Madeleine Y. Dong is a professor of history at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her research concerns the social and cultural history of modern China, focusing on the mid-19th century to the early twentieth century in particular. After her first book, Republican Beijing: The City and Its Histories (University of California Press, 2003), she has published two co-edited volumes, Everyday Modernity in China (University of Washington Press, 2006), and The Modern Girl Around the World (Duke University Press, 2009). She is currently writing a book on the various historical narratives of China's last dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, and she also plans to write a biography of an ordinary Chinese woman whose life experience provides a unique perspective on the drastic changes of modern China.

Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980s. While physical remnants from the past are being bulldozed every day to make space for glass-walled skyscrapers and towering apartment buildings, nostalgia for the old city is booming. Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city.

For residents of Beijing, the heart of the city lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling," a primary mode of material and cultural production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices evoked an air of nostalgia that permeated daily life. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past, but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia toward the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment, but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity.