In recent years, historians of late imperial China have called attention to the constructed and contested character of local culture and identity. By emphasizing the interplay of extralocal and interregional social networks in the production of “the local,” Steven B. Miles makes a major contribution to this literature. Miles traces the rise of Guangzhou's Xuehaitang Academy, founded in the 1820s by the famed scholar-official Ruan Yuan (1764–1849), to prominence as a center of intellectual activity in Guangzhou. The rise of the Xuehaitang went hand in hand with Guangzhou's ascent from a frontier backwater to a premier center of learning in the Qing empire. Miles skillfully deconstructs the discourses that celebrated the Xuehaitang as the prime mover in this transformation, reading them as “strategic texts” that claimed status and identity for competing segments of Guangzhou's literati elite. Miles thereby situates the history of Xuehaitang at the center of a larger story...

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