This book explores China's encounter with architecture and modernity in the tumultuous epoch before Communism - an encounter that was mediated not by a singular notion of modernism emanating from the west, but that was uniquely multifarious, deriving from a variety of sources both from the west and, importantly, from the east.

Edward Denison is an architectural historian and lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His previous publications include: Ultra-Modernism: Architecture and Modernity in Manchuria (2017), Luke Him Sau, Architect (2014), The Life of the British Home (2012), McMorran & Whitby (2009), Modernism in China (2008), Building Shanghai (2006), and Asmara: Africa's Secret Modernist City (2003).

Part I: China and the Meaning of Modernity, 1. Introduction, 2. Intellectural Orientations: The Unavoidable Burden of Context, 3. China's Multiple Modernities, 4. Chinese Art and its Multiple Modernities, Part II: Architecture and Modernity, 5. The Advent of Architecture, 6. Foreign Settlements before 1912, 7. Modernism and Nationalism, 8. Japan: China's Mirror to Modernism, 9. Shanghai: Multiple Modernities' Exemplar, 10. China's Multiple Modernities - A Project Curtailed