Wai-yee Li traces notions of the pleasures and dangers of things in the literature and thought of late imperial China. She considers core oppositions-people and things, elegance and vulgarity, real and fake, lost and found-to tease out the ambiguities of material culture.

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. People and Things
2. Elegance and Vulgarity
3. The Real and the Fake
4. Lost and Found
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index