The Cult of Happiness

This is a significant new book on the traditional New Year print (nianhua) in Norht China nad its modern transformations. Flath’s book is based on a particularly thorough investigation of early (mostly nineteenth and early twentieth-century) European sources on popular prints. David Holm, The University of Melbourne, The China Journal 55

There can be no doubt that this short book, densely packed with new information and well illustrated in colour as well as black and white, is an original contribution to the well-worked field of Late Imperial-Republican era Chinese history. James A. Flath brings to the history new material and a seriously interdisciplinary approach, one which draws on anthropology, folklore studies, and politics, as well as combing history with art history. Ralph Croizier, University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 75, no. 1, Winter 2006

This engagingly written and rigorously argued book on the nianhua, literally ‘New Year Pictures,’ produced in Shandong, Hebei, and Henan Provinces from about 1880 to 1950, is a welcome and important contribution to the study of China’s visual culture ... The author’s principal disciplinary identification is as a historian, and it is as historical texts that he engages with the seventy-four nianhua reproduced here (forty-three of them in good-quality color). However, his diligence in searching them out in collections in China and Europe, and the scrupulous attention paid to them also as material objects in their own right, with histories of production, distribution, and consumption practices all given their due weight is moreover a model of practice to art historians interested in addressing this material… The choice of cover illustration, a print from 1950 by Li Qi titled ‘Looking over the Tracktor,’ might lead the unwary to expect more discussion of the post-Liberation transformations of nianhua than the book provides. However, it is clear that James Flath is highly qualified to provide this discussion, and it is very much to be hoped that he continues to do so to the same high standard as he sets here. Craig Clunas, Professor of Chinese and East Asian Art, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, China, Review International, Vol. 12, No.1, Spring 2005

A fascinating and ambitious interdisciplinary study of popular and print culture in 19th and 20th century China. The Cult of Happiness is a pioneering Western-language work. It is one of only a handful of books worldwide on this important topic. Christopher A. Reed, author of Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937