Plum and Bamboo: China's Suzhou Chantefable Tradition. By Mark Bender. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003. xvi +259 pp. Illus. $ 44.95(hbk). ISBN 0-252-02821-X

Without question this book is a major contribution to scholarship in the Anglophone world on the vocal folk culture of China. Mark Bender, who has studied the sung narrative traditions of various regions of China, has written a monumental study that is simultaneously a history of Chinese chantefable, an ethnographic report of the performance of chantefable in one major cultural region of China, and a textual analysis of the surviving narratives from the repertoire of tanci (Chinese chantefable) in the region of the southern Chinese city of Suzhou, one of the aristocratic centres of late traditional Chinese culture.

The first of the three sections into which the book is divided begins with an overview of the history and characteristics of the tanci tradition from late imperial times in the seventeenth/eighteenth century down to the present day. Bender then discusses the particular characteristics of the conventions of the chantefable performance, the history and nature of the "storyhouse," or venue for the presentation of chantefables, the nature of the patronage of individual performers, the training of the performers, the use of voice, the character of the audiences and the "fans." He concludes this section with an introduction to the nature and range of the repertoire of chantefable in the region around the city of Suzhou.

The second section of the book uses various concepts to discuss the self-understanding of the performers. In particular, Bender focuses on the concept of "oral territory" and shulu ("story road") to describe how the chanteurs present the narrative to the audience and how they involve the audience in the story that they are relating. The third section of the book presents and analyses one of the most popular Suzhou tanci, "Two Women Marry." The appendices provide summaries of nine other popular chantefables, and a day-by-day summary of the narrative of the tanci "Love Reincarnate"--which is presented morning and afternoon over a period of sixteen days!