Finally, one is inclined to sigh, a scholarly study of the Shanghai illustrated magazine Dianshizhi huabao, one of the most significant pictorials in late-Qing China, founded by an Englishman, Ernest Major, who had successfully launched the Shanghai daily Shenbao a dozen years earlier. A handful of coffee table books hitherto featured illustrations from this pictorial, but there is no systematic study of its background and contents to date. This book is not that study either, but it presents a valuable mine of material. With its aim of reading the Dianshizhai huabao as a “source of Shanghai social history” (p. 2), it not only covers a wide range of material from the pictorial itself (laudably, it includes 137 illustrations), but also makes extensive use of the Shenbao, as well as contemporary memoirs and literary works.

The book consists of four parts, a short introduction and an afterword. Part one gives a brief history of the Dianshizhai, parts two and three deal with stories depicting Shanghai as a city between old and new and the source of a new urban culture, respectively. Part four turns to religious practices depicted in the Dianshizhai. No explanation is given for why these particular topics have been chosen. In the 1991 dissertation on which this book is based, an argument about urban popular culture had served to connect the several parts. This argument created coherence. It has been eschewed here.