Art historians have produced some of the most interesting historical works on China, bringing to the study of the past an immediacy of insight that can elude the historian who works only with texts. Ginger Hsü has provided such an insight into eighteenth-century Yangchow [Yangzhou], a city renowned at the time for its wealth, beauty, and cultural productivity, and now frequently cited as the exemplary site of social change in Ch'ing China. Although Yangchow is as closely associated with painting in China as are Venice and Florence in Europe, Hsü's is the first monograph-length study of Yangchow painting to have been published in English.