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The Teahouseby: Di Wang
Stanford CA:
Stanford University Press 2008, Hardbound
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9103-8
Reviewed by: Jacqueline M. Newman
Summer Volume: 2019 Issue: 26(2) page(s): 27
Subtitled: Small
Business, Everyday
Culture, and
Public Politics in
Chengdu, 1900
- 1950, archival
sources illuminate
the author, a
professor of
History at Texas
A&M University
and explore his
many visits to
China in this first
book-length history of Chinese teahouses examining
their economic, social, political, and cultural changes
in China’s public life in one Chinese city in the Sichuan
Province extrapolating them to all of China.
Di Wang sees changes including Chinese money changing
from one yuan and one wen to ‘dollars’ and ‘cents’
devalued from the yuan to the fabi; the golden yuan
or jinyuanjuan to three million fabi in one shot. The twenty-plus-page Introduction is about Chengdu,
its teahouses, and everyday culture. It discusses them,
the Teahouse Guild, labor in general and teahouse labor
specifically. All about these workplaces, teahouse life,
its entertainment, and other walks of life, this book
shares politics and the public, politics in general, and
other political issues, and concludes with small business
and everyday culture in these and other places. It ends
sharing comparisons of tea and rice prices from 1909 to
1948, tables, maps, and thirty-two illustrations, a multipage
Chinese character pronunciation guide, chapter
notes, works cited, and a two-column Index in this fifty-year
scholarly book about teahouse history in Chengdu. |
