Routledge Handbook of Chinese Architecture: Social Production of Buildings and Spaces in History

The title Routledge Handbook of Chinese Architecture suggests a manual that provides resources for research on Chinese architecture, something comparable to the widely used Chinese History: A Manual, by Endymion Wilkinson, which covers broader fields on everything premodern Chinese.¹ The Handbook, however, reads more like a themed anthology. Edited by three scholars from British and Chinese universities, Jianfei Zhu, Chen Wei, and Li Hua, it offers a collection of forty-five essays by forty different authors plus an introduction by the editors, who also contribute essays. About twenty of the forty-five essays are translated from Chinese, some previously published in journals or as book chapters. The essays are divided into four roughly chronological parts plus a final one on theorization; each of the parts is further divided into three thematic sections, except for part IV, which has five. Each themed section contains one to four essays. The editors’...