneous observers of real estate in Tianjin noted that property, and
especially property belonging to Chinese government officials and warlords, was
often registered in the name of a dummy corporation or an individual other than
the owner. See for example, Charles Dailey, “The Crime of the Tianjin Conces-
sions,” Chinese Students’ Monthly (March 1924): 49– 56 [reprint].
97. Who’s Who in China: Biographies of Chinese Leaders (Ministry of Interior, National
Government of China: 1932).
4. Choosing a House 293
98. Henry K. Chang, “China: A New Family Portrait,” The Rotarian (April 1931): 9–11,
44.
99. Chang, “China: A New Family Portrait,” 9, 44.
100. Chang, “China: A New Family Portrait.”
101. Who’s Who in China; and “Young Chang Formerly of Washington Enters U. of P.
Law Department,” Washington Times, October 23, 1906.
102. “Chang Yin Tang, Chinese Minister, Here to Replace the Smiling Wu,” San Fran-
cisco Call, December 11, 1909.
103. “Chang to Replace Wu”; and Edward B. Clark, “Washington’s Americanized For-
eign Colony,” Perrysburg Journal, October 13, 1911. Clark’s article was widely
syndicated.
104. Reports from the Daily Bee, October 2, 1910; and from Tribune, November 18,
1910.
105. “Charming Young Chinese Girl to Christen Cruiser: Alice Chang, Daughter of
Diplomat Will Act Sponsor for ‘Feihung,’ ” Washington Times, May 4, 1912.
106. “Charming Young Chinese Girl to Christen Cruiser.”
107. “Diplomatic Family Going Home: Radical Sartorial Change in Changs,” San
Francisco Call, June 23, 1913.
108. See Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity, on how water became the cornerstone of the
BMC’s hygienic modernity.
109. See BMC Reports.
112. According to Mr. Tsao, it cost $3 more per 10,000 gallons. Tsao also complained
about the salty taste. BMC Minutes, 1936.
114. John Tosh argues that the home was a central site of masculine identity in Victo-
rian England. Not only was the home the most visible badge of a man’s social posi-
tion (moving house meant moving up or down the social ladder, almost literally
so), but the home was viewed as refuge from the negativity of the work world that
made men whole again. John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-
Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999).
4. CHOOSING A HOUSE
1. For a summary of Tianjin’s demographics and growth, see chapter 3.

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 92– 93.
3. Li Jie, Yingzao fashi (Beijing: Zhongguo shu dian, 1989, originally published 1103).
4. Klaas Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China: A Study of the
Fifteenth- Century Carpenter’s Manual Lu Ban jing (Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993),
294 4. Choosing a House
27; Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chi-
nese Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Feng Jiren, Archi-
tecture and Metaphor: Song Culture in the Yingzao Fashi Building Manual (Hono-
lulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2012).
5. For example, when building a grade-one building, such as a large hall, one fen
equaled .6 Song dynasty inches (1.97 cm), while a fen in a grade-one structure like
a garden pavilion was half the size at 0.3 Song inches (0.99 cm). Ledderose, Ten
Thousand Things, 135.
6. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 28.
7. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China.
10. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 62, 74.
11. Ronald G. Knapp, China’s Vernacular Architecture: House, Form and Culture
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1989), 35.
12. Late imperial China witnessed a popularization of geomantic technology in com-
mon dwellings. The earliest geomantic building practices were solely concerned
with choosing a proper site for a structure. In the Song dynasty, a new school of
geomancy emerged that was concerned with determining and correcting favor-
able and unfavorable locations. For urban houses especially, this meant that if
households could not choose the most auspicious location on which to construct
their dwelling, they could build or adjust their houses accordingly. Ruitenbeek,
Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 55.
13. Ruitenbeek also defines geomancy as an aesthetic in Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and
Building in Late Imperial China, 55. See also Ronald G. Knapp, China’s Traditional
Rural Architecture: A Cultural Geography of the Common House (Honolulu: Univer-
sity of Hawai’i Press, 1986), 1.
14. Facing south was geomantically auspicious, but also practical, since southern
exposure offered the most heat and light.
15. Lothar Ledderose describes how Chinese practices of “modularity” apply not
only to architecture but also to calligraphy, bronze casting, manufacturing, art,
and even cooking, in Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things.
16. Most dwellings include an odd number of jian— one, three, or five—arranged
crosswise. Knapp, China’s Vernacular Architecture, 34.
17. The size of courtyards varied regionally. Courtyards in northern cities like Tian-
jin or Beijing tended to be larger than their southern counterparts to allow for
maximum natural light during cold winters.
23. Before the Song, sumptuary laws institutionalized distinctions in building; only
elite homes were built on a north-south axis with the ancestor tablets at the center
of the home. After the Song, all homes were to be built according to these shared
sociopolitical architectural principles. Late imperial sumptuary laws, from the
Song onward, reinforced this basic unity of form by regulating only the extent to
which households could expand or adorn their houses and not whether they could
be built consistent with auspicious practices. Scholars have also noted that a
change in sumptuary laws facilitated the unification in building practices and
social uses of domestic space. Fourteenth-century Ming sumptuary laws, for
example, stated that “common people” could not build structures larger than
three bays ( jian). Bray notes that a shift in sumptuary laws beginning in the Song
allowed for a standardization of the “basic social and cultural structure of the
Chinese house . . . at all levels of society,” in Bray, Technology and Gender, 90.
Ronald G. Knapp has also noted that Ming and Qing sumptuary laws, though
“formulated to preserve Confucian status distinctions, also contributed to the
standardization, modularization, and stylization of Chinese houses,” in Knapp,
China’s Old Dwellings (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000), 23.
24. According to Bray, someone living in a one-room house would have ritual and
social spaces similar to the palace. Without separate rooms, they would simply
mark these spaces with furniture or a curtain. Bray, Technology and Gender, 74.
25. Knapp, China’s Vernacular Architecture, 51– 53.
26. Xin Tianjin huabao 2, no. 22 (1940): 1.
27. Shen Yiyun (Mme. Huang Fu), Reminiscences of Huang Shen I- yun (Chinese Oral
History Project Collection of Reminiscences, Columbia University, 1962). The
financials cited in this chapter should be understood within the context of the
individual source. Currency in Republican-era China was very unstable and
complicated. I include amounts quoted in my various sources even if equivancies
and currency types (taels to dollars, for instance) are not clearly specified to docu-
ment that people were discussing what they paid for goods and services. National
currency was not unified until 1935. See Brent Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times:
Money, Banks, and State- Society Relations in Republican Tianjin (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2003).
28. According to Shen, the Italian Concession forbade gambling in private homes and
would often levy fines on private mahjong parties. In Shen, Reminiscences. Ironi-
cally, the Italian Concession had also constructed a multistory entertainment
club in art deco style that hosted a casino and a jai alai court. The proceeds of
these “public” gambling revenues are believed to have funded Italian colonial
ventures in Ethiopia.
29. Shen, Reminiscences.
33. Shen recalls Qiu Jin visiting the family compound. Qiu Jin was a feminist educa-
tor, activist, and anti- Qing revolutionary who was publicly executed after a failed
assassination attempt on a Qing official. Shen, Reminiscences.
34. Marie- Claire Bergère asserts that prominent families of the new entrepreneurial
class that rose after World War I reinforced their social standing and social ties
through arranged marriages between families in Bergère, The Golden Age of the
Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1989). The Song sisters, being daughters of a prominent banker and
businessman, provide a good example of forging family social ties through mar-
riage. The eldest married a wealthy banker, the second married Sun Yat-sen, and
the youngest married Chiang Kai-shek.
35. See chapter 2 for more on Tao Menghe.
37. John Benjamin Powell, Who’s Who in China; Containing the Pictures and Biogra-
phies of China’s Best Known Political, Financial, Business and Professional Men
(Shanghai: China Weekly Review, 1925), 379– 81.
38. Shen, Reminiscences; and Powell, Who’s Who in China, 379– 81.
39. Hu Shi’s oral history is also housed in the same oral history collection at Colum-
bia, and it also was published. Shen’s memoirs were never published.
42. While Shen may not have dwelled on the details of her social and political status,
her membership in an elite political and social group was certainly important,
enabling her memoirs to be collected and stored at Columbia University.
43. Tianjin Municipal Archives (TMA), Hebei Postal Administration Office, Guanyu
caiwu hui bokuan xiang piao kuan yishi jiaju gongju shebei de laiwang hanjian [Cor-
respondence regarding finances, remittances, furniture, and equipment], w2–295
(1924). See note 27 above regarding complexities in document Republican-era
currencies per Sheehan, Trust in Troubled Times.
44. While the post office agreed to reimburse a foreign clerk who had transferred to
Tianjin for first-class passage for himself and family, for example, it would only
reimburse his Chinese maid’s first- class transport at the rate of third class. TMA,
w2–295 (1924).
45. The Mandarin transliteration of his name is Song Shuo.
46. TMA, w2–295 (1924).
47. TMA, w2–295 (1924).
48. TMA, w2–295 (1924).
49. TMA, w2–295 (1924).
50. TMA, w2–295 (1924).
51. TMA, Haiho Conservancy, Youguan dichan gouzhi jiaju gouzhi, yiji hedao wenti de
shiwu lianxi de laiwang wenjian [Documents related to property and furniture pur-
chasing as well as miscellaneous problems related to the riverway], w3– 66 (1926).
52. Lu Hanchao argues that in the nineteenth century, Shanghai produced the first
modern real estate market in China with mass-produced alleyway homes (lilong
fangzi). According to Lu, cities in imperial China had a small rental market for
temporary sojourners, but most housing was built for personal use and not for
profit. Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twenti-
eth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 140.
53. The rise of professional architects in urban China signaled a shift in social groups
involved in building. In late imperial China, artisan- carpenters built houses for
literati and merchants. Although not as socially powerful as their employers, car-
penters possessed building knowledge that could be leveraged into improv-
ing their position. In twentieth-century urban China, architects rarely hailed
from the carpentry or artisan social groups but instead came from the same elite
groups that had commissioned carpenter-built housing in imperial China. Some
artisan-carpenters did rise to a position of social prominence equal to that of the
new professional architects. Yao Chengzu (1866–1939), for example, hailed from a
family of Suzhou artisan-carpenters and later headed Suzhou’s Lu Ban guild. Yao
also taught at a technical college and wrote a technical textbook on building in the
1920s. While successful in his own right, Yao would not have been a member of
the same kind of professional architect associations organized by foreign-trained
architectural professional elites. See Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late
Imperial China, 29.
54. Lu Yanzhi, born in Tianjin, studied at Cornell University in the 1910s; Liang
Sicheng and Chen Zhi (also known as Benjamin Chen) both studied with Paul
Cret at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1920s.
55. Tianjinshi fangdichan guanliju [Tianjin Gazetteer Office], Tianjin fangdichan zhi
Sciences Press, 1999), 753.
56. In Tianjin, it remains unclear whether some of these builders had been trained as
artisan- carpenters, whether they were enterprising men who parlayed money
and/or language skills into a new profession, or both. While the Tianjin Real
Estate Gazetteer notes the number of builders, there is no mention of carpenters.
It is unclear, for example, whether Tianjin carpenters had a guild. In imperial
China, urban carpenters were far more likely to organize into guilds than their
rural counterparts. Even as late as the Republican era, carpenters continued to
organize into a Lu Ban guild in Suzhou. In the twentieth century, however, Tian-
jin notoriously lacked guilds and unions. In her exhaustive study of workers in
Tianjin, Gail Hershatter notes that guild formation in Tianjin was at best spotty.
Though she examines some of the more prominent guilds in the city, she makes
no mention of a carpenters’ guild. Since building was such big business in the
city at the time of her study, if there had been a guild it likely would have been
prominent enough to catch her attention. Additionally, the Tianjin Real Estate
Gazetteer, in its more than 1,000-page history of building in Tianjin, does not
mention a carpenters’ guild. Further research is warranted to determine if there

were carpenters’ guilds in imperial and Republican- era Tianjin. See Ruitenbeek,
Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China, 29; Gail Hershatter, The Workers
of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1986); and Tian-
jin fangdichan zhi.
57. The journal also suggests that builders were literate, which would have set them
apart from earlier carpenters, who probably were not literate. Ruitenbeek sug-
gests that many carpenters could not read the Lu Ban Jing but carried it around as
a talisman. Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China.
58. Knapp, China’s Vernacular Architecture, 36.
59. On home economics education, see Helen M. Schneider, Keeping the Nation’s
House: Domestic Management and the Making of Modern China (Vancouver: Uni-
versity of British Columbia Press, 2011).
60. Jiaoyubu Shehui jiaoyusi [Department of education, social education], Jiating
jiaocai [Home teaching materials] (Chongqing: National Sichuan Professional
School, 1940).
61. See Kuaile jiating (Tianjin, 1923) on menu planning and advice on directing
domestic labor in the kitchen.
62. See chapter 2 for examples of Tianjin civil servants who lived in foreign conces-
sions with their extended families.
63. Yang Juanshi, Jianzhuxue ABC [The ABC’s of architecture] (Shanghai: ABC
Congshu, 1930). Other pre-1949 books on architecture and engineering in the
Tianjin Library include: Ding, Fangnei diandeng zhuangzhi gaiyao [An outline of
electric and interior design for the home] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1936);
Fangwu gongcheng [The engineering of housing] (Beiping: Huatongzhai, 1919);
Shen Zhijian, Shijie zhuming da gongcheng [World famous engineering] (Shanghai:
Yanxingshe, 1941); Tumu gongyi [Industrial arts of civil engineering] (Beijing:
Kexue huabao, Zhongguo kexue tushu yiqi gongsi, 1949); and Wang Huzhen and
Gu Shiji, eds., Mai yong tushu gongxue [Practical civil engineering] (Shanghai:
Zhongguo tushu yiqi gongsi,1949).
64. Fangwu gongcheng. In his memoirs, Nick Cherniavsky recalled how his Russian
émigré family arranged its four-room, British-architect- designed, company
house for the Shanghai Waterworks Company to fit its functional needs. Since
the ground floor only had two rooms, one of which was occupied by the kitchen,
his family used the second ground-floor room as a combined dining/living
room, while other families chose to dine in the kitchen. Coming from Russia,
the Cherniavskys would have been familiar with European domestic spaces
and would have known how to rearrange their space accordingly. A Chinese
family may or may not have arranged its house differently. Nick Cherniavsky,
Reminiscences of Nick Cherniavsky (oral history, 1973; accessed at Columbia
University).
5. Designing House and Home 299
5. DESIGNING HOUSE AND HOME
1. Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 1996).
2. Auslander, Taste and Power, 2.
4. Jordan Sand, House and Home in Modern Japan: Architecture, Domestic Space,
and Bourgeois Culture, 1880–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2003).
5. For an understanding of how shifting class relations led to class anxieties during
this period, see the period novel by Chang Hen-Shui, Shanghai Express: A Thirties
Novel, trans. William A. Lyell (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997).
6. Gwendolyn Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7– 8.
7. Raymond F. Betts argues that assimilation, or the idea that people in the colonies
could become “French” through the civilizing process, governed nineteenth-
century French colonial policy, whereas France in the twentieth century increas-
ingly turned toward a colonial policy of association, or the idea that colonial subjects
were partners with, rather than citizens of, the metropole. Conversely, Gwendolyn
Wright argues that the policies and practices of the two schools were much more
closely intertwined. Raymond F. Betts, Assimilation and Association in French Colo-
nial Theory, 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Wright, The
Politics of Design, 74.
8. Wright, The Politics of Design.
9. Wright, The Politics of Design.
10. Jeffrey W. Cody, Building in China: Henry K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture,”
1914–1935 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2001); Jeffrey W. Cody, Export-
ing American Architecture, 1870–2000 (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Peter G.
Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern
China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
11. Cody, Building in China.
12. Rowe and Seng, Architectural Encounters.
13. Klaas Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial China: A Study of the
Fifteenth- Century Carpenter’s Manual Lu Ban jing (Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993),
144.
14. Liang Sicheng, A Pictorial History of Chinese Architecture: A Study of the Develop-
ment of Its Structural System and the Evolution of Its Types, ed. Wilma Fairbank
(Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1984), xvi. Many of
Liang’s studies of traditional Chinese architecture were published posthumously,
including a Chinese-language study of the Yingzao fazhi and an English-language
300 5. Designing House and Home
illustrated history of Chinese architecture. Liang Sicheng, Yingzao fashi zhushi

(Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, Xinhua shudian, 1983).
15. Li Shiqiao, “Writing a Modern Chinese Architectural History: Liang Sicheng and
Liang Qichao,” Journal of Architectural Education 56, no. 1 (2002): 35–45.
16. Jianzhu yuekan 2, no. 6 (June 1934).
17. Nankai faculty housing is described in Eleanor McCallie Cooper and William Liu,
Grace: An American Woman in China, 1934–1974 (New York: Soho Press, 2003).
18. In 1934, Shanghai’s New China Bank (Xinhua yinhang) proposed a housing
development named “New China Village (Xinhua yicun),” located in the Guomin-
dang government’s new Shanghai development. Zhongguo jianzhu [Chinese
architect] (February 1934), 10.
19. According to Gwendolyn Wright, the French launched their plan to redesign
Madagascar’s capital city in 1918 with every street and district laid out carefully.
The plan even proposed the type of housing that should be built— single family
rather than apartments. In 1927, the colonial administration established the
Bureau of Architecture and Urbanism, and two years later they added the Bureau
of Economic Housing. See Wright, The Politics of Design, 273– 88.
20. Craig Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1996).
21. Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American
Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
22. See for example Allison Blunt, “Imperial Geographies of Home: British Domes-
ticity in India, 1886–1925,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 24,
no. 4 (1999): 421–40; and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and
Sexuality in the Colonial Context (London: Routledge, 1995).
23. When I last visited, the home was a restaurant where staff claimed that the build-
ing is “over one hundred years old.” However, building materials, such as decora-
tive concrete that was not used in Tianjin until the 1920s, suggest that the house
could not possibly have been built that early. While there is no official record of
who owned the house, the restaurant claims that it was at one time home to the
fourth concubine of warlord who became Beiyang president Cao Kun. According
to the historian Liu Haiyan of the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences, the home
was most likely built by a merchant or businessman. It is unlikely that a warlord
would have let a concubine live in the Chinese section of the city during the 1920s,
a period of violent unrest and feuding between warlords. In fact, during this time,
many warlords purchased or built homes for their families and concubines in the
concessions, where foreign governments offered security. Cao Kun himself lived
in the Italian concession. See also Elizabeth LaCouture, “Tianjin’s Western- Style
Chinese Villa,” China Heritage Quarterly, no. 21 (March 2010).
24. Most urban courtyard houses in Beijing and Tianjin tended to be built from gray
bricks, whereas even as late as the 1930s, less than a quarter of rural dwellings had
brick walls. Ronald G. Knapp, China’s Traditional Rural Architecture: A Cultural
5. Designing House and Home 301
Geography of the Common House (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1986),

69. Makers of Chinese gray bricks reduced oxidation in the final stages of brick-
making by adding water. The finest bricklaying technique first ground the indi-
vidual bricks to fit a joint and then applied mortar from the inside, making the
seams almost invisible from the outside of the wall. Ivan Chi- ching Ho, The Study
of the Chinese (Grey) Brickwork in the Vernacular Buildings in Hong Kong (MA the-
sis, University of Hong Kong, 2002).
25. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994).
26. Seaports of the Far East, Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial
Facts, Figures, & Resources (London: Macmillan, 1907), 156.
27. One foreign-owned factory, for example, employed 120 workers. Seaports of the
Far East, 156.
28. Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), Muqi jiaju paimaihang gong-
huigongyuan dengjibiao [Registry of wooden utensils and furniture auction
houses], j128–1399 (1917); TMA, Muqi jiaju ye tongyegonghui shanghao diaocha biao
[Registry of wooden utensil and furniture companies], j129–364 (1942).
29. In 1940, for example, the Tianjin Customs House sent a memo to the central
office requesting permission to reupholster a couch purchased in 1915. Tianjin hai-
guan (Tianjin Customs House), TMA (1940).
30. Sims claimed to own the only wood- drying kilns in the area to ensure that care-
fully selected timbers would shrink up to 12 percent before being built into furni-
ture, and since Tianjin and many of China’s coastal cities could be quite humid,
Sims coated their furniture in a special moisture-resistant varnish that they
believed to be “an exclusive feature” of their products. For upholstery, Sims
claimed to use English webbing, coils, and horsehair as well as coir fibers from
coconuts and down feathers from chickens. TMA, Sims and Co. memo to Hai
River Conservancy Commission, dated July 1928 in Haiho Conservancy, Youguan
dichan gouzhi jiaju gouzhi, yiji hedao wenti de shiwu lianxi de laiwang wenjian [Doc-
uments related to property and furniture purchasing as well as miscellaneous
problems related to the riverway], w3– 66 (1926–1928).
31. TMA, Haiho Conservancy, W3– 66 (1928).
32. TMA, Haiho Conservancy, W3– 66 (1928); TMA, Tianjin haiguan [Tianjin Cus-
toms House], Gongyong jiaju [Common-use furniture], W0001– 003581 (1923) and
(1940); TMA, Hebei Postal Administration Office, Guanyu caiwu hui bokuan xiang
piao kuan yishi jiaju gongju shebei de laiwang hanjian [Correspondence regarding
finances, remittances, furniture, and equipment], w2–295 (1924); and Guanyu
jiaju shebei gongju de laiwang hanjian [Concerning correspondence dealing with
furnishings and equipment], w2–358 (1926).
33. TMA, Sims and Co. memo to Hai River Conservancy Commission, July 2, 1928,
W3– 66 (1928).
34. Frank Dikötter argues that by the 1920s, increased production of rattan furniture
by prison labor made these objects highly affordable, thereby “democratizing the
302 5. Designing House and Home
easy chair.” Dikötter, Exotic Commodities: Modern Objects and Everyday Life in
China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 170.
35. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Mod-
ern China (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).
Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011).
37. See for example, Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture
in Seventeenth- Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994);
and Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2007).
38. On Tianjin night schools for workers (male and female), see Tianjin tebie shi she-
huiju [Tianjin Bureau of Social Affairs], Annual Report (1929); and TMA, Minjiao-
guan funü yinranban [The printing office of the people’s education], j113–107
(1939). While the Tianjin Social Bureau ran several schools, as late as the 1940s,
many workers signed their company savings passbooks with a thumbprint, sug-
gesting they were illiterate. Savings passbooks for British Tobacco, collection of
author.
39. Scholars of Japanese women’s magazines have noted that factory girls in Japan
read women’s magazines, sharing issues with each other. See for example, Sarah
Frederick, Turning Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar
Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006).
40. In 1927 a skilled carpenter in Beijing earned 75 cents per day, an unskilled carpen-
ter 45 cents. Sidney D. Gamble, “Peiping Family Budgets,” Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 152 (November 1930): 81–88.
41. Kuaile jiating [Happy home; Tianjin], issue 1 (January 1, 1923).
42. In his history of the home, Witold Rybczynski notes that English houses contin-
ued to be built and decorated in the Georgian style of the eighteenth century well
into the twentieth century, as it epitomized the height of comfort in English
design. In fact, the arrangement of the library pictured in Kuaile jiating sounds
nearly identical to Rybczynski’s description of a typical Georgian-style library,
with “easy chairs . . . set in front of the fireplace to create a cozy corner” and “cut
flowers and potted plants” as part of the decor. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short
History of an Idea (New York: Penguin, 1987), 104, 118.
43. Couplets or duilian are two complementary poetic or auspicious phrases written
vertically in Chinese characters on two long and narrow sheets of paper. They are
always displayed together. They can be for temporary display, like the couplets
written on red paper and displayed on either side of a household’s door at Chinese
New Year, or they may be more permanent, written on high quality paper or silk
and mounted on hanging scrolls like the couplet in the picture.
44. See, for example Ling long magazine, published in Shanghai (1931–1937).
45. By the 1930s, Shanghai boasted the tallest building in Asia, the 275-foot, 22-story
Park Hotel, whose art deco façade alluded to skyscrapers in New York. By
6. Living at Home 303
comparison, the Empire State Building, which was constructed around the same
time, was 1,050 feet tall (102 stories), and remained the tallest building in the
world until 1972. The Park Hotel was financed by Chinese banks and designed by
Ladislav Hudec (1893–1958), a stateless Hungarian expatriate residing in Shang-
hai. On Shanghai nightlife and music, see Andrew Field, Shanghai’s Dancing
Worlds: Cabaret Culture and Urban Politics, 1919–1954 (Hong Kong: The Chinese
University Press, 2010); and Andrew Jones, Yellow Music: Media Culture and Colo-
nial Modernity in the Chinese Jazz Age (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001).
46. Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China,
1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
47. According to Tianjin local historian Liu Haiyan, Tianjin residents, unlike their
counterparts in Shanghai, gave addresses beginning with the concession name
first. Conversation with Liu Haiyan, October 2006. On the Tianjin civil-servant
family background surveys, some Tianjin civil servants listed their address as the
“old British” or “old Italian” concessions. TMA, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao
[Report on the registration of family conditions], j2– 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815,
5816, 5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946).
48. Nathaniel Peffer, China: The Collapse of a Civilization (New York: John Day, 1930),
123.
49. Peffer, China: The Collapse of a Civilization, 123.
50. Dikötter, Exotic Commodities, 54, 200, 219.
51. Carl Crow, 400 Million Customers (Soul Care Publishing, 2008 [1937]).
52. Elizabeth LaCouture, “Inventing the ‘Foreignized’ Chinese Carpet in Treaty-
Port Tianjin, China,” Journal of Design History 30, no. 3 (2017): 300–314.
53. According to a report on Tianjin rug workshops in the Chinese Economic Journal,
the limited number of rugs that were purchased locally found their way into “gov-
ernment offices, large business establishments and wealthy families.” While the
market was mostly foreign, Tianjin’s foreign manufacturer Elbrook did advertise
to a Chinese consumer in the Shanghai-based housing trade journal The Builder.
“Tientsin Rug Workshops,” Chinese Economic Journal 4 (1929): 404–10.
6. LIVING AT HOME

ography,” American Historical Review 124, no. 4 (October 2019): 1278– 89.
2. Sarah Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg
and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 34.
3. Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” 38.
4. Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism,” in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory
Reader, 102–3. Berlant refers to Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation
304 6. Living at Home
of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 1989 [1969]).
5. Haiyan Lee, Revolution of the Heart: A Genealogy of Love in China, 1900–1950
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); and Eugenia Lean, Public Pas-
sions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican
China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007).
6. Jennifer Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender, and the
Promises of Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995), 35.
7. Scanlon, Inarticulate Longings.
8. Zhang Ailing, Tan nüren [Talking about women] (first published in 1944).
9. Régine Thiriez, “Photography and Portraiture in Nineteenth- Century China,”
East Asian History 17/18 (1999): 77–102; and Régine Thiriez, Barbarian Lens:
Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor’s European Palaces (Amsterdam:
Gordon and Breach, 1998).
10. For a detailed description of technical innovations in the Chinese printing indus-
try, see Christopher Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai (Vancouver: University of Brit-
ish Columbia Press, 2004).
11. On painting, see Jonathan Hay, “Painting and the Built Environment in Late-
Nineteenth- Century Shanghai,” in Chinese Art Modern Expressions, ed. Max-
well K. Hearn and Judith G. Smith (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2001); and Jonathan Hay, “Painters and Publishing in Late Nineteenth- Century
Shanghai,” in Art at the Close of China’s Empire, ed. Ju-hsi Chou (Tempe: Arizona
State University, 1998), 134– 88. On literature, see Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai
Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern:
Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2001). On cinema, see Zhang Zhen, An Amorous History of the
Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896–1937 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2005).
12. The list also included 13 Shanghai magazines, 4 Beiping, 2 Hong Kong, and one
each for Nanjing, Hangzhou, and Zhengzhou. Ling long, issue 100 (1933), 964.
13. Jiating zhoukan, issue 1 (1931).
14. The Tianjin Municipal Library has only eighteen issues of Kuaile jiating. I have not
been able to locate additional libraries with this periodical in their collection.
15. Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), Funü xin duhui baoshe cheng wei
gaifa yuekan [Woman World magazine application to change to monthly], j1–747
(1941).
16. On the history of the growth of print technology in Shanghai, see Reed, Gutenberg
in Shanghai. On the impact of distribution, see David Strand, “ ‘A High Place Is No
Better than a Low Place’: The City in the Making of Modern China,” in Becoming
Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-Hsin Yeh (Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2000). Strand describes a 1924 incident in which girls in
6. Living at Home 305
Baoding city in Hebei Province rebelled against their male headmaster after
reading in the feminist Tianjin journal Funü ribao [Women’s daily] about debates
over whether male headmasters should lead girls’ schools. The magazine, in turn,
covered the protests in Baoding, which led female students in Tianjin to protest in
sympathy.
17. Jiating shinian jinian kan [A commemorative issue for the 10th anniversary of
publication of Happy Home] (Shanghai, 1946), 1. For an outline of Shanghai’s
Happy Home, see Maeyama Kanako, “Chûgoku no josei muke teiki kankôbutsu ni
tsuite— sono naiyô to tokuchô” [Chinese periodicals for women from 1898 to
1949: Their contents and characteristics], reprinted in Surugadai University Stud-
ies, no. 10 (1995): 115–45.
18. Columbia University subscribed to Ling long magazine and now maintains the
most complete digitized collection of the magazine. See Ling long magazine,
written content by Elizabeth LaCouture (Columbia University Libraries), https://
exhibitions .library.columbia .edu/exhibits/show/ linglong, accessed June 19,
2020.
19. Women’s magazines in Japanese cities and in colonial Korea, by contrast,
included factory girls in their audience. For Japan, see Sarah Frederick, Turning
Pages: Reading and Writing Women’s Magazines in Interwar Japan (Honolulu: Uni-
versity of Hawai’i Press, 2006); for Korea, see Theodore Jun Yoo, The Politics of
Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945 (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2008). See chapter 7 for more on class and readership.
20. Men edited Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating and Shanghai’s Happy Home. The editor-in-
chief of Ling long was also a man. Writers included both men and women.
21. Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Mod-
ern China (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 85.
22. In addition to local Chinese schools for girls such as the Beiyang Girls’ School,
foreign churches offered both single-sex and coeducational options (the
St. Joseph’s Convent, for example), and in 1927, the British Municipal Council
opened a coeducational school for Chinese children to complement the council-
run school for foreigners. The Chinese school remains one of the most competi-
tive high schools in Tianjin today, second to Nankai Middle School, known for
famous graduates such as Zhou Enlai.
23. Examples from the Tianjin Municipal Library include Jiating changshi huibian [A
compilation of household common knowledge], vols. 1– 8 (Shanghai: Wenming
shuju, 1918); Jiating changshi huida [Common knowledge questions and answers
to life at home] (Shanghai: Changchun shudian, 1930); Hangkong changshi [Air-
plane common knowledge] (Shanghai: Beixin shudian, 1934); and Diande chang-
shi [Electricity common knowledge] (Shanghai: Zhonghua shuju, 1936).
24. “Mosquito press” was the English term used to refer to periodicals known in Chi-
nese as xiaobao, literally “small papers.” These were low-brow, less expensive,
sometimes tabloid papers. Examples of two “mosquito” journals that dealt with
306 6. Living at Home
changshi are Da changshi [Important common knowledge] and Shanghai changshi

[Shanghai common knowledge], both published in 1928.
25. Kuaile jiating, issue 1.7 (1923); “Jiating xiao changshi” [Minor common knowledge
about home and family], Dagong bao, L’impartial (August 23, 1928).
26. Kuaile jiating, issues 1.4, 1.5, and 1.7 (1923).
27. Arjun Appadurai, The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
28. Kuaile jiating, issue 1.12 (1923).
29. The 1930s Shanghai women’s magazine Ling long used the term shafa. A tangyi,
according to a magazine photograph, was an outdoor lounge chair. Ling long, issue
70 (1932): 938.
30. Sarah Handler, Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture (Berkeley: Uni-
31. The Lu Ban jing carpenters’ manual included instructions on building furniture in
addition to houses. Klaas Ruitenbeek, Carpentry and Building in Late Imperial
China: A Study of the Fifteenth- Century Carpenter’s Manual Lu Ban jing, ed. E.
Zurcher (Netherlands: E. J. Brill, 1993).
32. Sarah Handler argues that high, square tables joined chairs, leading to people
taking meals together and eating from a common bowl with chopsticks, rather
than from individual trays. The move from mat to chair also changed architec-
tural space and interior decoration. Chairs raised the level of vision, bringing
windows and ceilings up along with it. Decorations followed, with high, long
tables placed against walls to display ancestor offerings, plants, a clock, or other
luxury items, and on the walls behind these tables, a hanging scroll or Chinese
character couplet was often hung at or above the eye level of someone seated on a
chair. Handler, Austere Luminosity of Chinese Classical Furniture. For a compara-
tive look at how changes in furniture transformed social relations in France, see
Mimi Hellman, “Furniture, Sociability, and the Work of Leisure in Eighteenth-
Century France,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 32, no. 4 (1999): 415–45. Also see Jor-
dan Sand, “Tropical Furniture and Bodily Comportment in Colonial Asia.” posi-
tions 21, no. 1 (Winter 2013): 95–132.
33. Kuaile jiating, issue 1.3 (1923): 33.
34. Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, trans.
James Amery Underwood (London: Penguin Books, 2008 [1936]).
39. “Xiandai jiating zhuangshi” [Modern home furnishings], Ling long, issue 256
(1936): 3039.
40. Ling long, issue 256 (1936): 3042; and Ling long, issue 55 (1932): 215.
7. Engendering the Chinese City 307
41. Thank you to Sarah Teasley for sharing a European copy book from Japan that
included a photograph of an interior space also used in Ling long.
42. Ling long included only a handful of images of the home’s exterior, while Tianjin’s
Kuaile jiating and Jiating zhoukan did not include any. This is in stark contrast to
the images of exteriors and floor plans in magazines for building professionals
like The Builder and Chinese Architect. See chapter 4.
43. Witold Rybczynski, Home: A Short History of an Idea (New York: Viking, 1986),
179– 83.
44. Shih Shu-mei, The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China,
1917–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), esp. 14.
45. See B. L., “Shanghai Tackles Slum Problem,” Far Eastern Survey 6, no. 11 (1937);
and Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth
Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
46. This list of Chinese names for various rooms was drawn from women’s maga-
zines. The imagined modern interior included many new kinds of rooms with new
functions, thus new Chinese names had to be created. Names for these new kinds
of rooms were still not standardized in the 1920s and 1930s.
47. The photograph in Woman World appeared twice, first as a stock photo without a
caption and second with a caption suggesting the photo was of a Japanese house-
wife. Visual clues, such as the style of the woman’s apron, may or may not have
alerted readers that the subject was Japanese. Ling long, issue 73 (1932): 1066a.
48. “Zuo xiaocai de fazi” [How to make small dishes], Kuaile jiating, issue 1.1 (1923).
7. ENGENDERING THE CHINESE CITY
1. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Mal-

den, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 39.
2. Charles D. Musgrove, China’s Contested Capital: Architecture, Ritual, and
Response in Nanjing (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).
4. Leo Ou-Fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China
1930–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Shu-mei Shih,
The Lure of the Modern: Writing Modernism in Semicolonial China, 1917–1937
Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994); Francesca Bray,
Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1997); and Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in
China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
308 7. Engendering the Chinese City
6. Michael Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton, 1900–1927

(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999).
7. Michael Tsin, “Canton Remapped,” in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and
National Identity, 1900–1950, ed. Joseph W. Esherick (Honolulu: University of
Hawai’i Press, 2000), 19.
8. Zheng Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories
9. Wang, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment, 20.
10. For an exception to the focus on the public sphere, see Bonnie S. McDougall and
Anders Hansson, ed., Chinese Concepts of Privacy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002).
11. Two events in 1989 influenced the public sphere debate in Chinese history: the
English translation of Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere and the Chinese government’s crackdown on student demonstra-
tions in Beijing. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1989 [1969]); and Modern China 19, no. 2 (April 1993).
12. Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular
Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
13. “Lun jiaoji yu jiaobu zhe jieyan” [Discussing communication and negotiation],
Dagong bao (June 4, 1905).
14. “Ying Ri jiaoji” [British and Japanese communications], Dagong bao (May 14,
1918).
15. “Lu Zhong qing Zhang Shizhao jiangxue” [Lu Zhong invites Zhang Shizhao to
give a lecture], Dagong bao (November 5, 1926).
16. Dagong bao (April, 2, 1929). A social dance was also reported in Dagong bao (Janu-
ary 13, 1930).
17. See for example, Dagong bao (June 29, 1935), (March 13, 1933), (March 16, 1935),
(March 29, 1935), (July 12, 1935), (July 13, 1935), and (March 4, 1936).
18. According to the Shanghai periodical database, jiaoji appears in Dagong bao as
follows: 1905–1909: 3; 1910–1919: 9; 1920–1929: 28; 1930–1939: 50; 1940–1948: 6,
and in all periodicals 1905–1909: 37; 1910–1919: 123; 1920–1929: 696; 1930–1939: 5;
1940–1948. www.cnbksy.com, accessed May 20, 2020.
19. Yuan Hu, “Nü jiaoji mingxing shier mang” [Twelve things that the social star is
busy with], Funü 1, no. 1 (1927): 14.
20. Beiyang huabao (September 7, 1927): 1.
21. Sun Liying, “An Exotic Self? Tracing Cultural Flows of Western Nudes in Pei- yang
Pictorial News (1926–1933),” in Transcultural Turbulences Towards a Multi-Sited
Reading of Image Flows, ed. Christiane Brosius, and Roland Wenzlhuemer (Berlin:
Springer, 2011), 273–74.
22. The ten-year anniversary issue of Beiyang huabao proclaimed that they were very
much aware that their audience was elite all along. Sun, “An Exotic Self?,” 274.
23. Beiyang Huabao (January 5, 1927): 2.
7. Engendering the Chinese City 309
24. On guixiu and nineteenth-century Chinese male intellectuals’ backlash against

them, see Susan Mann, The Talented Women of the Zhang Family (Berkeley: Uni-
25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 6.
26. Beiyang huabao (December 2, 1926). Isabel’s sister May, Koo’s second wife, died in
1918.
27. The best-known example of a family that expanded its social network through
marriage was the Song family. The eldest sister married a businessman and min-
ister of finance, the second married Sun Yat-sen, and the third married Chiang
Kai-shek.
29. Beiyang huabao (July 3, 1937).
30. Beiyang huabao (August 4, 1926); and Beiyang huabao (November 5, 1928).
31. Yin Meibo, “Nüren zai shehuishang de diwei: weishenme jiao nanzidi xia?”
[Women’s social status: why is it lower than men’s?], Funü xin duhui / Woman
World, issue 4 (July 1, 1939): 1.
32. “Shidai he huanjing gei funü de yingxiang” [Era and environment influence
women], Woman World, issue 6 (July 8, 1939).
33. Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), Funü xin duhui baoshe cheng wei
gaifa yuekan [Woman World magazine application to change to monthly], j1–747
(1941).
34. The fact that the editor-in-chief, Yin Meibo, was a woman may have been rare at
the time. The editor of Happy Home, for example, was male, as was the chief edi-
tor of Ling long.
35. Yin Meibo, “Diyitian de hua” [Introduction to the first issue], Woman World, issue
1, (June 21, 1939).
36. “Shanghai de funü zouxiang shiyeceng qu” [Shanghai women walk toward career
status], Woman World, issue 39 (November 25, 1939); and Ah Mei, “Deguo funüde
meide: Neng chiku naifan wujia xiuxi, hunqian hunhou chengliang ge ren” [The
moral beauty of German women: They can eat bitter and are patient, before and
after marriage two different people], Woman World, issue 27 (October 14, 1939).
Similarly, other Tianjin-published women’s magazines suggested that the Tianjin
modern woman was peripheral to foreign and Shanghai modernity. See, for
example, “News from the Women’s World,” Jiating zhou kan [Home weekly], no. 1
(1931); and “Shanghai funü de muqian xin zhanrong” [The future battle of Shang-
hai women],” Xin funü [New woman weekly], no. 5 (1935).
Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Colombia Press, 2011).
38. Yin Meibo, “Nüren zai shehuishang de diwei.”
39. See also Tianjin’s Kuaile jiating (1923).
310 7. Engendering the Chinese City
40. Zhou Mengjie, “Funü zhiye de jiantao” [A criticism of career women], Woman
World, issue 41 (December 2, 1939).
41. Zhou, “Funü zhiye de jiantao.”
42. Meizi, “Zhiye funü ying juyou de jian zuo” [The skills that career women must
have], Woman World, issue 46 (December 20, 1939).
43. Man Qi, “Nüzi daziyuan de ziyou” [The freedom of a female typist], Woman
World, issue 37 (November 18, 1939).
44. Man, “Nüzi daziyuan de ziyou.”
45. Man, “Nüzi daziyuan de ziyou.”
46. Tianjin City Government, Tianjin-shi zhengfu zhiyuan zhuangkuang tongji [Statis-
tics on the condition of Tianjin city government workers] (1931). See also
chapter 1.
47. TMA, Jiating zhuangkuang dengji biao [Report on the registration of family condi-
tions], j2– 5810, 5811, 5812, 5814, 5815, 5816, 5817, 5818, 5827, 7084 (1946). See also
chapter 1.
48. Zhang Fei, “Nü zhiyuan: weishenme shi huaping?” [Office women: Why are they
flower vases?], Woman World, issue 20 (September 16, 1939).
49. Yin Meibo, “Ru hezuo ge xiandai funü” [How to be a contemporary woman],
Woman World, issue 24 (September 4, 1939).
50. Zhang Fei, “Xiaojie you liangzhong zuofeng: Yizhong shi jiating shi de, yizhong
shi xuesheng shi de” [There are two styles of women: One is family and one is
student], Woman World, issue 32 (November 1, 1939); Liu Ling, “Shehui gongkai
yu lian’ai wenti” [The opening of society and issues of dating], Woman World,
issue 44 (December 13, 1939).
51. Liu, “Shehui gongkai.”
52. Zhai Junsheng, “Xie gei shejiaochang shang de xiaojiemen” [Written for the
young ladies in the social sphere], Woman World, issue 25 (September 7, 1939);
“Dang ni he nan pengyou chichi deshihou yinggai chuan shenme yifune” [What
should you wear when you go out for tea with your boyfriend?], Woman World,
issue 4 (July 1, 1939).
53. Woman World, issue 32 (November 1, 1939).
54. “Shi zhufu dang ying zenyang chuli jiating: Zai xiandai de shehui li haishi cong
jiating wei guojia de benwei” [How should today’s housewives manage the home?:
in contemporary society the home is still the root of the state], Woman World,
issue 48 (December 27, 1939).
of California Press, 2003); and Kuaile jiating (1923).
56. Nicole Huang, Women, War, Domesticity: Shanghai Literature and Popular Culture
of the 1940s (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2005).
57. TMA, “Hebeishengli nüshinüshixueyuan, xuesheng shenghuo diaocha” [Hebei
Women’s Normal Institute, student life survey], j164–169 (1948).
58. Names of students have been changed.
8. The Chinese Bourgeois Home 311
59. TMA, “Student life survey.”

8. THE CHINESE BOURGEOIS HOME

IN THE SOCIALIST WORLD
1. Gail Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 1986), 66.
2. For description of working-class residences see Hershatter, The Workers of Tian-
jin, 69.
3. Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 66.
4. See for example, Woodhead’s complaints to the British Municipal Council in
“British Municipal Council, Annual Report (1922).” For Chinese complaints on
the rising cost of housing in the foreign concessions, see Yishibao (September 23,
1924).
5. Tianjinshi fangdichan guanliju (Tianjin Gazetteer Office), Tianjin fangdichan zhi
Sciences Press, 1999), 324.
Making of Modern China (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
2011).
7. Chün Hsing, Baptized in the Fire of Revolution: The American Social Gospel and the
YMCA in China, 1919–1937 (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 1996), 116;
and Gustav Schwenning, “An Attack on Shanghai Slums,” Social Forces 6, no. 1
(September 1927): 125–31.
8. Zhongguo jianzhu [Chinese architect], (February 1934): 10.
9. Zhongguo jianzhu (February 1934): 10.
10. Zhongguo jianzhu (February 1934): 10.
11. Tianjin Municipal Archives (hereafter TMA), j131–472 (July 1930).
12. This area of each residence was similar to what Gail Hershatter records for work-
ing class houses. Hershatter, The Workers of Tianjin, 69.
13. TMA, j56 1198 (August 1947).
14. TMA, j56 1198 (August 1947).
15. TMA, j56 1198 (August 1947).
16. Kang Chao, “Industrialization and Urban Housing in Communist China,” Jour-
nal of Asian Studies 25, no. 3 (May 1966): 381– 96; and Christopher Howe, “The
Supply and Administration of Urban Housing in Mainland China: The Case of
Shanghai,” China Quarterly no. 33 (January–March 1968): 73– 97.
17. TMA, “Jingji zhuzhai, Tianjin Jianzhu gongsi” [Economical housing, Tianjin
architecture company], X0053-D- 001008 (1951).
312 8. The Chinese Bourgeois Home
18. Kenneth G. Lieberthal, Revolution and Tradition in Tientsin, 1942–1952 (Stanford,

CA: Stanford University Press, 1980), 6.
19. On Tianjin’s construction industry in the 1950s see Lieberthal, Revolution and
Tradition, 142– 52.
20. Christine Varga-Harris, Stories of House and Home: Soviet Apartment Life during
the Khrushchev Years (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
21. TMA, “Jingji zhuzhai,” X0053-D- 001008 (1951).
22. TMA, X0053- C- 00439– 064 (1952).
23. Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern
China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). See also Wen-
hsin Yeh, “Republican Origins of the Danwei: The Case of Shanghai’s Bank of
China,” in Danwei: The Changing Chinese Workplace in Historical and Comparative
Perspective, ed. Xiaobo Lü and Elizabeth J. Perry (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe,
1997).
24. TMA, X154– 637 (1953).
25. TMA, “Tianjin dajian sushe” [Tianjin large construction dormitory], X154– 641
(1953).
26. TMA, “Fangdichan guanli ju zai wuqu Dali dao jian ganbu sushe” [Real estate
administration builds cadre housing in district 5 on Dali road], X154–1323
(1954– 55).
27. TMA, X154–187; and TMA, X154–188.
28. TMA, “Yunnan lu shimin jingji zhuzhai, Tianjinshi caizheng jingji weiyuanhui”
[Yunnan street economical housing, Tianjin finance committee], X077- C-000502
(1952); TMA, X0053- C-000–439– 064; and TMA, X0053- C-000432– 007.
29. TMA, X0053-D- 002668 (1954).
30. TMA, X0053-D- 002668 (1954).
31. Susan E. Reid, “Communist Comfort: Socialist Modernism and the Making of
Cosy Homes in the Khrushchev Era,” Gender & History 21, no. 3 (Novem-
ber 2009): 465– 98.
32. Xin Liliang, “Chairman Mao Gives Us a Happy Life,” (March 1954), International
Institute of Social History (IISH), https://chineseposters.net/posters/e16–269
.php, accessed June 10, 2017.
33. Stefan Landsberger, Chinese Posters, http://chineseposters.net/artists/xinliliang
.php, accessed June 10, 2017.
34. Ellen Johnston Laing, Selling Happiness: Calendar Posters and Visual Culture in
Early Twentieth- Century Shanghai (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).
35. See, for example, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass
Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).
36. According to Simon Partner, Matsushita Electronics spent more money on adver-
tising than on research and development. Partner, Assembled in Japan: Electrical
Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1999). On the history of cooperation between government and advertising
8. The Chinese Bourgeois Home 313
in the United States, see Jason Petrulis, America the Brand: Advertising the Ameri-
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57. TMA, 123- C-44 (1956).
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EPILOGUE: HISTORICAL ERASURES AND

CHINA’S NEW MIDDLE CLASS
1. Li Jing, “Has China Failed to Learn the Lessons of Deadly Tianjin Explosions?,”
South China Morning Post, August 12, 2016, https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/poli
tics/article/2002987/ has- china-failed-learn-lessons- deadly-tianjin- explosio ns.
2. Te-Ping Chen, “Chinese Officials Ramp up Investigations into Tianjin Explo-
sions,” Wall Street Journal, August 18, 2015.
3. Anonymous, “Censored: A Young Survivor Decries Handling of Tianjin Explo-
sion,” trans. David Wertime, Foreign Policy (September 10, 2015). The Weibo post
originally appeared on September 7, 2015.
4. Joseph Kahn, “China Backs Property Law, Buoying Middle Class,” New York
Times, March 16, 2007.
5. Wang Hui, “The Year 1989 and the Historical Roots of Neoliberalism in China,”
in The End of Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London: Verso, 2011),
19– 66.
6. Leta Hong Fincher, Leftover Women: The Resurgence of Gender Inequality in China
(London: Zed Books, 2014), 45.
7. Hong Fincher, Leftover Women, 47.
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Index
ABC’s of Architecture, The, 152 (see courtyard houses); feng shui and
advertisements, 230, 254, 269, 312n36 cosmological principles, 10, 17, 20,
aesthetics. See architecture and building 42–43, 79, 131–34, 160; garden city
practices; home design model, 95, 123, 154, 159, 187; Gothic
affect. See emotions style, 87, 115, 156; imperial-era
Ahmed, Sarah, 190, 255 architecture of Tianjin, 23–24, 123;
altars, ancestral, 19, 102, 133–34, 150 mixed Chinese-Western styles,
apartments: in Tianjin, 1, 123, 135, 146, 162– 69, 170–71(figs.), 183– 84; modular
161, 245, 249, 250– 52, 262, 268, 270; home building, 23, 38, 128, 132, 160,
in the U.S., 138, 140, 141 294n15, 295n23; Murphy’s adaptive
architecture and building practices, 12; designs, 159– 60; nationalist architec-
architectural manuals and journals, ture, 159– 60; and negative energy, 127;
127–31, 133, 146, 152, 160– 61; architec- Peffer’s criticisms of mixed styles,
tural styles of foreign concessions, 87, 183–84; politics of architectural style,
156, 158, 187 (see also specific conces- 157– 62; post-and-beam construction,
sions); art deco style, 156, 210, 302n45; 23, 38, 128, 160; postcolonial preserva-
assimilation vs. association agendas in tion of European architecture in
architectural styles, 157– 59; auspicious Tianjin, 3–4; and public and private
locations and dates for building, domains, 160– 61 (see also public and
131–32, 152, 294n12; Bao Guiqing house, private domains); and real estate
164(fig.), 164– 66; Beaux Arts style, 3, market, 91, 146, 148; rooflines, 159,
87, 135, 156, 159, 160, 187, 217; building 160, 162, 165; rooftop pavilions, 162,
practices, 127–32, 147– 50, 152, 294nn 163(fig.), 164(fig.), 164– 65; and
12–17, 295n23; Chen Guangyuan house, sociopolitical spaces of Tianjin,
162, 163(fig.), 164; and choice of 219–20; sumptuary laws, 295n23; Sung
housing, 13, 123– 53; courtyard houses Sik house, 141–46, 148– 51, 149(fig.),
338 Index
architecture and building practices (cont.) Berlant, Lauren, 190

153; and Tianjin modern style, 13, 156, Bernhardt, Kathryn, 81
169–72, 187– 88 (see also Tianjin Better Homes and Gardens, 177
modern style); and Tianjin’s colonial- Betts, Raymond, 299n7
capitalist system, 91; Tianjin’s public Bhabha, Homi, 171
architecture, 3, 156, 158, 161, 165; birth control, 69
Western building principles, 145– 51; Blackmar, Elizabeth, 90– 91
Western-style houses, 124, 136, BMC. See British Municipal Council
137(fig.), 139, 142(fig.), 145– 51, 246; Bourdieu, Pierre, 7
Xu Pu’an house, 125–27, 126(fig.), bourgeoisie. See middle class, Chinese;
128–30(figs.), 134–36, 150, 153, 166– 69, urban elites
167– 68(figs.), 200n23. See also Boxer Indemnity scholarships, 58, 64, 146
carpenters and builders; zoning laws Boxer Uprising, 29, 33–34, 36(fig.), 89,
and building regulations 288n22; aftermath, 37–43
art deco, 156, 209–10, 302n45 Boynton, Grace, 280n40
assimilation vs. association agendas in Bray, David, 260, 262
architectural styles, 157– 59 Bray, Francesca, 8, 47–48, 126, 133,
Auslander, Leora, 155 295n23, 295n24
Austria-Hungary, 29, 34, 44, 82 breakfast rooms, 211, 213
British Concession (Tianjin), 29, 30;
Ba Jin, 72 architectural style, 95, 156, 158, 159,
Bank of China, 249 162, 163(fig.), 164, 187; British school
Bao Guiqing, 164(fig.), 164– 66, 290n44 in, 88– 89; Chinese architectural
Bao Guiqing house, 164(fig.), 164– 66 elements in, 162, 163(fig.), 164;
bathrooms, 149(fig.), 150– 51, 208(fig.), 211 Chinese residents in, 2, 100, 244;
bays (ian), in courtyard houses, 132, 294n16 Chinese school in, 88– 89, 305n22; and
Beaux Arts style, 3, 87, 135, 156, 159, 160, decolonization, 247; as desirable
187, 217 residential district, 82– 83; furniture
bedrooms, 148, 149(fig.), 173–74, 208(fig.) stores, 173; garden city model for
Beijing: and Boxer Uprising, 43; displaced residences, 95, 123, 154, 159, 187;
as capital, 45, 218; family size in, 68; governance of (see British Municipal
first British envoy to, 27–28; as imperial Council); and property disputes, 105;
capital, 21–22, 43; Shen Yiyun’s house public parks, 165; and real estate
in, 138; social surveys in, 65, 66 market, 91– 92, 96; as tourist destina-
Beijing Girl’s High School, 231 tion, 3; water issue, 116–18; zoning laws
Beiyang Girls’ School, 305n22 and building regulations, 96
Beiyang huabao (pictorial magazine), British Concession Water Works, 116–17
194– 95, 224–26, 228, 229, 237, 308n22 British Municipal Council (BMC): and
Belgian Concession (Tianjin), 29, 44 architectural style of British Conces-
Benevolent Association, 246 sion, 159; bilingual documents
Benjamin, Walter, 204 facilitating Chinese participation,
Bergère, Marie- Claire, 6, 82, 93, 296n34 100–101, 116; British school funded by,
Index 339
88– 89; participation of Chinese (male) Cassel, Pär Kristoffer, 86

residents, 100–101, 115–16; and ceramics, 155
political rights of Chinese residents, chairs, 173, 179, 202, 306n32
98– 99; and real estate development, Chang, Eileen (Zhang Ailing), 194, 236–37
95; zoning laws and building Chang, Henry K., 108–14
regulations, 96 Chang, Isabel, 108–14, 113(fig.), 224–25, 227
brothels, 40, 92 changshi, 199–202, 214. See also women’s
bugs, getting rid of, 201–2, 213 magazines: advice columns
Builder, The (journal), 161 changyi, 202. See also sofas
building practices. See architecture and Chen Duxiu, 59, 62, 279n28
building practices; carpenters and Cheng Ke, 290n44
builders Chen Guangyuan, 162, 164, 290n44
Bureau of Social Affairs (Shehui ju), 76–78, Chen Guangyuan house, 162, 163(fig.), 164
246, 247, 285n105, 286n116, 302n38 Chen Hengzhe (Sophia Chen Zen), 60– 62,
Burgess, John Stewart, 282n61 281n54
Burton, Antoinette, 12 Chen Shousun, 279n24
Chen Zhi (Benjamin Chen), 297n54
cai, 128 Cherniavsky, Nick, 298n64
Cai Yuanpei, 61 Chiang Kai-shek, 82, 138, 218, 245, 309n27
Canton, urban planning in, 220 Chiang Yung-chen, 280n40, 282n62
Cao Kun, 200n23, 290n44 chimeral aspects of architecture. See
Cao Yu, 152, 290n44 Tianjin modern style
capitalism, 10, 12, 13, 267, 286n116; and China, imperial (late Qing dynasty), 13;
post–WWII visions of prosperity, 254; abolition of civil service examination,
Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist system, 5, 98; Boxer Uprising and its after-
81– 91, 95– 97, 100, 105, 115–18, 135, 146, math, 29, 33–45, 36(fig.), 89, 288n22;
156, 162, 166, 184, 243. See also real and colonialism (see colonialism);
estate market confrontations with foreign intruders,
career women, 221, 230–34. See also 31–38; design, style, and aesthetics of
employment dynasties, 154– 55; European imaginary
Carnegie Corporation, 71 of China, 25; fall of imperial ideology,
carpenters and builders, 297n53, 297n56, 13, 53– 55, 58– 59, 78; fall of the Qing, 5,
298n57; architectural manuals and 10, 37–43, 79, 80, 97– 98; foreign
journals for, 127–31, 133, 146, 152, accounts of, 25–28; furniture, 202; and
160– 61; and courtyard houses, 124, history of Tianjin, 18, 21–25, 218;
127–33; professional associations, 146, house-building practices, 79, 131, 133,
297n56; training, 130–31, 147–48, 294n12; knowledge about the home as
297n56; tricks and magic practiced male-gendered knowledge, 192; and
against employers, 130, 132, 133; wages, layout of houses, 133–34; patrilineal
302n40. See also architecture and succession of property, 103; regulation
building practices of space and the inner/outer (nei and
carpets, 185– 86, 186(fig.), 188, 303n53 wai) continuum, 18 (see also inner/
340 Index
China, imperial (late Qing dynasty) (cont.) China, Republican era, 13; capital moved
outer continuum); relationship to Nanjing, 45, 82, 218; and choice of
between house and political stability, housing, 13, 123– 53 (see also housing;
19–21, 59, 79, 131, 133; relationship real estate market); civil code of 1929
between individual, household, and and 1930, 80– 81, 101– 5, 107– 8, 114, 115,
state in Neo- Confucian ideology, 118; concern for China’s global
19–20, 117, 133–34; relationship standing, 102–3; female-gendered
between text and house, 47–48; social spaces, 14, 17 (see also social spaces);
relations, 10, 17, 20–21, 47, 133–34; gender and social status (see gender
sociopolitical ideology of jia, 18–21, 59, roles; social status); as “hypo-colony,”
133–34, 191; sumptuary laws, 295n23; 86; identity formation, 7, 10–11
and transformation from jia to jiating, (see also identity); ideological concept
9, 12, 48, 191; and urban planning, 44, of middle class not fully formed, 6, 7;
46, 91, 136, 162, 217, 220–21; weakening and invention of home by urban elites,
of Qing Empire and reduction of local 5, 6, 242 (see also home life); Nanjing
services, 22, 24; “woman question,” Decade (1927–1937), 218, 221, 227;
49; women’s gendered and political nationalist architecture, 159– 60;
roles, 102. See also Confucianism; nationalist family reforms not fully
Neo- Confucianism realized, 72–78, 239–40; nationalist
China, People’s Republic, 242– 63, 265–70; ideology focused on reforming the
collectivization of household labor, family, 11, 17–18, 46, 51, 55, 75, 76,
257, 259– 62; Cultural Revolution, 262; 78–79, 238–42; neglect of public
current housing market, 267; and housing, 243; new vocabulary of, 11
“economical housing,” 248–49; (see also jiating); and property
establishment of, 10; Great Leap ownership, 80–119 (see also property
Forward, 260, 262; housing through ownership); prosperity of Chinese
work units (danwei system), 3, 249– 50, bourgeoisie, 6; as social laboratory of
259– 63, 266; new middle class in, 3, 6, modernity, 281n59; social relations,
14, 264–70; patriarchal privilege and 11, 18, 55, 64, 70, 79, 135, 148, 176,
power, 244, 256– 57, 267; production 220–21, 237–40; social spaces in
rather than consumption as economic Tianjin, 217–41; Tianjin concessions
driver, 254– 55; propaganda about returned to Chinese municipal
happy home life, 252– 56; and property governance, 14, 246–47; and Tianjin
rights, 266– 67; and public housing, modern style (see Tianjin modern style);
243–44, 246– 52, 259– 63; re- and urban planning, 218, 220, 247–48;
marketization of Tianjin housing, Warlord Era (1916–1928), 82, 218
266– 68; and socialist mass consump- Chinese Civil War, 248
tion, 255; social relations, 260– 62; Chinese Communist Party (CCP):
women’s gendered and political roles, abolition of private property, 260– 62;
257– 58; worker’s housing needed for collectivization of household labor,
First Five Year Plan, 251– 52. See also 257, 259– 62; and “economical
Chinese Communist Party housing,” 248–49; and erasure of
Index 341
historical memory, 3, 264–70; and of Tianjin, 18, 25, 31, 38–43; and
historical narrative about prosperity, delegitimization of the Qing, 18, 37–43;
267– 68; housework gendered female French colonial policy of association
and devalued, 257– 58; housing as a vs. assimilation, 299n7; hybridity
political right for all citizens, 14, (Bhabha’s concept), 171; and politics
247–48, 262; and new understanding of design, 155– 56; property as center of
of jiating, 259– 63; and patriarchal power struggles between colonial
privilege and power, 244, 256– 57, 267; powers and Chinese urban elites,
and postcolonial preservation of 80– 82; semi-colonial countries, 83,
European architecture in Tianjin, 3–4; 85– 86; Tianjin’s colonial-capitalist
propaganda about happy home life, system, 81– 91, 95– 97, 100, 105, 115–18,
252– 56; and public housing, 243–44, 135, 146, 156, 162, 166, 184, 243, 248.
251– 52; takeover of Tianjin, 248; See also foreign concessions; specific
women’s roles in the workforce and concessions
the home, 257– 58; and xiaolaobaixing Columbia University, 71
(common people), 265– 66. See also comfort, 203
China, People’s Republic common knowledge, 199–202. See also
Chinese Family and Society (Lang), 71 women’s magazines: advice columns
cholera, 116 communal living, 259– 62
Chung Yuen Department Store, 228 concubines, 46, 75, 77, 78, 300n23
civil code of 1929 and 1930, 80– 81, 101– 5, Confucianism, 133; critiques of the
107– 8, 114, 115, 118 Confucian household, 59, 62; and
civil servants, 17, 19, 72–76, 93, 234, 290n42 Darwinian progress, 54; denunciation
civil service examination, 5, 98, 156 of, 53– 55, 58, 102; and house-building
Cixi, Empress Dowager, 278n13 practices, 130–31; and oppression of
Class Dream housing complex, 270 women, 81; and patriarchy, 81; and
Cohen, Myron, 284n96 sumptuary laws, 295n23. See also
collectivization of household labor, 257, Neo- Confucianism
259– 62 Confucius, 10, 19–20
colonialism: assimilation vs. association “conjugal” family, 71, 284n97, 285n99.
agendas in architectural styles, 157– 59; See also nuclear family
China’s confrontations with foreign consumption, 282n70; and advertising,
intruders, 31–38; colonial coproduction 254; conspicuous consumption, 65– 66;
of knowledge about the traditional consumption of global commodities,
Chinese family, 55– 63; colonialism as 5, 165– 66, 173, 178, 185– 88, 201, 209;
both multiple and partial in Tianjin, consumption of objects and styles of
18, 81, 83, 85– 86, 158; consumption of imperialism in the U.S., 165– 66; and
objects and styles of imperialism in “creative bricolage” (Dikötter’s
the U.S., 165– 66; cooperation and concept), 184; Engel’s Law (law on
competition among colonial empires, income and food consumption),
89, 158– 59; decolonization, 246–47; 65– 66; and furniture, 172–74; and
and deconstruction and reconstruction post–WWII visions of prosperity, 254;
342 Index
consumption (cont.) Darwin, Charles, 52– 53

socialist consumption, 255; social dating, 223–24, 235
surveys on household consumption, daughters: cultural and educational
65, 67, 283n77. See also home design capital of daughters of civil servants, 7,
cooking, 211–13, 212(fig.) 157, 175, 176, 193, 269; daughters of
cosmological spatial ordering, 17, 42–43, scholar-officials as household managers
131. See also feng shui principles and income earners, 19; education of
cosmopolitanism, 4, 52, 87– 90, 137–39, daughters of urban elites, 198; and
141, 146, 153, 192, 210, 225; cosmopoli- household as a state, 62; and inheri-
tan domesticity, 165– 66, 183, 185, 188 tance rights, 103; and marriage, 138;
Cosmopolitan (magazine), 269 social status marked by taste/style,
couplets (wall hangings), 181, 302n43, 1–2, 157; and women’s magazines, 198,
306n32 226–27
courtyard houses, 24, 28, 94, 124–36, 138, democracy, 46, 49, 51, 62, 63
217; ancestral altars, 19, 102, 133–34, Denby, Charles, Jr., 39, 44, 92
150; bays ( jian), 132, 294n16; building Deng Xiaoping, 265
materials, 200n24; building practices, Deng Yingchao, 268
127–32, 294n16, 294n17; compared to department stores, 172–74, 223, 228, 241,
Western-style houses, 148; elements 255, 301n30
of, 126–28, 132–34; flexible living Dianshizhai huabao (pictorial publica-
spaces in, 150, 210; and gender and tion), 194
status relations, 133–34, 150; and great Dictionary of Socialism (Rappoport),
socialist jiating, 261; and inner/outer 279n24
(nei and wai) continuum, 132, 191; mixed Dictionary of Social Problems (Chen
Chinese-Western styles, 166– 69, Shousun), 279n24
167– 68(figs.); and servants, 134, 140, Dikötter, Frank, 184, 301n34
141, 150, 152; Xu Pu’an house, 125–27, dining room, 148, 149(fig.), 150, 152, 173,
126(fig.), 128–30(figs.), 134–36, 150, 153, 211, 261
166– 69, 167– 68(figs.), 200n23 dining tables, 172, 175, 306n32
courtyards, 126, 127, 132, 138, 141, 152, 238, disease, 32, 41, 116
294n17 Dittmer, C. G., 282n61
Crédit Foncier (bank), 91, 92, 100, 108, divorce, 77, 101, 103, 106– 8, 267
141–42, 146, 162 Doll’s House, A (Ibsen), 59– 60, 281n50
Cret, Paul, 160, 297n54 domesticity, 47, 189; cosmopolitan
cultural capital, 7, 145, 157, 175, 176, domesticity, 165– 66, 183, 185, 188;
192– 93, 227–28, 269 difficulty of translating into Chinese,
Cultural Revolution, 262 9; and the Japanese middle class, 5;
translated as jiating shenghuo (“home
Dagong bao (newspaper), 196, 199, 200 life”), 9. See also home life
da jiating, 261, 262 Dong, Madeleine Yue, 45
danwei system of housing, 3, 249– 50, Dongxing gongsi, 93
259– 63, 266 doorways, 126(fig.), 126–27
Index 343
dormitories, 249, 252, 262 Eight Nation Alliance, 34–35, 38, 39, 89
drawing room, 148, 149(fig.), 150, 152, 174 elites. See urban elites
duilian, 302n43. See also couplets (wall emotions, 190– 91; affective understand-
hangings) ing of home, 13, 213; Chinese terms
for happiness, 256; consideration of
Eastern Miscellany, The (Dongfang zazhi; “feeling” in decorating, 204– 5;
journal), 50 different conceptions of happiness,
economics: cosmological principles in 256; happy home life framed as
house design required for economic dependent on productive work in the
prosperity, 21, 131, 134; “economic public workplace, 258; and home life,
family” defined, 67; Engel’s Law 190– 91, 202–4, 252–56; and photography
(law on income and food purchases), and fantasies of home, 204 (see also
65– 66; and modular home building, fantasies of home); propaganda about
132; and motivation of female workers, happy home life under the CCP, 252– 56
234; and Neo- Confucian ideology, 17; employment: distinction between elite
relationship between income and career women and working-class
family size, 68– 69, 75; and women in women, 233–34, 243; happy home life
the late imperial era, 19; and women framed as dependent on productive
viewed as parasites, 49. See also work in the public workplace, 258;
capitalism; real estate market identity formation in the public spaces
education: Boxer Indemnity scholarships, of work under the CCP, 257; most
58, 64, 146; Chinese intellectuals common types of work for women,
educated abroad, 58, 61; concession 234; motivation of female workers,
schools, 88– 89, 288n23; and domestic 234; and sexual harassment, 234; and
science, 176; educational capital of socializing sphere, 241; women as
women, 7, 176 (see also cultural career women vs. wives and mothers
capital); education viewed as way to in the Republican era, 221, 230–34;
make women productive, 49; and women in the workforce under the
family size, 68– 69; as form of CCP, 257– 58; and women’s tenuous
self-cultivation rather than national political status under the CCP, 258;
improvement, 236–37; home econom- women’s work and incomes, 19, 234;
ics education, 50, 51, 56, 68, 150, 231, work unit–based housing (danwei
237; Japan as source of models of system), 3, 249– 50, 259– 63, 266
female education, 49– 50; night encyclopedias of knowledge about the
schools, 77, 176, 286n117, 302n38; and home, 192
origins of jiating as home, 48– 52; energy, negative and positive, 127, 132
Shimoda Utako and, 50– 52; and social Engel, Ernst, 65– 66, 282n70
class, 176; texts on domestic science, Engel’s Law, 65– 66
50, 176; Tianjin schools, 44, 77, 88– 89, epistemology: colonial coproduction of
288n23, 305n22; training of social knowledge about the traditional
scientists, 64; and women’s magazines, Chinese family, 55– 63; common
231. See also schools knowledge, 199–202; knowledge about
344 Index
epistemology (cont.) family values, 58, 59; “conjugal,”

the home acquired from women’s “stem,” and “joint” families, 71,
magazines (see women’s magazines); 284n97, 285n99; critiques of the
knowledge about the home as Confucian household, 59, 62;
female-gendered knowledge in the developmental theory of family
Republican era, 14, 175–77, 184, 192– 93, transformation, 57, 59, 76; “economic
242; knowledge about the home as family” defined, 67; extended/“joint”
male-gendered knowledge in imperial family (see extended/“joint” family);
China, 192; Yan Fu on the difference families in Tianjin in the Republican
between Chinese and Western era, 72–76; family size, in China,
knowledge, 280n34 68– 69, 73–74, 79, 284n95; family size,
Escherick, Joseph, 33 in Taiwan, 284n96; family size, and
Europe: and coproduction of knowledge income, 68– 69, 75; family size, in
about Chinese society, 60– 61; Europe and the U.S., 57, 284n87;
developmental theory of family family size, in Hong Kong and other
transformation, 57, 59; European industrialized cities, 284n97; family
housing principles, 124; family size, structure not accurately captured by
57, 284n87; ideas about origins of social science models, 67–72; family
small families, 57; ideas about public structure not always matched by
and private spaces, 8, 17, 220; ideas housing choice, 152; and filial piety, 59,
about women, 49; modern kitchens in, 62, 63, 70; Japanese term for, 51– 52;
150. See also colonialism; foreign jiazu as, 52, 279n24; as laboratory for
concessions the social sciences, 63–72; and layout
Evans, Richard T., 106 of houses in the late Qing and
Evolution and Ethics (Huxley), 52 Republican era, 134; and May Fourth
extended/“joint” family, 71, 75, 238–39, Movement, 58– 59; and moral and
284n97; financial responsibility for, political values, 48; myth of backward
73–75; myths transformed into social extended Chinese family transformed
science fact, 55– 63; negative views of, into social science fact, 55– 63; and
51, 56, 58, 59, 62, 190, 221, 238–39; narratives of jiating, 238–40; national-
positive views of, 238–40; property ist ideology focused on reforming the
rights, 101, 107; as a response to family, 11, 17–18, 46, 51, 55, 64, 75, 76,
drastic changes in China, 79 78–79, 238–42 (see also nuclear family;
Extra-Mural Area, 99 xiao jiating ideology); and new
Eyferth, Jacob, 258 understanding of jiating under the
CCP, 259– 63; nuclear family as ideal
family: CCP and, 259– 60; colonial (xiao jiating ideology), 11, 17–18, 46, 55,
coproduction of knowledge about the 57, 58, 60, 78–79, 239, 242, 260;
traditional Chinese family, 55– 63; and patriarchal family relations, 59, 62, 81;
common knowledge, 200; complica- and perceived obstacles to democracy,
tions of defining families and 51, 62– 63; and “reading history
households, 67– 68, 72–75; Confucian sideways,” 57, 58, 60; services
Index 345
provided by the family rather than 44–45, 83; extramural concessions,

the state, 285n112; shift in cultural 44–45, 99; foreigners priced out of
understanding of property ownership housing, 100; governance of, 89– 90,
from family to individual, 97– 98, 101, 98, 100–101, 114–16 (see also British
103, 104, 108; and social progress, 69, Municipal Council); lack of public
72; social relations (see social relations); housing, 243; legal practices in, 86
social surveys on, 64– 66, 68–70, (see also zoning laws and building
72–76; and sociopolitical ideology of regulations under this heading);
jia in the late imperial era, 18–21; as miniature colonies, 4, 86– 87;
transitions from large to small, 238–39; misinformation about, 2; as most
types of families, 70–72, 75, 284n97, desirable real estate in Tianjin, 82;
285n99; and Western-style houses, and property disputes, 105–11; public
148. See also jia; jiating parks, 165; public utilities and services
fantasies of home, 14, 193, 199, 201, 203–14; in, 89, 90, 116–18; and real estate
kitchens excluded from, 211–13 market, 91– 97, 159, 243; return to
fashion, 111, 194, 226, 235 Chinese control, 14, 82, 246–47;
fen, 128 schools in, 88– 89, 288n23; shops and
feng shui principles, 10, 79, 131–34, 160; restaurants in, 228; and sociopolitical
and Tianjin city site, 21, 23 spaces, 220; zoning laws and building
Feng Wuyue, 225 regulations, 96– 97, 124, 159, 162. See also
Fileti, Vincenzo, 87 British Concession; German Conces-
filial piety, 59, 62, 63, 70 sion; Italian Concession; Japanese
floorplans, 127, 134, 138, 148, 149(fig.), 150, Concession; Russian Concession
152, 154, 211, 213, 250– 51 France: assimilation vs. association
Fong, H. D., 281n55, 285n105 agendas in architectural styles,
food consumption, 65– 67 157– 58; and Boxer Uprising, 34;
footbinding, 49, 236 French colonial policy of association
foreign concessions (Tianjin), 86– 87; vs. assimilation, 299n7; style and taste
address conventions, 303n47; architec- in, 155; and urban planning in
tural styles, 156, 158, 187 (see also Madagascar, 300n19
specific concessions); Chinese nation- French Concession (Tianjin), 29, 30, 31,
als’ power in, 88, 98, 100–101, 115–16, 33, 44; architectural style, 156, 158;
291n59; Chinese residents in, 2, 8, 83, and decolonization, 247; as desirable
94– 95, 100, 136– 51, 244; and colonial residential district, 82; housing
competition, 89, 158– 59; as commer- development contracted to Crédit
cial extensions of empire rather than Foncier, 162; housing for warlords, 94;
colonial settlements, 158; concession and political rights of Chinese
holders, 29, 44; and cooperation residents, 98, 291n59; and property
among foreign empires, 89; current disputes, 105–11; real estate market,
status, 3; dates established and 92; shops and restaurants in, 228; and
relinquished, 85(fig.); establishment Woman World, 229
of, 18, 29; expansion and growth of, Fululin Restaurant, 228
346 Index
Funü xin duhui. See Woman World 229–37; women as household laborers
Funü zazhi (magazine), 196 under the CCP, 257– 58. See also men;
furniture, 172–75, 181, 202–3, 301n30, patriarchy; women
301n34; carpets, 185– 86, 186(fig.), 188, geomancy, 131, 132–33, 152, 294n12, 294n13.
303n53; chairs, 173, 179, 202, 306n32; See also feng shui principles
and changing social practices, 202–3, George III, king of England, 27
306n32; Chinese words for, 202–3, German Concession (Tianjin), 29, 44, 82
306n29; and common knowledge, Germany, 29, 34
200–201; and consuming the world at Geyling, Rolf, 146
home, 185– 86; and emotional and ghosts, 127
aspirational aspects of home life, Glosser, Susan, 8– 9, 17, 55
202–3; furniture stores, 172–74, 301n30; “good wife wise mother” ideology, 49
sofas, 172–74, 202–3; tables, 150, 172, Gothic style, 87, 115, 156
175, 306n32 governance of Tianjin: and blurred lines
between public government and
Gamble, Sidney, 65, 66, 67, 68, 282n61, private business in real estate market,
282n70 91– 92; Bureau of Social Affairs (Shehui
gambling dens, 92, 295n28 ju), 76–78, 246, 247, 285n105, 286n116,
garden city residential model, 95, 123, 154, 302n38; Chinese participation in
159, 187 foreign concession governance,
gender roles, 7; civil code of 1929 and 100–101, 115–16, 291n59; concessions
1930 as legal centerpiece for gender returned to Chinese control, 14, 82,
equality, 101–3, 114, 118 (see also civil 246–47; and development of housing,
code of 1929 and 1930); housework 124–25; focus on social stability and
gendered female and devalued under order, 76; foreign members of
the CCP, 257– 58; and housing, 125, concession municipal councils, 89– 90;
133–34; jiaoji women, 222–24, 226, 228, governance of foreign concessions,
241; knowledge about the home as 89– 90, 98, 100–101, 114–16, 291n59
female-gendered knowledge, 14, (see also British Municipal Council);
175–77, 184, 192– 93, 242; and May multiplicity of property laws, 105– 6;
Fourth Movement, 221; nei (inner) as relocation of political center, 44
female and wai (outer) as male, 17; and (see also Tianjin: new municipal
political rights (see political rights); district); return to Chinese control
and property ownership (see property following Boxer Uprising, 43; suffrage,
ownership); and public and private 98; Tianjin Provisional Government
domains, 221; public parks as sites (TPG), 38–45; transition from
of child-rearing, 165; sewing, 140; Guomindang to CCP governance, 248
and the social sphere, 224–29; and Grand Canal, 21, 22, 23
sociopolitical spaces of Tianjin, 219–24 Great Britain, 34–35, 50, 114, 293n114.
(see also social spaces); and state-led See also British Concession
patriarchy of the CCP, 257; women and Great Leap Forward, 260, 262
society, home, and the social sphere, Great Learning (Confucius), 10, 19–20, 133
Index 347
Guangxu emperor, 49 formation of class identity and the

guilds, 22, 297n56 construction of home as mutually
guixiu, 226 constitutive processes, 242; and
Guomindang: and capital moved to gender roles (see gender roles); interiors
Nanjing, 82, 218; and civil law, 104, 118 and exteriors (see architecture and
(see also civil code of 1929 and 1930); building practices; home design);
and control of Tianjin municipal invention by urban elites in the
government, 14; and public housing, Republican era, 5, 6, 242; jiating as,
243, 247; and reforming the family, 103 48– 52, 191, 213, 241; katei as, 50– 51,
(see also family; ideology); and urban 278n17, 278n18; and patriarchal
planning, 218, 220, 247–48. See also privilege and power under the CCP,
China, Republican era 244, 256– 57; as refuge from work world
gynotechnic, 47 for men in Victorian England,
293n114; Shimoda Utako and, 50– 51;
Habermas, Jürgen, 190 as site of identity formation in
Hai River, 21, 29, 44, 116 Republican era, 5, 7, 242; as site of
Hai River Conservancy Commission, 29, personal comfort, 52; in socialist
89, 144 China, 243, 244, 256– 58; subjectivity
halls: in courtyard houses, 132, 181; in and narratives of jiating, 237–40; and
Western-style houses, 180(fig.), 181, women’s magazines, 52, 175, 177– 81,
182, 185 229–37 (see also women’s magazines);
Handler, Sarah, 202, 306n32 women’s mastery of knowledge about
happiness in the home. See emotions; the home, 175–77, 184, 242. See also
home life home design; home life; house; jiating
Happy Home (Shanghai magazine), 195, home design, 13, 154– 88; architectural
196, 198, 305n20 styles of foreign concessions, 156, 158,
Happy Home (Tianjin magazine). 187 (see also architecture and building
See Kuaile jiating practices; specific concessions); art deco
Hershatter, Gail, 6, 297n56 design, 209–10, 302n45; consideration
Hevia, James, 28 of “feeling” in decorating, 204– 5; and
He Zhang Suling, Mrs., 106– 8 consumption of global commodities,
historiography, 58, 60, 268 5, 165– 66, 173, 178, 185– 88, 201, 209;
Ho, Franklin, 61, 281n55 cosmopolitan domesticity, 165– 66,
Hoganson, Kristin, 165– 66 183, 185, 188; decorating mistakes, 205;
home: affective understanding of, 13, 213 European and American Orientalism
(see also emotions); as the center of in the Chinese home, 185– 86; and
society, 231–32, 237; collectivization of female taste and knowledge about
household labor, 257, 259– 62; debates the home, 174–77, 184, 192– 93; and
over home and society in Woman feminization of knowledge, 14, 175,
World, 230–37; as the enemy of female 188, 192– 93, 197–202; furnishings,
social status, 231–32, 237; as female- 154, 172–74, 202–3, 306n32 (see also
managed center of modern living, 52; furniture); global modern style, 209;
348 Index
home design (cont.) in design of, 20, 79, 124 (see also
late imperial Chinese aesthetics, 181; feng shui principles); jia as, 131; as
mixed Chinese-Western styles, 162– 69, manifestation of an individual’s
177–78, 180(fig.), 182– 88; photos of property ownership and political
interior spaces and fantasies of home, rights, 102 (see also political rights;
203–14; photos of staged interiors, property ownership); owned by
205– 8, 206– 8(figs.); politics of individuals rather than the extended
architectural style, 157– 62; politics family, 101, 103, 104, 108 (see also
of design/style, 154, 155– 56, 175; and property ownership); relationship
social status, 192– 93; Tianjin modern between house and political stability
style, 13, 156, 169–72, 177–78, 182– 88, in late imperial China, 19–21, 59, 79,
209–10; wall hangings, 177, 181, 205, 131, 133; relationship between text and
302n43, 306n32; and women’s house in late imperial China, 47–48;
magazines, 175, 177– 81, 202–13. ritual and social spaces in analogous
See also architecture and building positions in all types of houses, 133,
practices; specific rooms 134, 295n24; Shen Yiyun’s houses,
home economics education, 50, 51, 56, 68, 136–41, 153; as site for identity formation
150, 231, 237 and signaling, 5, 7, 14, 137, 139, 214; as
home life ( jiating shenghuo), 9, 189–214; site of women’s gendered and political
advice on, 192– 94, 199–202, 212–13; roles associated with spatial practices,
and affect, 190– 91, 202–3 (see also 102; Sung Sik house, 141–46, 148– 51,
emotions); and common knowledge, 149(fig.), 153; superfluous rooms, 211;
199–202; fantasies of home, 14, 193, as symbol of masculine identity, 115–18;
199, 201, 203–14; and feminization of Xu Pu’an house, 125–27, 126(fig.),
knowledge, 14, 175, 188, 192– 93, 128–30(figs.), 134–36, 150, 153, 166– 69,
197–202; home as apolitical space, 191; 167– 68(figs.), 200n23. See also
the home as a site for happiness, 190, apartments; architecture and building
252– 54, 253(fig.); and middle-class practices; courtyard houses; furniture;
identity, 190– 91; potential volatility housing; jia; property ownership;
of, 191; and propaganda under the property rights; real estate market;
CCP, 252– 54, 253(fig.); and women’s single-family houses; townhouses;
magazines, 190, 192–202 Western-style houses; specific rooms
Hong Fincher, Leta, 267 household, 9; as business institution in
Hoover, Herbert and Lou, 35 the late imperial era, 19; and changes
house: Bao Guiqing house, 164(fig.), in property rights, 101, 103, 104, 108;
164– 66; Chen Guangyuan house, 162, defining the “economic family,” 67;
163(fig.), 164; design and personal divergence between Japanese and
taste (see home design); floorplans, Chinese political understandings of
127, 134, 138, 148, 149(fig.), 150, 152, the household, 51– 52; and gender roles
154, 211, 213, 250– 51; “Great Socialist (see gender roles); and inner/outer (nei
House,” 260– 62; as gynotechnic, 47; and wai) continuum, 17; as political
importance of cosmological principles participant, 19; relationship between
Index 349
household and state in the imperial era, government, colonial governments,

19–20, 117; relationship between and investors, 124–25; political
household and state in the Republican consequences of choice, 135; and
era, 117; as social space, 20; and politics of architectural style, 157– 62;
sociopolitical ideology of jia in the public housing (see public housing);
late imperial era, 19–21; surveys on renters and rental property, 87, 95– 96,
household consumption, 65– 67. 116, 123, 136, 142–43, 243, 244, 297n52;
See also jia for shimin (city people), 247–48;
housewives, 211, 230, 235, 261; house- single-family house ideal, 248–49, 251,
work gendered female and devalued 262, 263; and social class/social status,
under the CCP, 257– 58; taitai (wives 7, 82, 94– 95, 125, 138, 150 (see also
of elites), 221; women as career middle class, Chinese; urban elites;
women vs. wives and mothers in the working class, Chinese; specific classes
Republican era, 221, 230–34. See also under this heading); and social
gender roles practices, 13, 125; and sociopolitical
housing: building practices, 127–32, 147– 52, ideology of jia in the late imperial era,
294nn12–17, 295n23 (see also architec- 133–34; subletting, 65, 67, 95, 96;
ture and building practices; carpenters “suitable” housing, 143–45; types of,
and builders); for cadres, 250– 51, 123 (see also apartments; courtyard
251(fig.), 262– 63; choice of, 13, 123– 53; houses; dormitories; public housing;
commodification of, 81, 90– 97, single-family houses; townhouses;
266– 68 (see also real estate market); Western-style houses); for university
communal housing not fully realized, faculty, 250; for urban elites, 93– 95,
262; economical housing proposed in 123– 53, 245; for warlords (see warlords);
the early postwar years, 248–49, 262; and water issues, 116–18; for workers,
floorplans, 127, 138, 148, 149(fig.), 150, 3, 94, 243–45, 249– 52, 259– 63, 266; work
152, 154, 211, 213, 250– 51; form dictating unit–based housing (danwei system), 3,
function, 148; and gender roles, 19, 125 249– 50, 259– 63, 266; zoning laws and
(see also gender roles); hierarchies building regulations, 96– 97, 124,
within housing complexes, 250– 51; 144, 159, 162. See also apartments;
housing assignments under the CCP, architecture and building practices;
250– 51, 262– 63; housing central to courtyard houses; dormitories;
masculine identities, 14, 115–18, 242, property ownership; property rights;
293n114; housing central to middle public housing; single-family houses;
class identity, 3, 246, 264, 266– 67; townhouses; Western-style houses
housing as a right, 14, 119, 247, 248, Hsu, Francis, 284n95
262; housing shortages, 119, 210, Huang, Nicole, 236
244–48; investors, 87, 92– 93, 146, 159, Huang Fu, 138, 139–40
245, 267, 270; loan applications, 249– 50, Hua Shiku, 290n44
259; middle-class housing in the Hübner, Otto, 85
post-WWII era, 161; new development Hudec, Ladislav, 303n45
determined by Chinese municipal Hu Shi, 59, 61, 140, 279n28
350 Index
Huxley, Thomas, 52 house design, 20, 79, 124; late imperial

hygiene, 40–41, 76, 116–17 Chinese political ideology, 13, 18–21,
59, 133–34, 191 (see also Confucianism;
Ibsen, Henrik, 59– 60 Neo- Confucianism); nationalist
identity, 293n114; in the current era, ideology focused on reforming the
265– 66; and dwelling in the world, family, 11, 17–18, 46, 51, 55, 75, 76,
13–14, 137; and economic status, 115; 78–79, 238–42; and patriarchal
formation of class identity and the privilege and power under the CCP,
construction of home as mutually 244, 256– 57, 267; and public and
constitutive processes, 242; and home private domains, 220–21; reconnection
design, 156, 175; house and home as a of family, house, and home under the
site for identity experimentation and CCP, 244, 260– 62; small family (xiao
signaling, 5, 7, 14, 137, 139, 214; housing jiating) ideology, 11, 17–18, 46, 55, 57,
central to identity of Chinese middle 58, 60, 78–79, 239, 242, 260, 262; social
class, 3, 246, 264, 266– 67; identity science as political ideology, 53, 55
formation in the public spaces of work (see also social science); sociopolitical
under the CCP, 257; middle-class ideology of jia, 18–21, 59, 133–34, 191;
identity and the home as a site for and women’s roles in the workforce
happiness, 190– 91, 214; multiple and the home under the CCP, 257– 58.
layers of, 81– 82, 115, 156; and multiple See also Confucianism; May Fourth
social roles of urban women, 230–37; Movement; Neo- Confucianism
and personal taste, 162–74; and India, 37, 66, 83
possession of women’s magazines, individualism, 57, 58, 59
194; property ownership and mascu- Industrial Revolution, 8, 62
line identity, 14, 115–18, 242, 293n114; inner/outer continuum (nei and wai), 17,
in the Republican era, 5, 7, 10–11, 240; and concentric ordering of space,
115–18, 137; scholar gardens as sites of 24; and courtyard houses, 132, 191;
masculine identity, 165 distinguished from public/private
ideology: CCP propaganda about happy distinction, 17, 19; and doorways, 127;
home life, 252– 56, 253(fig.); and and sociopolitical ideology of jia in
Chinese intellectuals educated the late imperial era, 18–21, 191; and
abroad, 61; and colonial coproduction sociopolitical spaces of Tianjin, 220
of knowledge about the traditional Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), 60– 61,
Chinese family, 55– 63; “community 64, 71
loyalty” vs. “family loyalty,” 72; interior decoration. See home design
debates over sociopolitical ideology, international relations, 224
among Chinese intellectuals, 54– 55; investors, 87, 92– 93, 146, 159, 245, 267, 270
denunciation of Confucianism and IPR. See Institute of Pacific Relations
Confucian family values, 53– 55, 58, 59; Italian Concession (Tianjin): architec-
differing models of change, 63, 78–79; tural style, 156, 158; Chinese architec-
disjunction between ideology and tural elements in, 164, 164(fig.);
practice, 72–78, 113–14, 239–40; and Chinese residents in, 94– 95, 136– 51,
Index 351
244, 290n44; as desirable residential and katei, 51; meaning in late imperial
district, 82; entertainment club in, era, 19, 191; as political participant, 13;
295n28; establishment of, 44; housing sociopolitical ideology of, in the late
for warlords, 94, 95; and property imperial era, 18–21, 59, 133–34, 191;
disputes, 105; and real estate market, transformation into jiating, 9, 12, 48, 191
91, 97, 136, 143; as showpiece, 87; as jian, 132, 294n16
tourist destination, 3; Western-style Jianzhu yuekan (The Builder; journal),
houses in, 136– 51, 137(fig.), 142(fig.); 147–48
zoning laws and building regulations, jiaoji, 222–23, 228–29, 241, 243, 308n18.
97, 144, 159 See also social spaces: women and the
Italy, and Boxer Uprising, 34 socializing sphere
jiating: affect and, 190 (see also emotions);
Japan: adoption of Chinese characters, different meanings of (family, house,
279n30; advertisements and consump- home), 11, 48, 51, 222; early use of
tion, 254; and Boxer Uprising, 34–35, term, 278n17; as the enemy of society
36(fig.); and capitalism, 254; divergence or political center of national reform,
between Japanese and Chinese political 231–32, 237; as family, 191 (see also
understandings of the household, family); as female-gendered space,
51– 52; education of women in, 49– 50; 222; as home, 48– 52, 191, 213, 241
family reform, 278n18; “good wife (see also home); and multiple social
wise mother” ideology, 49; invasion roles of urban women, 230–37; new
of Tianjin, 236; Japanese middle class model of jiating under the CCP, 244,
and the invention of the modern home, 260– 63; and patriarchal privilege and
5, 156; katei as home, 50–51, 278n17, power under the CCP, 244, 256– 57;
278n18; kazoku as family, 52; modern relationship between jiating and
kitchens in, 150; post–WWII shortages shehui, 224, 241; as space of personal
of goods and housing, 254; and relations and affections, 240–41;
translations of social science texts, 53; subjectivity and narratives of jiating,
women’s magazines, 302n39, 305n19 237–40; transformation from jia, 9, 12,
Japanese Concession (Tianjin), 2, 3, 29; 48, 191; as understood by Chinese
architectural style, 158; Chinese people rather than political ideologues,
property owners as members of 12; and urban elites, 242; and women’s
municipal council, 98; and decoloniza- magazines, 52, 195, 213, 237 (see also
tion, 247; as desirable residential women’s magazines); word origin, 11,
district, 82; mixed Chinese-Western 48– 52. See also home; home life
styles, 169; mixed-use real estate jiating shenghuo, 9, 189. See also home life
development, 95, 290n46; Puyi as Jiating zhoukan (The Chinese Home;
resident, 198; real estate market, 92; magazine), 195– 97
schools, 288n23; shops and restau- jiawu, 258
rants, 228 jiazu, 279n24
jia: different meanings of (family, house, “joint” family. See extended/“joint”
household), 10, 20, 47; as house, 131; family
352 Index
Journal of Architecture, 260– 61 Kwan Man Bun, 22, 274n14, 289n38

Journal of Foreign Policy, 265 Kwok, D. W. Y., 281n60
Judge, Joan, 50, 278n13
Ladies’ Home Journal, 35, 177, 192– 93, 195
Kailan Mining Administration, 94 Ladies’ Journal (Funü zazhi), 52
Kang Youwei, 49, 54, 58 Lady, The (Funü; periodical), 222–23
katei (Japanese word for “home”), 50– 51, Lamson, Herbert, 67– 69, 283n77
278n17, 278n18 Lang, Olga, 70–72, 79, 284n94
Katei (Shimoda), 51 Lean, Eugenia, 190, 221–22
Keeping the Nation’s House (Schneider), 231 Ledderose, Lothar, 294n15
keting, 152, 174. See also drawing room Lee, Haiyan, 190
Khrushchev, Nikita, 249, 255 Lee, Rose Hum, 285n112
kitchen, 152; appliances and furniture, Lefebvre, Henri, 217
173; and courtyard houses, 134, 150; legal practices: civil code of 1929 and
excluded from photographs, 211; and 1930, 80– 81, 101– 5, 107– 8, 114, 115, 118;
gender and status relations, 150– 51; legal practices in foreign concessions,
modern women cooking considered 86, 96– 97 (see also British Municipal
comical, 211–12, 212(fig.); and servants, Council); legal reforms intended to
150– 51, 211; and Western-style houses, enhance China’s global standing,
149(fig.), 150 102–3; marriage law of 2011, 267;
Knapp, Ronald, 131, 134, 295n23 multiplicity of property laws in
Ko, Dorothy, 8 Tianjin, 105– 6; property laws under
Koo, Wellington, 111, 227 the CCP, 266– 67; property rights of
Korea, 288n23, 305n19 extended families, 101, 107; property
Koyama Shizuko, 49 rights of men, 97–101; property rights
kuaile, 256. See also emotions of women, 101–14; sumptuary laws,
Kuaile jiating (Happy Home; Shanghai 295n23; zoning laws and building
magazine). See Happy Home regulations, 96– 97, 124, 144, 159, 162
Kuaile jiating (Happy Home; Tianjin Lenin, Vladimir, 83, 85– 86
magazine), 52, 190, 196; advice Lewis, Mark Edward, 24
columns, 199, 200–201; and affective Liang Qichao, 49, 54, 58, 146, 147(fig.),
understanding of home, 204– 5; 198
contrast to Ling long, 209–10; cooking Liang Sicheng, 146, 160– 61, 297n54,
column, 212; and emotional and 299n14
aspirational aspects of home life, Liang you (pictorial magazine), 194, 225
202–3; and fantasies of home, 203– 5; library, 178– 82, 179(fig.), 185, 211, 302n42
and global vision of home, 177– 82, Lieberthal, Kenneth, 248
178(fig.), 179(fig.), 180(fig.), 185– 86; Li Jie, 127–28
kitchens not depicted in, 211; male Lijin gongsi, 92
editors, 305n20; readership of, 177; Ling long (women’s magazine), 195;
words for furniture used in, 202 advertisements, 269; advice columns,
Kuo, Margaret, 104 199; contrast to Kuaile jiating, 209–10;
Index 353
and fantasies of home, 210, 211; images networks, 227, 309n27; and social
of women in public spaces, 203, 205; status, 138. See also divorce
meaning of title, 197– 98; modern masculinity, 81, 82; and architectural
women cooking considered comical, styles, 166; and property ownership,
211–12, 212(fig.); possession of, as mark 14, 115–18, 242, 293n114; and scholar
of identity, 194; and Shanghai modern gardens, 165
style, 209–10; staged interior shots, materiality of everyday life, 9; and
206– 8(figs.), 206– 8; wide circulation advertising, 269, 312n36; cosmopolitan
and preservation of copies, 196– 97; domesticity, 165– 66, 183, 185, 188;
words for furniture used in, 306n29 design, style, and aesthetics of
Lin Sung-ho, 67 dynasties, 154– 55; positive affect of
literacy, 48, 98, 176, 193, 194, 302n38 “good objects,” 190; tension between
Li Tun, 93 modernity and degradation, 201–2;
Liu, Lydia, 53– 54 and women’s knowledge about the
Liu Haidi, 238–39 home, 175–77, 184, 199–202; and
Liu Haiyan, 1–2, 21, 93, 200n23, 305n47 women’s magazines, 193–202. See also
living room, 152, 173, 211 consumption; furniture; home design
Lu Ban, 129–30, 133 May Fourth Movement: and concubinage,
Lu Ban jing (architecture manual), 129–30, 75; and ideas about traditional
131, 133 Chinese families, 58, 59, 69, 190, 221;
Luce, Henry, 194 and legal reforms, 103; and public and
Lu Hanchao, 297n52 private domains, 220–21; and small
Lu Yanzhi, 146, 159– 60, 297n54 family (xiao jiating) ideology, 55; and
women, 221
Macartney, George, 27–28 Matsushita Electronics, 312n36
magazines. See women’s magazines memoirs, 136–41
magic, practiced by carpenters against men: as editors of women’s magazines,
employers, 130, 132, 133 305n20; knowledge about the home as
Mai Huiting, 69–70 male-gendered knowledge in imperial
make-up rooms, 211 China, 192; in large vs. small families,
Mann, Susan, 8 70; male individual as political unit,
Mao Zedong, 83, 86, 253(fig.), 255, 256, 51; “man of the house” vs. “man of the
256(fig.), 257 market” (Habermas’s concepts), 190;
maps, 30(fig.), 30–31, 84(fig.) multiple layers of male identity, 81– 82;
marriage, 70; arranged marriages, and patriarchal power in the Republi-
296n34; and civil code of 1929 and can era, 81; patriarchal privilege and
1930, 101; concubines and second power under the CCP, 244, 256– 57,
wives, 46, 75, 77, 78, 300n23; dating, 267; and patrilineal succession, 103;
223–24, 235; marriage law of 2011, 267; political rights tied to property, 13,
matchmaking services, 77–78; and 97– 99, 115–16, 118; and property
May Fourth Movement, 221; men’s disputes, 80– 81; property ownership
choice of a wife, 235; and social and masculine identity, 14, 115–18, 242,
354 Index
men (cont.) modernity, 5, 281n59; “counterhistories”

293n114; and property rights, 118, 267; of (Burton’s concept), 12; and diversity
and public and private domains, 220; of family structures, 75; and feminiza-
right to manage women’s property, tion of knowledge about the home,
108; social status marked by housing 192; global modern style, 209–10;
choice, 7, 94– 95, 145, 157, 293n114; and and middle-class urban culture, 6–7;
society as a male-dominated space, and mixed Western and Chinese
233; and suffrage, 98; as writers for temporalities and cultures, 153; and
women’s magazines, 197. See also civil reconstruction of Tianjin’s political
servants; gender roles; sons; warlords center, 44; Shanghai universal
middle class, Chinese, 14; Chinese words modern style, 182; and small family
for, 265; and conspicuous consump- (xiao jiating) ideology, 57, 58, 78–79;
tion, 65– 66; and erasure of historical and social surveys, 65; tension
memory, 3, 264–70; Euro-American between modernity and degradation,
class categories not easily mapped 201–2; Tianjin modern style, 13, 156,
onto Chinese society, 6; formation of 169–72, 177–78, 182– 88, 209–10; and
class identity and the construction of transformation from jia to jiating, 12
home as mutually constitutive modular home building, 23, 38, 128, 132,
processes, 242; global visions of the 160, 294n15, 295n23
modern middle-class home predating Morse, Hosea Ballou, 42
self-conscious bourgeois class in “mosquito press,” 200, 305– 6n24
China, 188; and home life, 190– 91, Murphy, Henry, 159– 60, 161
203, 213 (see also home life; women’s
magazines); home ownership central Nanjing: capital moved to, 45, 82, 218; Sun
to middle-class identity, 3, 246, 264, Yat-sen Mausoleum, 160
266– 67; and housing in Zhejiang, 138, Nanjing Decade (1927–1937), 218, 221,
139; and joint family structure, 239, 227
284n97; low class consciousness, 6, 7, Nankai Middle School, 305n22
156, 188; middle class housing in the Nankai University, 161, 249, 268
post-WWII era, 161; and modern Nationalist Party. See China, Republican
China, 3, 6, 14, 264–70; and single- era; Guomindang
family housing project of 1947, 247; nei and wai, 17–19, 127. See also inner/outer
Tianjin’s lack of true bourgeois class, continuum
93, 156; and women’s magazines, 193, Neo- Confucianism: denunciation of,
198 (see also women’s magazines). 53– 55; and house-building practices,
See also urban elites 130–31, 133; interconnected relation-
middle class, Japanese, 5, 156 ship between individual, household,
middle class, U.S., 140 and state, 19–20; ordering of space and
Milam, Ava, 56, 68, 283n82 inner/outer continuum, 17, 19; reform
Mill, John Stuart, 52 through cyclical and restorative
Ming dynasty, 21–22, 128, 155, 295n23 change, 63; and social hierarchy,
missionaries, 10, 31–32, 37, 58, 64, 245 289n38; and sociopolitical ideology of
Index 355
jia in the late imperial era, 19–20, 48, Pathé Department Store, 228
133. See also Confucianism patriarchy: Confucian patriarchy, 81;
New China Village (Shanghai), 246 patriarchal family relations, 59, 62, 81;
New Culture Movement, 58, 220–21. patriarchal privilege and power under
See also May Fourth Movement the CCP, 244, 256– 57, 267; property
Newell, Jane, 55– 56, 58, 280n40 ownership and patriarchal power in
New Youth (Xin qingnian; journal), 58– 59 the Republican era, 81
Niehoff, Johan, 25–27, 26(fig.), 27(fig.) Peffer, Nathaniel, 183–84
nuclear family: as “conjugal” family, 71; People’s Daily Newspaper, 257
connection to natal household, 72; and People’s Liberation Army, 248
developmental theory of family photography, 194– 95; cover girls, 225–27,
transformation, 57, 70; in Europe, 57; 230; and fantasies of home, 203–14;
and housing for university faculty vs. and female celebrity, fashion, and
workers, 250; as ideal family structure beauty, 226; and global modern style,
in nationalist ideology, 46, 55, 75, 209–10; images of women in public
239–40, 242 (see also xiao jiating spaces, 203, 205, 230; kitchens not
ideology); as ideal family structure depicted in women’s magazines, 211;
under the CCP, 259– 60, 263; and Mai pictorial magazines, 224–27, 229–37
Benwen’s ideas about types of families, (see also Woman World); as prescrip-
70; as marker of and means to tive, 205; sitting for portraits, 226–27;
modernity, 57; as “marriage” family, staged interior shots, 205– 8,
68; and narratives of jiating, 238–39; 206– 8(figs.); stock photos, 209
nationalist calls for modern small police, 44, 75, 89, 90
families not heeded, 75–76, 239–40; political rights: and Chinese participation
and patriarchal privilege and power in foreign concession governance,
under the CCP, 256– 57; and property 100–101, 115–16, 291n59; housing as a
disputes, 104– 5; size of, 73, 285n108; political right for all citizens, 14,
in the U.S., 285n108; and Western- 247–48, 262; and property ownership,
style houses, 148, 150; worker’s village 13, 97– 99, 102, 114, 266– 67; of women,
for, 252 107– 8, 114, 118, 258; and women’s
nüshi, 226 employment, 258
political stability, 17, 19–21, 59, 79
Ocko, Jonathan, 97 politics of design/style, 154, 157– 62, 175
On Liberty (Mill), 52 poor, the, 77; family size, 68, 71; high
opium, 40 mortality rate, 71; living arrange-
Opium Wars, 22, 28 ments, 65; poor women in Tianjin,
Osborne, Ernest, 63 77–78; and public housing, 246, 247
(see also public housing); relationship
Palmer, Frederick, 35 between income and food purchases,
Park Hotel (Shanghai), 302–3n45 65, 66. See also working class, Chinese
parks, 83, 165, 204, 223, 230, 264 Power, Brian, 288n20
Partner, Simon, 312n36 Practical Women’s School (Tokyo), 50
356 Index
Princeton University, 64, 65 Concession, 144, 151; and nationalist

private/public space. See public and architecture, 160– 61; and real estate
private domains development, 95, 97; and shehui, 222;
Problems of Change of the Chinese Family and socialist collectivity, 260; and
(Jiating gaizao wenti; Mai Huiting), sociopolitical spaces, 220, 221
69–70 public housing: CCP and, 243–44, 251– 52,
propaganda, 252– 58, 253(fig.), 256(fig.), 256– 57, 266; and collectivization,
257– 58 259– 62; and Guomindang government
property ownership, 80–119; and dummy of Tianjin, 247–48; neglected in the
corporations, 292n96; and masculine Republican era, 119, 243–46; and
identity, 14, 115–18, 242, 293n114; and patriarchal privilege and power under
middle-class identity, 246; and the CCP, 256– 57; in postcolonial/CCP
political rights, 13, 97– 99, 102, 114, era, 246– 52, 259– 63; Tianjin municipal
266– 67; property as center of power government’s early plans for, 246
struggles between colonial powers Pudong Model Village, 245
and Chinese urban elites, 80– 82; shift Pusey, James Reeve, 279n28
in cultural understanding of property Puyi, deposed Qing emperor, 198, 228
ownership from family to individual,
101, 103, 104, 108. See also housing; qi, 131
real estate market Qianlong emperor, 155
property rights, 97–114; abolition of qijujian. See living room
private property under the CCP, qing, 191
260– 62; differing notions of property Qing dynasty. See China, imperial (late
in China and the West, 97; of extended Qing dynasty)
family, 101, 107; inheritance rights, Qinghua University, 64
103–4; legal protections of private Qiu Jin, 296n33
property under the CCP, 266– 67; of Qi Yaoshan, 290n44
men, 97–101, 114, 118, 267; patrilineal
succession in the imperial era, 103; Rappoport, A. S., 279n24
property disputes, 104–11; and public real estate market, 90– 97, 123–25, 136,
utilities, 116–18; shift of rights from 146, 148; and architectural styles, 159;
family to individual, 97– 98, 103, 115, foreign concessions as most desirable
118; of women, 13, 80– 81, 101–14, 118, location, 82– 83; foreigners priced out
267; women not guaranteed the right of concession housing, 100; and
to manage their property, 107– 9 gender inequality, 267, 269; housing
prostitution, 77 shortages, 119, 210, 244–48; and
public and private domains, 8; develop- investors, 87, 92– 93, 146, 159, 245, 267,
ment of the public sphere in China, 270; lack of middle- and lower-end
221–22; distinguished from inner/outer housing, 245; public housing neglected
continuum, 17, 19; and gender, in the Republican era, 243; re-
subjectivity, and social relations, marketization of housing in Tianjin
220–21; and housing in the Italian under the CCP, 266– 68; renters and
Index 357
rental property, 87, 95– 96, 116, 123, semi-colony, Tianjin as, 83, 85– 86
136, 142–43, 243, 244, 297n52; in servants, 141; and courtyard houses, 134,
Shanghai, 95– 96, 210, 245–46, 297n52; 140, 141, 150, 152; and the “economic
subletting, 65, 67, 95, 96. See also family,” 67; and kitchens/cooking,
housing; property ownership 150– 51, 211–12; living arrangements,
Reid, Susan, 255 65; and Western-style houses, 140, 150
renters and rental property, 87, 95– 96, sexual harassment, 234
116, 123, 136, 142–43, 243, 244, 297n52 shafa, 202, 306n29. See also sofas
restaurants, 3, 14, 40, 228, 240, 241, Shakai mondai jiten (Takabatake), 279n24
300n23 Shanghai: class consciousness in, 6;
Riche Café, 228 department stores, 255; and the
rituals, 24, 102, 117, 130, 132, 133, 134, 213 “economic family,” 67; family size in,
riyong leishu (encyclopedias), 192 68; foreign concessions, 29; furniture
Rockefeller Foundation, 64, 282n62 stores, 172; housing crisis, 210, 245–46;
Rogaski, Ruth, 41 “model village” in Pudong district,
romance, 223–24 245; popular press in, 195–200; real
Rong-qing, 278n13 estate market, 95– 96, 210, 245–46,
Rongye gongsi, 93 297n52; subletting in, 67; tallest
Rong Yuan, 93 building, 302n45; and universal
rooflines, 159, 160 modern style, 182; urban development
Ruitenbeek, Klaas, 128–30, 131, 298n57 in, 95– 96; women’s magazines, 182,
Ruskola, Teemu, 86 194, 195– 98 (see also Ling long)
Russia, and Boxer Uprising, 34. See also Shanghai changshi (Common Knowledge;
Soviet Union journal), 200
Russian Concession (Tianjin), 29, 32, 44, shangliang (ridge pole), 132
156 shehui, 54, 219, 222, 224, 229–31, 241, 243.
Rybczynski, Witold, 209, 302n42 See also society
shehui diwei, 229, 232. See also social status
salt merchants, 19, 24, 93, 94, 274n14, Shehui ju (Tianjin Bureau of Social
289n38 Affairs), 76–78, 246, 247, 285n105,
salt trade, 22 286n116, 302n38
Sand, Jordan, 5, 50– 51, 156, 278n18 Shehuixue yuanli (Sun Benwen), 69
Sanger, Margaret, 69, 283n86 shejiao chang, 235. See also social spaces:
sanitation, 40–41, 116–17 women and the socializing sphere
Scanlon, Jennifer, 192– 93 Shen Yiyun, 136–41, 143, 150, 152, 153,
Schneider, Helen, 231 295n28, 296n33, 296n42
schools, 44, 77, 176, 260, 305n22; and Shih Shu-mei, 182
education of women in Japan, 49– 50; shimin (city people), 247–48
in foreign concessions, 88– 89, 288n23; Shimoda Utako, 50– 52, 278n13, 278n17
night schools, 77, 176, 286n117, 302n38 siheyuan, 24, 132. See also courtyard
Schwarcz, Vera, 58 houses
scientism, 281n60 Sims and Company, 172–74, 301n30
358 Index
single-family houses, 1, 95, 96, 143, 169, jiating, 48; and narratives of jiating,
238, 243, 245– 52, 267. See also Western- 237–40; and public and private domains,
style houses 220; reconnected to social spaces
Sino-Japanese War, 29, 53, 232 under the CCP, 260; in the Republican
sitting rooms, 207(fig.), 211 era, 11, 18, 55, 64, 70, 79, 135, 148, 176,
Skinner, William, 91 220–21, 237–40; in socialist China,
small family ideology. See xiao jiating 260– 62; spatial regulation of, within
ideology the house, 133–35, 148, 150; and
Smith, Adam, 52 transitional families, 70; and women’s
Social Bureau. See Bureau of Social Affairs magazines, 198. See also patriarchy
social capital. See cultural capital social science: developmental theory of
social class: and ability to change family transformation, 57, 59, 76; the
residences throughout life, 138; family as laboratory for, 63–72; foreign
delineated by education, 176; and funding for, 61, 64, 282n62; global
employment of women, 233; formation social science and Chinese intellectu-
of class identity and the construction als, 52– 55, 64; myth of backward
of home as mutually constitutive extended Chinese family transformed
processes, 242; and property owner- into social science fact, 55– 63; as
ship, 82; as a social process rather than political ideology, 53; science used to
a category, 7; and social spaces, 227, discredit traditional values, 53, 281n60;
228, 241 (see also social spaces); and social surveys, 48, 64– 66, 68–70, 72–76,
social surveys, 283n82 (see also social 234, 283n77, 283n82, 285n104, 285n105,
science: social surveys); and taste/ 285n107, 286n116, 290n42; training of
style, 156– 57 (see also home design); Chinese social scientists, 64, 282n63
and women’s magazines, 177. See also social spaces, 14, 217–41; cosmologies of
middle class, Chinese; social status; sociopolitical space, 219–24; identity
urban elites; working class, Chinese formation in the public spaces of work
social Darwinism, 10, 53, 58, 279n28 under the CCP, 257; jiaoji women,
socialism. See China, People’s Republic; 222–24, 226, 228, 241; jiating, shehui,
Chinese Communist Party and jiaoji, 222–23, 229, 241, 243; and
social practices: female social agency, 14, multiple social roles of urban women,
230–37 (see also social spaces); and 230–37; new understanding of jiating
furniture, 202–3, 306n32; and housing, under the CCP, 244, 260– 63; and
13, 125 public and private domains, 220–22
social progress, 66, 69, 72. See also (see also public and private domains);
ideology; modernity; social science and salt merchants, 289n38; and social
social relations: and colonial-capitalist class, 227, 241, 243; women and the
system, 156; disconnected from social socializing sphere, 14, 224–29, 235,
spaces, 55, 64, 79; and international 240–41, 242; women and the social
relations, 224; and Japanese concept of sphere, society, and home, 14, 229–37,
katei, 51; in the late imperial era, 10, 17, 240–41; women and the workplace,
20–21, 47, 133–34; and meanings of 233–34, 241, 243
Index 359
social status, 5; Chinese term for, 229, 232; sons: and CCP propaganda posters, 256;
and Confucianism, 295n23; and chambers for, in courtyard compounds,
conspicuous consumption, 65– 66; and 134, 138; and Happy Home magazine,
courtyard houses, 150; and danwei 198; and household as a state, 62; and
system, 266; discussions in Woman inheritance rights, 103; and marriage,
World, 229–37; and educational and 235; and “stem” family, 71
cultural capital of women, 176 (see also Soviet Union, 249, 252, 254, 255
cultural capital); and exterior house space: ancient Chinese concentric
design, 7, 157; and family and home, ordering of the universe, 24; Chinese
14; and feminization of knowledge projection of power through place,
about the home, 192; and furniture, 46; cyclical modes of, 46; and
174; hierarchies within housing deconstruction and reconstruction
complexes, 250– 51; and housing, 7, of Tianjin, 41–45; Euro-American
94– 95, 125, 145, 157, 293n114; and projection of power through height,
housing assignment under the CCP, 46; Euro-American public/private
250– 51, 262– 63, 266; and interior home distinction, 8, 17 (see also public and
design, 7, 176, 192– 93; and marriage, private domains); flexible living spaces
138; in Neo- Confucian social order, in courtyard houses, 150, 210; ignored
289n38; and possession of women’s in xiao jiating discourse, 17; Neo-
magazines, 194; and process of Confucian cosmological ordering
“distinction” (Bourdieu’s idea), 7; and system, 17, 42–43; social spaces of
social sphere, 228; status within Tianjin, 217–41 (see also social spaces);
houses, 133–34, 150; and sumptuary traditional building ideals, 42–43,
laws, 295n23; and taste/style, 156– 57, 45–46, 124. See also feng shui
174– 84; and Western-style houses, 150. principles; inner/outer continuum
See also identity; social class staircases, 149(fig.), 150
society: Chinese term for, 54, 222 (see also standard of living, surveys on, 65– 67,
shehui); debates over home and society 283n77
in Woman World, 229–37; as male- Staunton, George, 26–27
dominated space, 233; and multiple Steinhardt, Nancy, 45
social roles of urban women, 230–37; “stem” family, 71, 150, 285n99
as new concept in Chinese intellectual stone screen, 126(fig.), 127
thought, 52, 219; women and society, subjectivity, 14, 190; and escapist
home, and the social sphere, 14, fantasies of home, 14, 213–14; and
229–37, 240–41 material spaces and objects of home,
Society for Chinese Architects, 146 13; and narratives of jiating, 237–40;
Society for Renewal (Zuoxin she; and public and private domains,
publishing house), 50, 278n14 220–21
sofas, 172–74, 202–3 subletting, 65, 67, 95, 96
Song dynasty, 127, 155, 294n12, 295n23 sumptuary laws, 295n23
Song Shaopeng, 257 Sun Benwen, 69
Song sisters, 296n34, 309n27 Sung Sik, 141– 51, 153
360 Index
Sung Sik house, 141–46, 148– 51, 149(fig.) centers, 45; city’s residents’ perception
Sun Xiuying, 239 of their city, 183; colonial-capitalist
Sun Yat-sen, 83, 86, 278n13, 309n27 system, 81– 91, 95– 97, 100, 105, 115–18,
Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, 160 135, 146, 156, 162, 166, 184, 243, 248;
Su Qing, 236–37 colonialism as both multiple and
surveys. See social science: social surveys partial in, 18, 81, 83, 85– 86, 158;
Communist takeover (1949), 248; and
tables, 150, 172, 175, 306n32 concentric ordering of space, 24;
Tai Chong and Company, 172 confrontations with foreign intruders,
taitai, 221, 227 31–38; as cosmopolitan city, 88 (see also
Taiwan, 129, 288n23 cosmopolitanism); and decoloniza-
Takabatake, Motoyuki, 279n24 tion, 246–47; deconstruction and
tang. See halls reconstruction under colonial powers,
Tang Shaoyi, 111 18, 25, 31, 41–45, 48, 218; drum tower,
tangyi, 202–3, 306n29. See also sofas 23, 24, 42(fig.); elite residents (see urban
Tang Yulin, 290n44 elites); establishment of foreign
Tao, L. K. (Tao Menghe), 67, 68, 138, concessions, 29; and fen shui prin-
281n53 ciples, 21, 23; foreign accounts of,
taste, personal: female taste, 174– 84, 192; 25–28; foreign concessions (see British
and furniture, 173; and identity, Concession; foreign concessions;
162–74; rooftop pavilions, 162, 163(fig.), German Concession; Italian Conces-
164, 164(fig.), 164– 66; shift from taste sion; Japanese Concession; Russian
as aspect of male identity to taste as Concession); geography of, 21, 30–31,
domain of female knowledge, 175; and 93– 94; governance of (see governance
social status, 156– 57, 192. See also home of Tianjin); history of, 21–25, 218;
design housing crisis, 244–48; hygiene and
Teakle, S. G., 99–100 sanitation in, 41, 116–18; imperial
TEDA. See Tianjin Economic Technologi- yamen (administrative building), 23,
cal Development Area 24, 30; Japanese invasion, 236; lack of
Temple of Heaven (Beijing), 43 guilds and unions, 297n56; and legal
Tenney, C. D., 44, 92 practices of extra-territoriality, 86– 87;
theaters, 230 maps, 30(fig.), 30–31, 84(fig.); middle-
Theory of the Leisure Class, The (Veblen), class housing in the post–WWII era,
65– 66 161; as military garrison and trading
Thin, George, 33 hub, 18, 22, 218; new economic center
Thornton, Arland, 57, 61 of, 94; new municipal district, 44, 94,
Tianjin, 27(fig.), 30(fig.); address 154, 170–71(figs.), 217–18, 220; partial
conventions, 303n47; architecture of sovereignty of, 81; pictorial maga-
(see architecture and building zines, 224–25; and politics of design,
practices); and Boxer Uprising, 32–35, 155– 56; population statistics, 82, 123;
36(fig.), 37–43; chemical explosions of and post–Boxer Uprising foreign
2015, 264– 66; as city of multiple occupation, 37–43; postcolonial
Index 361
preservation of European architec- Tong Lam, 281n59

ture, 3–4; public housing, neglected in Tosh, John, 293n114
the Republican era, 243–46; public’s townhouses, 46, 123, 141, 145(fig.), 148
memory of colonial past, 3, 264–70; TPG. See Tianjin Provisional Government
real estate market, 90– 97, 146, 267– 68 Tsin, Michael, 54, 220
(see also real estate market); reputation
as conservative and conventional, United States: advertisements and
218–19; schools, 44, 77, 88– 89, 176, consumption, 254; and architectural
288n23, 305n22; as site for investment, styles in China, 159; and Boxer Uprising,
45 (see also investors); social spaces in, 34; and capitalism, 254; Chinese
217–41 (see also social spaces); surveys students in, 58, 282n63; concessions in
on municipal workers and families, China, 29, 44; consumption of objects
72–76; transition from Guomindang to and styles of imperialism, 165– 66;
CCP governance, 248; as treaty-port modern kitchens in, 150; post–WWII
city, 4, 18, 28–31, 82– 83; and unravel- shortages of goods and housing, 254;
ing of Qing authority, 39–43; urban promotion of changes in Chinese
planning (see urban planning); violent society, 64; and single-family house
confrontations with colonial powers, ideal, 249; size of nuclear families,
32–35; walls, 22–23, 24, 30; walls removed 285n108; and women’s rights, 114
by colonial powers, 41–43; water, 41, urban elites, 4; celebrity elites, 198, 226,
116–18; women’s magazines, 195– 96 227, 228; choice of housing, 123– 53; and
(see also Kuaile jiating); working class, combining old and new, 46 (see also
94; Xin Hebei qu (municipal complex), Tianjin modern style); and conspicu-
154, 170–71(figs.), 217, 220 ous consumption, 65– 66; as cosmo-
Tianjin Economic Technological politan class, 4, 138, 139; and cultural
Development Area (TEDA), 264 capital, 7, 145, 157, 176, 192– 93, 227–28,
Tianjin funü ribao (Tianjin Woman 269; and development of Tianjin’s
Weekly; magazine), 196 colonial-capitalist system, 82– 91
Tianjin Incident (1870), 32–33 (see also capitalism); diversity of family
Tianjin modern style, 13, 156, 169–72, structures, 75; and dwelling in the
177–78, 182– 88, 209–10 world, 13–14, 137; education as form of
Tianjin Native City Water Works, 116–17 self-cultivation rather than national
Tianjin Provisional Government (TPG), improvement, 236–37; employment of
38–45, 91, 98, 276n55, 276n59 elite women, 233–34, 243; family size,
Tianjin Social Bureau. See Bureau of 68– 69, 71; formation of class identity
Social Affairs and the construction of home as
Tianjin University, 250, 262 mutually constitutive processes, 242;
Tientsin Land Investment Company, 91– 92 houses named by, 292n90; housing
ting. See halls prioritized for, 245; income gap
Tong, Edith, 227 between urban elites and working
Tong Chang, Isabel, 108–14, 113(fig.), class in Tianjin, 142; jiaoji women,
224–25, 227 222–24, 226, 228, 241; and marriage
362 Index
urban elites (cont.) real estate investment, 93; social status

(see divorce; marriage); multiple forms marked by housing choice, 7, 157
of economic, social, and cultural water, 41; water issue in British Conces-
capital, 227–28; multiple social roles of sion, 116–18
urban women, 230–37; and personal Wealth of Nations, The (Smith), 52
taste, 162–74; photographs of, 113(fig.), Wen-hsi Yeh, 6
197, 225–27, 230; and political rights Western-style houses, 136– 51, 137(fig.),
(see political rights); and privileges of 142(fig.), 149(fig.); compared to
jiating as house and home, 242; and courtyard houses, 148, 210; elements
property ownership (see property of, 148– 50; and gender and status
ownership); and property rights relations, 150; and modern family
(see property rights); and real estate ideal, 148, 150; photographs of interiors
investment, 87, 92– 93, 146, 159, 245, (see photography); single-purpose rooms
267, 270; and social spaces, 217–41 in, 210–11; and women’s magazines,
(see also social spaces); and social 178– 80. See also single-family houses;
status (see social status); and standard specific rooms
of living, 66; types of elites, 198, 218; Who’s Who in China, 139–40
and women’s magazines (see women’s widows, 81, 103–4
magazines) window curtains, 145, 201
urban planning, 300n19; foreign urban windows, 145, 201
planning in Tianjin, 44; imperial era Woman World (Funü xin duhui; magazine):
(late Qing dynasty), 44, 46, 91, 136, cover girls, 230; dates of publication,
162, 217, 220–21; Republican era, 218, 196; debates over home and society,
220, 247–48. See also architecture and 229–37; and female education, 231;
building practices; public housing founding of, 231; goal of, 231; and
jiating as the enemy of society or
Veblen, Thorstein, 65– 66 political center of national reform,
violence, 31–37 231–32, 237; and multiple social roles of
urban women, 230–37, 269; photo-
wai. See nei and wai graphs of local women, 197, 203;
walls: and courtyard compounds, 24, 28; photographs of women in the kitchen,
as signifiers for imperial cities, 22–23, 211; readership of, 233
28, 41–43; Tianjin’s walls, 22–24, 30; women: as career women vs. wives and
Tianjin’s walls removed by colonial mothers, 221, 230–34; celebrity,
powers, 41–43; wall hangings, 177, 181, fashion, and beauty, 226, 235; Chinese
205, 302n43, 306n32 terms for, 226; Chinese women in
Wang Hui, 53, 266– 67, 281n60 Japanese schools, 50; and civil code of
Wang Zheng, 221 1929 and 1930, 80– 81, 101– 5, 107– 8,
Warlord Era (1916–1928), 82, 218 114, 115, 118; cover girls, 225–27, 230;
warlords, 82, 166, 188; location of housing, cultural and educational capital of, 7,
94, 95, 200n23; and personal taste, 145, 157, 176, 192– 93, 227–28, 269;
164; and property ownership, 269; and current status, 258, 267, 269; dating,
Index 363
223–24, 235; economic roles, 19, 234; state-led patriarchy of the CCP, 257;
education of, 48– 52, 176, 231, 236–37, status of women as yardstick for
286n117; elite women identified civilization and modernity, 102;
through husbands and fathers, 227; subjectivity of, 14, 237–40 (see also
employment of (see employment); and subjectivity); and taste/style, 174– 84,
family size, 68–70; and feminization 188; “woman question” of the late
of knowledge, 14, 175, 188, 192– 93, imperial era, 49; as writers for
197–202; and filial piety, 59; footbind- women’s magazines, 197. See also
ing, 49, 236; as fun to be around vs. as daughters; divorce; gender roles;
competent household managers, 235; housewives; marriage; widows
gender roles (see gender roles); “good women’s magazines, 12–14, 192–202,
wife wise mother” ideology in Japan, 224–29, 269; advertisements, 230, 269;
49; identity (see identity); and inner/ advice columns, 192, 194, 199–202;
outer (nei and wai) continuum, 17, and fantasies of home, 14, 193, 199,
19–21; and Japanese invasion, 236; 201, 203–13; and feminization of
jiaoji women, 222–24, 226, 228, 241; knowledge, 14, 175, 188, 192– 93,
knowledge about the home as 197–202; and home design and social
female-gendered knowledge, 14, identities and relations, 175, 176; home
175–77, 184, 192– 93, 199–202, 242; design styles promoted in, 177– 82,
knowledge acquired through women’s 179– 80(figs.); and the home as a site
magazines (see women’s magazines); for happiness, 190; images of women
in late imperial era, 18–21; marginal- in public spaces, 203, 205; in Japan,
ization of Chinese women’s history, 8; 302n39; and jiating as home, 52;
mastery of knowledge about the kitchens not depicted in, 211; list of,
home, 175–77, 184, 188, 242; match- 194– 96; male and female writers, 197;
making services, 77–78; and May male editors, 305n20; and marriage,
Fourth Movement, 221; municipal 235; as material culture, 193–202; and
government services for, 77; and photography, 194– 95, 197, 205– 8,
negative views of traditional Chinese 206– 8(figs.), 230; possession of, as
family, 56, 59 (see also under family); mark of identity, 194; readership in
oppression of, 11, 56, 81, 236, 238, 240; China, 177, 197, 198; readership in
as “parasites,” 257, 258; political rights, Japan, 302n39, 305n19; Shanghai
107– 8, 114, 118; political roles, 19, 102; magazines, 182, 195 (see also Ling
and poverty, 77; and property long); and society, home, and the
disputes, 80– 81, 106–11; and property social sphere, 229–37; staged interior
rights, 13, 80– 81, 101–14, 118, 267; and shots, 205– 8, 206– 8(figs.); Tianjin
ritual practices in the house, 19, 102; magazines, 195– 96, 229–37 (see also
sexual harassment, 234; social agency, Kuaile jiating; Woman World)
14, 230–37 (see also social spaces); and Wong, Anna May, 226
social status, 7, 14 (see also social working class, Chinese: class boundaries
status); and sociopolitical ideology of and female workers, 233–34, 241; class
jia in the late imperial era, 18–21; and consciousness, 6; and the “economic
364 Index
working class, Chinese (cont.) Xu Pu’an house, 125–27, 126(fig.),

family,” 67; education/night schools 128–30(figs.), 134–36, 150, 153,
for working-class women, 77, 176, 166– 69, 167– 68(figs.), 200n23
286n117, 302n38; excluded from
foreign concession housing, 96, Yale-in- China Program, 159
244–45; family size and structure, 67, yamen, 23, 24, 30, 93
68, 284n97; and housing crisis, Yan Fu, 52– 53, 54, 58, 280n34
244–45; housing for, under the CCP, Yang, S. K., 67, 68
249– 52; housing for, neglected in the Yanjing University, 64, 65, 68, 282n61
Republican era, 243–45; income gap Yao Changzu, 297n53
between urban elites and working Yeho Yuen Restaurant, 228
class in Tianjin, 142; location and type Yiboshen Zhuyi (Ibsenism), 59– 60
of housing for working-class people, Yingzao fashi (architectural manual),
94, 243, 249, 252; relationship between 127–28, 160
income and food purchases, 65; and Yin Meibo, 196, 229–31, 235, 309n34
social surveys, 72–76, 286n116; Yinong Xu, 23, 43
women’s magazines not read by, 177, YMCA, 64, 65, 159, 245
197. See also public housing Yongle emperor, 21
working class, Japanese, 302n39, 305n19 Yongzheng emperor, 22
working class, U.S., 140 Yuan Hu, 224
work units, and housing. See danwei Yuan Shikai, 43–44, 46, 92, 98, 140
system of housing
World War I, 82 Zao Jiuyou, 116
World War II, 246–47, 254 Zelin, Madeleine, 19, 97
Wright, Gwendolyn, 157, 200n19, Zhang Ailing, 194, 236–37
299n7 Zhang Baixi, 278n13
Wu Huaijiu, 278n13 Zhang Mei, 238, 240
Zhang Tinge, 290n44
xiao jiating ideology (small family Zhang Zhidong, 278n13
ideology), 11, 17–18, 46, 55, 57, 58, 60, Zhejiang, 138, 139
78–79, 239, 242, 260, 262. See also zhezhong (transitional) family, 70
family; nuclear family Zhongguo jianzhu (The Chinese Architect;
xiaojie, 226 journal), 146
xiaokang shuiping, 265– 66 Zhou Enlai, 268, 305n22
xiaolaobaixing, 265– 66 Zhou Longguang, 290n44
Xin funü (magazine), 196 Zhu Xi, 19
xingfu, 256. See also emotions zoning laws and building regulations,
Xin hebei qu, 154, 170–71(figs.), 217, 220 96– 97, 124, 144, 159, 162
Xin Liliang, 252– 54 zuoshi, 258
Xu Pu’an, 134–36, 153, 290n42 zuo yifu, 258

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Dwelling in the World

STUDIES OF THE WEATHERHEAD EAST ASIAN INSTITUTE,

The Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute of Columbia University

(Complete list at: weai.columbia.edu/content/publications)

COLU M BIA U N IV ER SIT Y P R ESS NEW YORK

Copyright © 2021 Columbia University Press

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent

Printed in the United States of America

Cover design: Lisa Hamm

Part I. Domestic Empires

2 Family in Ideology and Practice 47

3 Property, Power, and Identity in a

Part II. At Home in the World

5 Designing House and Home 154

6 Living at Home 189

Part III. Chinese Social Spaces

8 The Chinese Bourgeois Home in the Socialist World 242

Epilogue: Historical Erasures and China’s New Middle Class 264

study, research, and writing. Thanks to Fulbright-Hays, the American

I am grateful to the many brothers and sisters in my academic family.

reshaped individual identities. Archival research and fieldwork in Tianjin

Occupying former European-colonized spaces and designing new Euro-

China: that Chinese people simultaneously invented the modern home as

although Glosser follows Euro-American historiographical methods, she

Moreover, I argue that it was precisely because this historical moment

family, what did Chinese people living in Tianjin understand as “mod-

To understand how Chinese people interpreted the modern family

site of everyday life and a modernist escapist fantasy of individual subjec-

Qing-era China the regulation of space was a central component of the

THE SOCIOPOLITICAL IDEOLOGY OF JIA

were mutually reinforcing.3 Stability in the empire relied on order in the

The ancients who wished clearly to exemplify illustrious virtue through-

architecture of the house became central to both the prosperity of the

ORIENTING TIANJIN IN THE CHINESE EMPIRE

The topographical and cosmological geographies of Tianjin connected the

classical Chinese. During the Qing dynasty, Tianjin’s walls enclosed

average residence, even while the proportions and principles remained

FIGURE 1.1 Johannes Nieuhoff, “An Embassy from the East-India

FIGURE 1.2 Johannes Nieuhoff, “View of Tianjin,” 1669.

more open trade with China, Macartney returned to Britain empty-

CONFRONTING FOREIGN EMPIRES

As foreign empires in China intertwined diplomacy with trade and reli-

This confrontation, which came to be known as the Tianjin Incident,

In an article in Ladies’ Home Journal, the American journalist Frederick

FIGURE 1.5 Company of Boxers in Tianjin. Published by the Whiting View

UNRAVELING THE CHINESE EMPIRE

The combination of chaos and order continued in post-Boxer Tianjin. At

imposed order by restructuring urban spaces along lines that differed

fire departments, a judicial board, a treasury, a custodian of abandoned

There sprang to existence in a few weeks’ time a completely organized,

Concession.55 In regulating sanitation through fines, the department

an imperial administrative city and served to reinforce the sense of

DECENTERING THE CHINESE CITY

recommendations to institute a series of dramatic structural and adminis-

With nine foreign concessions and a Chinese-governed municipality,

enclosures, and a north-south orientation. Like space, political time was

INTRODUCING JIATING AS HOME

The Japanese female educator Shimoda Utako became a bridge