This book explores China s encounter with architecture and modernity in the tumultuous epoch before Communism an encounter that was mediated not by a singular notion of modernism emanating from the West, but that was uniquely multifarious, deriving from a variety of sources both from the West and, importantly, from the East. The heterogeneous origins of modernity in China are what make its experience distinctive and its architectural encounters exceptional.

These experiences are investigated through a reevaluation of established knowledge of the subject within the wider...