The Neighborhood

This masterful blend of history and urban storytelling brings to life the people and politics that shaped a single neighbourhood in a Manchurian city across several centuries.

What can one neighbourhood reveal about the making of a modern nation? The Neighborhood deciphers the unexpected significance of Xita, a half-square-mile quarter in Shenyang, in Northeast China. As the historian Nianshen Song shows, over nearly four centuries, Xita has been shaped and reshaped by empire, war, migration, and urban transformation. Its history almost completely mirrors China's metamorphosis from a multiethnic Eurasian empire to a post-industrial society.

Song begins with Xita's origins as a Qing-era Tibetan Buddhist centre, following the lives of Mongol lamas and their imperial patrons. He tracks the neighbourhood through the tumultuous twentieth century, when competing Russian and Japanese railway empires fuelled its industrial growth, and Japanese colonisers turned it into a showcase for their imperial ambitions. Later, Xita became a vital enclave for Korea's diaspora before emerging in the post-Mao era as a neon-lit hub of commerce and entertainment.

A thoroughly researched microhistory, The Neighborhood reveals how global forces play out in everyday spaces. By studying the emperors, warlords, merchants, labourers, and migrants who shaped Xita, Song presents a captivating perspective on understanding China's past—not from the top down, but through the streets and people who lived it.