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Beyond the Great Wall: Urban Form and Transformation on the Chinese Frontiers. By PIPER RAE GAUBATZ. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996. xvii, 376 pp. $49.50.
Over the course of two millennia of empire-building, the Han Chinese state expanded from a relatively small core area in present-day northwest China to encompass territories even greater than the current borders of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The Han preferred to build their own cities on the frontiers rather than move into existing settlements. Frontier cities were constructed on the model of a standardized Chinese urban ideal, though they sometimes incorporated certain expressions of the cultural identities of the original inhabitants.
These cities are the focus of Gaubatz's research. During fifteen months of fieldwork between 1986 and 1988, she visited the five major cities of Kunming, Huhhot, Lanzhou, Urumqi, and Xining and, for secondary examples of interactions between Han and non-Han, the additional five smaller cities of Dali, in Yunnan province; Qinghai province's Lushaer; Turfan, in Xinjiang; Xihe of Gansu; and Lhasa, capital of Tibet. All were founded by non-Han people and continue to have substantial nonHan populations. The ten cities are compared across five dimensions: elements of (1) overall form, such as city wall styles, cardinal orientation, street patterns, the siting of monumental buildings, and the location and nature of residential, religious, commercial, governmental, military, ethnic, and class districts; (2) economic form, including local and regional productions strategies as well as trade patterns; (3) architectural form, such as the relation of vernacular and monumental styles to local styles; (4) social forms, that is, class structure and power relations; and (5) cultural form, such as...