Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Search

Refine search

Refine search

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

2 results

  • 3 - Deodorizing China

  • from Part Two - Smellscapes in Flux
  • Xuelei Huang, University of Edinburgh
  • Book:
    Scents of China
    Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023, pp 101-142

  • Summary

    Chapter 3 undertakes a comparative study of three deodorization projects in Shanghai, conducted respectively by Western colonial administrations from the 1850s to the 1890s, reform-minded Chinese gentry of the late Qing and early Republic, and the Communists in the 1950s, with a focus on the trope of stagnant water. Despite their disparate, if not antithetic, motives and rhetoric, these projects forged a continuous Chinese olfactory revolution through a common commitment to the progressive ideology of deodorization. I scrutinize how the threads of olfactory modernity tied in with a series of spatializing projects during the urbanization of Shanghai, and how these undertakings brought about an uneven redistribution of sensescapes alongside capital and symbolic capital. I argue that the outcome of battling against contamination was not purity, but a stratified reorganization of purified and contaminated spaces.

Scents of China
  • A Modern History of Smell
  • Xuelei Huang
  • Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023
  • In this vivid and highly original reading of recent Chinese history, Xuelei Huang documents the eclectic array of smells that permeated Chinese life from the High Qing through to the Mao period. Utilising interdisciplinary methodology and critically engaging with scholarship in the expanding fields of sensory and smell studies, she shows how this period of tumultuous change in China was experienced through the body and the senses. Drawing on unexplored archival materials, readers are introduced to the 'smellscapes' of China from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century via perfumes, food, body odours, public health projects, consumerism and cosmetics, travel literature, fiction and political language. This pioneering and evocative study takes the reader on a sensory journey through modern Chinese history, examining the ways in which the experience of scent and modernity have intertwined.