"Rowe's new work can be said to be a model of painstaking and exhaustive research. It is also quite possibly the best single study ever written anywhere of the life, thought and career of a pre-1800 Chinese scholar-official . . . .This is a brilliant picture of the world of a major Chinese thinker and bureaucrat in the 1700s . . . .[It is] must reading for anyone interested in the thought and practices of Chinese politics after 1700."--Pacific Affairs
"Whatever doubts may remain regarding the phrase "early modernity" or how well Chen Hongmou represented the mainstream of eighteenth-century bureaucratic thinking, historians of China owe a debt to Rowe for sharing his stunning research talents with us in this impressive piece of scholarship."--Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies

William T. Rowe is John and Diane Cooke Professor of Chinese History at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Hankow: Conflict and Community in a Chinese City, 1796-1895 (Stanford, 1989) and Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, 1796-1889 (Stanford, 1984).