Samuel Liang Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender, and Visual Culture in the Sojourners’ City, 1853–98 Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge, 2010, 218 pp., 41 b/w illus. $130.00, ISBN 9780415569132 Increased international scholarly interest in China over the past twenty years has helped reposition Shanghai as a consequential site, not merely in the history of modern Chinese architecture and urbanism but also in the analysis of the complex interplay between empire, capitalism, and architecture. Despite such attention, however, critical and discipline-specific English- language studies of the city’s built environment remain relatively few.1 Samuel Liang’s Mapping Modernity in Shanghai: Space, Gender and Visual Culture in the Sojourners’ City, 1853–1898 thus represents a noteworthy addition to an active and quickly expanding field. Liang eschews the city’s most recognizable architectural landmarks as well as the traditional periodization of its history as an international treaty port (1843–1943). Rather, his argument centers on a series of “everyday” spaces frequented by the city’s Chinese population during the late nineteenth century, including courtesan houses, alleyway or li dwellings, the street, as well as restaurants, theaters, and gardens (3). Liang traces the origins of a spatially rooted, uniquely Chinese form of modernity to these sites and the transformative practices, activities, and behaviors taking place within and in relation to them. Each of the book’s six chapters is loosely structured around one of these spaces. Chapter 1 begins by briefly tracing the subversive effect of literati culture on the neo-Confucian household over the course of the Tang (618–907) and Song (960–1279) dynasties …