SCENTS OF CHINA Scents of China

A Modern History of Smell

Xuelei Huang

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, 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.

Xuelei Huang is Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She co-edited the volume Sensing China: Modern Transformations of Sensory Culture (2022), and authored the book Shanghai Filmmaking: Crossing Borders, Connecting to the Globe, 1922-1938 (2014). She has received fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Gerda Henkel Foundation, and Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, among others.

UK publication September 2023

US publication December 2023

9781009207041 Hardback

£29.99 | $39.99 USD | $45.95 CAD

At a glance

• The first book-length study of smell in Chinese history

• For a broad interdisciplinary readership across history, literature, cultural and sensory studies

• Provides fresh insights on Chinese history through sensory experiences