Chuck Wooldridge's City of Virtues explores the nexus of urban space and literary commemoration in nineteenth-century Nanjing. Each chapter centers on an individual or a cluster of men who left their mark—literally or figuratively—on the city. The unifying thread that Wooldridge identifies over the course of this volatile century is a shared embrace of utopia by reformers and radicals. Wooldridge grounds the borrowed concept of utopia within the Chinese context by using it to identify a kind of religious zeal that undergirded both elite activism and the Taiping social movement. Key to all utopian visions in nineteenth-century China, Wooldridge argues, was the restorative force of virtue—which he joins to the neo-Confucian concept of qi, and which could be located in places or persons. The result is a thoughtful book linking urban history to the ritual and literary representation of space, while also contributing to scholarship on the Taiping civil...
Skip Nav Destination
Article navigation
