Colonial powers in China and northern Indochina employed the built environment for many purposes: as an expression of imperial aspirations, a manifestation of colonial power, a tool in the mission to civilize, a recreation of a home away from home, or simply as a place to live and work for the colonizers and the colonized. In this volume, scholars of city planning, architecture, and Asian and imperial history provide a detailed analysis of how colonization worked both at the top and bottom levels of the society and how it was expressed in stone, iron, and concrete. The process of creating the colonial built environment was multilayered, complicated, and unpredictable. This book stresses the regional diversity of the colonial built form found from Harbin to Hanoi, diverse experiences of the foreign powers in Asia, flexible interactions between the colonizers and the colonized, and the many risks entailed in building and living in these colonies and treaty ports.
