The urban ecology of late imperial Beijing reconsidered - The transformation of social space in China's late imperial capital city

Urban space has proved a consistently popular topic among urban historians of China as it has with scholars of cities elsewhere. This article, which also concerns urban space, takes as its object of study the physical and social space of China's capital city, Beijing, during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties. Focusing especially on the sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, I demonstrate that the transformation of urban social space in China is not a process wholly reserved to the modern period. Indeed, Beijing's social space was dramatically transformed even though the physical space of Beijing remained relatively unchanged. This transformation was most strikingly expressed in the emergence of two distinct centers of residential and social activity in Beijing-one serving merchant and tradesmen and the other host to China's scholar-official elite. Because the formation of a scholar-official district stands out as a particularly Chinese urban phenomenon and because it has received relatively scant scholarly attention, this article pays special attention to that process. To place my findings within a scholarly context, I begin with a review of influential work related to Chinese urban space and pay particular attention to an important essay by noted scholar G. William Skinner. My work, which is clearly indebted to Skinner's, confirms some and refutes other portions of his argument. This article seeks especially to historicize our understanding of a process marked as much by governmental fiat and historical contingency as by modelable tendencies in Chinese urban form.