Exploring a neighborhood through 400 years of history

After releasing the English version last year, the Chinese edition of The Neighborhood: Space, State, and Daily Life in a Manchurian City has recently been published by Shanghai People's Publishing House.

The book focuses on the Xita neighborhood in the heart of Shenyang, Liaoning province, tracing its nearly 400-year evolution from 1644 to the present.

Originally built as a Tibetan Buddhist monastery, Xita witnessed the early integration of a multiethnic dynasty. In modern times, with the construction of the Chinese Eastern Railway, Xita attracted a large influx of migrants from various regions, giving rise to a distinctive transnational culture and a vibrant urban vernacular.

Yet, the book is no conventional historical work. Rather than adhering to grand narratives, it turns its gaze to the streets and the people who inhabit them — emperors, monks, merchants, migrants, factory workers, and ordinary city dwellers — weaving their intertwined fates into a richly textured micro-history. Drawing on multilingual archives and extensive fieldwork, the author, Song Nianshen, vividly reveals how global forces took root in everyday spaces, offering a remarkably incisive lens for understanding China's transformation from a traditional imperial order, through industrial modernity, and into the post-industrial era.

Song, a professor of the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences, says: "I believe Xita embodies a multilayered superimposition of center and periphery. Today, Xita is unequivocally in the city center, yet during the process of urban development, it was precisely a site of contestation and negotiation among multiple forces, which rendered it relatively marginal.

"Shenyang is now the largest city in Northeast China, but Northeast China itself, within the broader national map, is a frontier region. However, in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), one could not simply call the Northeast an absolute periphery, because the Qing court regarded it as where it began to thrive and invested it with profound political and religious significance. Thus, no matter which level we consider — from the small community of Xita, to the city of Shenyang, or even to the entire Northeast — center and periphery are layered upon and entangled with each other. It is precisely this superimposition that constitutes the historical space worthy of such a rich narrative."