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In the building frenzy of present-day Shanghai, housing built and neighborhoods established in the early twentieth century are quickly disappearing save for a few on the Bund or in the former French Concession. Scholars have argued for the preservation of old neighborhoods that are historically valuable, but amidst the beehive of commerce that is Shanghai today, their pleas are often dismissed as misplaced nostalgia. Old Shanghai has been ruthlessly destroyed.
Few, however, know that this is not the first time that modern Shanghai was torn down--not because of war or revolution, but because of commerce. In the late nineteenth century Shanghai experienced its first boom in the modern era, creating a city that was as "modern" as the nation had ever seen. Yet much of the city, at least physically, was razed and replaced throughout the early twentieth century. Samuel Liang's Mapping Modernity in Shanghai reconstructs a world that has largely vanished and, to some extent, has been forgotten. Liang views "nineteenth-century modernity as another form of modernity rather than a premature version of the positivist notion of the modern" (p. 26). In other words, late nineteenth-century Shanghai has its own place in the formation of this great city and, more importantly, in China's search for modernity
Liang's book can be seen first of all as a work of urban...