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This chapter shows the general validity and significance of Inoue Susumu's and Katsuyama Minoru's statistical claims, but only after stressing the considerable coincidence of the overlap of these figures with the actual general trends. The use of the number of woodblock imprint titles to indicate book output tends to underestimate the scale of production levels and the extent of readership for Chinese books. The evidence presented indicates that large private libraries were few up to the early sixteenth century; that they usually held between 10,000 and 20,000 juan and seldom more than 30,000 juan until the latter half of the sixteenth century; that normal scholar-official collections were considerably smaller; that even high officials in the capital of Hangzhou had trouble acquiring copies; that the situation improved then in Hangzhou but not noticeably in large, nearby cities like Ningbo; and, that a shortage of books was reported in all these places from the fourteenth up to the early sixteenth centuries. The chapter also emphasizes that the ascendance of the imprint in the sixteenth century did not end the influence or the use of manuscripts in late imperial China.

The issue of women's liberation provided one of the most critical terrains on which China endeavored to construct its modernity. At a certain moment, Chinese women's liberation also figured centrally within western feminism as a means of structuring its own forms of knowledge and politics. This chapter explores the multiple deployments of meaning and power constituting “women's liberation” as it reconsiders the heterogeneous processes through which a small group of women felt galvanized to adopt the kinds of revolutionary subject-positions that the socialist regime provided for them. It focuses on the oldest cohort of women workers, who came of age with the 1950s nationalization of urban industries. In Hangzhou's silk factories, a particular fraction of this cohort repeated that the revolution had liberated them.

As urban Hangzhou rapidly expands into its rural hinterlands, it transforms the agrarian landscapes that sustain it. This chapter is an ethnographic investigation of Hangzhou’s changing “foodshed,” from the point of view of the procurement agents who supply a farm-to-table restaurant in the city’s scenic West Lake District. In this context, the lives and deaths of nonhuman natures are a matter of unstable perspective: former productive farm fields have ghostly afterlives in the present urban core, while reanimated spaces of “wild” nature can be deathly for vibrant human communities. My findings in Hangzhou underline the crucial significance of agrarian environments within the ecologies of urbanism framework. Agrarian landscapes unsettle analytic binaries between human and non-human natures. At the same time, human-centric conceptions of agrarian “nature” provide critical insights about the tempo and meaning of unfolding urban transformations.

This chapter discusses the events following the author's shooting performance at the China Avant-garde Art Exhibition in Beijing, China, in February 1989. She returned to the museum at about four in the afternoon to surrender and she was arrested by the police. On the way to her detention cell after her interrogation she met Lan Jun again. He smiled at her and it melted her uptight state of mind and a kind of romantic feeling was involuntarily born in her heart. When she was released Lan Jun was there again. He accompanied her to the reopened museum, introduced her to the curator Gao Tianyu and also went with her to Hangzhou when she went home to her parents.

This chapter discusses the author's return to her family in Hangzhou with Lan Jun after the shooting incident. It cites the comments of her mother and the people from her old school, the Zhejiang Fine Arts Academy, about her action at the exhibition and her decision to go with Lan Jun. It questions articles in newspapers which credited Lan Jun's involvement in the shooting performance. It also highlights the author's sending of a letter to Wei Bo about the incident and her decision to go to Australia.

This chapter discusses the author's completion of her studies at the Subsidiary High School of the Beijing Central Academy of Fine Arts in China. Before she returned to Hangzhou, Wei Bo instructed her not to tell her parents about what happened between them and explained that other people would despise her if they learned about it. This chapter relates her acceptance at the Oil Painting Department of the Zhejiang Fine Arts Academy and her relationship with a teacher named Guo Wenfeng, who was already married. It also describes the lingering memory of what Wei Bo did that always made her felt an inexpressible sense of anger and loss.

This chapter discusses merchants’ roles in collecting culture during the High Qing period through a study of the salt merchant Wang Qishu and his collection of seals. The Qianlong emperor’s personal interest in collecting and his compilation of a large series of court-sponsored catalogues led to a recognition of collectors in Qing society. Collectors (shoucangjia) emerged as a unique social category, and collecting came to be seen as a valued form of expertise. By locating Wang Qishu’s case in this High Qing context, the author examines how Wang used different elements associated with his seal collection to assert himself as a collector. Wang’s contemporaries also saw him as a collector passionate about seals, as an expert in seal connoisseurship, and as financially capable of amassing a distinguished collection. Through his collection, Wang assumed the role of “collector”—a new social status symbol—and thereby legitimized his position in society.

The type of prostitution regulation deployed in Hangzhou during the Republic stands in for the method used in most provincial capitals at that time, the light regulatory approach. The chapter explores the city's organization of prostitution, the connections between prostitution and historical pariah-group legal status assigned to sub-ethnics, and the failure of Hangzhou's treaty port to thrive as a prostitution district. Then the chapter explores the development of prostitution regulation in Hangzhou, showing how the police there implemented the model throughout the period, punctuated by a brief attempt at abolition. The system produced very little revenue, and was not applied rigorously to prevent venereal disease transmission. Instead, officials chose keep using it because it was to them the epitome of modernity, the only scientific way to deal with prostitution in a modern state.