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This article compares village, national, and provincial forestry policy in early-twentieth-century China, with a focus on Yunnan, making three important observations. First, by identifying villages as key arenas for the production of forestry policy, it highlights the importance of rethinking the political geography of forestry policy during this period, to establish a proper comparative baseline for evaluating policy implementation. Second, its comparisons reveal diverging interests in forestry at these three levels, ranging from village reforestation for ecological conservation to provincial afforestation for economic development. Third, it shows that policymakers in these three arenas deployed distinctive cultural and political resources to promote their policies. The localized formats and objectives of village policies may have rendered them relatively invisible to national policymakers, who promoted more general and systematic forestry frameworks as novel interventions into a seemingly neglected policy arena that demanded comprehensive and intensive political intervention.

Fortune soon fell out with the Horticultural Society, but the 17,000 tea-plant seeds he shipped from Shanghai to Calcutta helped the East India Company establish Britain's first commercial tea plantations in India and establish itself as a world-class grower of this vital crop.2 Plants like the Peking peach, along with new azaleas, camellias, chrysanthemums, peonies, and new species of roses, which Fortune shipped back to Britain, further bolstered the evolving British imperial self-image as a paramount governor of nature more generally.3 For Fortune himself, the Shanghai peach was a useful subject to turn to at the close of a book designed to expose myths about Chinese agriculture and simultaneously to promote the significance of his own botanical discoveries.4 On the one hand, there was no shortage of mythology and lore associated with the peach in China, for hardly any other tree or fruit in China is so heavily overlaid with symbolism as the peach. 5 By the time of Fortune's arrival, peaches had been closely associated with the quest for immortality for two millennia, ever since the Queen Mother of the West chided Emperor Wu of the Han (r. 140-86 BCE) for presuming that he could grow the peaches of immortality that she cultivated in her gardens in the fabled Kunlun Mountains. 6 On the other hand, while the qualities of the Shanghai peach were somewhat more diminutive than those described by the Horticultural Society-cultivated in the Emperor's Garden and weighing 2 lbs.-they also provided Fortune with an opportunity to boast of the bountiful crops and products that he witnessed first hand in Shanghai.7 He acknowledged a challenge in this regard, since he was writing in the wake of predecessors who had written with such hyperbole about the agriculture of southern China that it was not clear what terms were left for him to describe the rich plains of Shanghae. Linda Cooke Johnson's findings in particular suggest that the 1684 revival of coastal trade and the relocation of the main office of the Jiangsu River and Seas Customs Office (Jianghaiguan) to Shanghai in 1735 may be as important to the city's economic history, and to late imperial history more generally, as was the designation of the city as an international treaty port in 1842.94 Shanghai's history as a place famous for the cultivation of specialty crops further demonstrates that the city had a meaningful and significant cultural history prior to its designation as a treaty port.

Swislocki reviews The Chile Pepper in China: A Cultural Biography by Brian R. Dott

Swislocki reviews Chinese Visions of Family and State, 1915-1953, by Susan Glosser.

The dissertation uses food to illuminate aspects of Chinese modernity, defined in the dissertation as a twin project calling for (1) a reconciliation of historical Chinese culture with so-called \"global\" and \"universal\" norms and values, and (2) the creation of a distinctive Chinese identity in an unstable world. It begins with an overview of food culture in Republican Shanghai, highlighting the vast differences in the diets of the city's rich and poor. This is followed by a discussion of methodological problems in the study of food, drawing on examples from Republican Shanghai to show how eating and thinking about eating connect to the city's history. Chapter Two shows how physicians and state agents used the science of biomedical nutrition both to criticize and affirm Chinese dietary practices. Chapter Three looks at how the same \"modern\" municipal state agents, when faced with a food supply crisis, drew upon \"traditional\" Chinese ideas about the government's responsibility to feed its population. Chapter Four considers how social reformers and home food providers accommodated biomedical nutrition with Chinese medicine and cookery for the purposes of family-planning and nation-building. Chapter Five examines how in Shanghai, China's most \"Westernized\" of cities, restaurateurs and restaurant patrons domesticated Western food to Chinese sensibilities, while the city's restaurant industry, organized along regional lines, increasingly celebrated the diversity of Chinese cuisine.

The first half of the book will be valuable to those seeking an integrated introduction to Chinese concepts of nature, the body, medicine, food, ecology, and environmental management (no small task), as well as those who wish to learn about all of this in the expansive context of evolutionary biology.