Scythe and the City

Christian Henriot is Professor of Modern History at Aix-Marseille University and the author of numerous books on modern Chinese history, including Prostitution and Sexuality in Shanghai: A Social History, 1849–1949 (2001). He is also Project Director of Virtual Shanghai (virtualshanghai.net).

• Introduction1. Scythe and the City: The Measure of Death2. Guilds, Charities, and the Community Management of Death3. Funeral Companies and the Commoditization of the Dead Body4. A Final Resting Place: From Burial Grounds to Modern Cemeteries5. Foreign Cemeteries and the Colonial Space of Death6. Invisible Deaths, Silent Deaths7. Funerals and the Price of Death8. The Cremated Body: From Social Curse to Political Rule9. The Management of Death under Socialism

"Christian Henriot provides an utterly original perspective on Shanghai's modernization. Against a background of periodic epidemics and wars, poverty stands out as the biggest killer. Shanghai sucked in and killed people by the tens of thousands, this human fuel being what fired the city and made it work. Henriot's 'scythe' will stick in readers' minds."—Matthew Sommer, Stanford University "A city of death: though grim, this is Shanghai in the early twentieth century. Henriot's excellent book shows the unexpected intersections of modernity and traditional custom, whether in the rise of the coffin industry or local guilds' handling of funeral rites. This volume breaks ground as powerfully as the shovels that created Shanghai's modern cemeteries."—Rana Mitter, Oxford University "Henriot probes the question of how the city treated its working masses when they became dead bodies. The industrializing city steadfastly pushed graveyards out while the Sino-Japanese War witnessed numerous 'bodies without masters,' disproportionately of children dying in public places. This is a powerful work and a must-read for all readers enamored with Shanghai's famed splendor."—Wen-hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley "Based on extensive archival research, Christian Henriot's groundbreaking book Scythe and the City: A Social History of Death in Shanghai offers an original perspective on the subject of death—a previously overlooked aspect by which Shanghai modernity deems to be re-defined....The breadth and depth of archival research on historiography of death in modern Shanghai that the book presents is unmistakably pioneering."—Lei Ping, China Review International