YANG CHIA-LING and RODERICK WHITFIELD, eds, Lost Generation: Luo Zhenyu, Qing Loyalists and the Formation of Modern Chinese Culture. London: Saffron Books, 2012. 312pp.  ISBN 978-1-872843-57-7. Review by TIM BARRETT | You may buy this book here Until less than a generation ago the name of Luo Zhenyu was known to virtually everyone working on pre-modern China – certainly those working on early and medieval China. In some respects his scholarship has since been superseded—his studies of Tang biographical materials have been incorporated in more recent works, for example – and it is his publications of Dunhuang manuscripts or of collected inscriptions that tend to be cited nowadays rather than his original works.  But in one area, art history, the impact of his work has been so great and continuing that a full assessment has long been required, not least because his legacy cannot but be seen as problematic, for reasons extraneous to scholarship. The violent and unpredictable upheavals of the twentieth century affected countless millions of lives much for the worse, creating victims enough for little sympathy to be spared for those whose chief loss was to their reputations, as a result of backing what turned out to be the wrong side. Luo Zhenyu (1866-1940), following the convention of continued loyalty to the dynasty under which he was raised, found himself at the end working for a puppet government generally recognised internationally as a distasteful sham.  Yet it is not the least of the virtues of this handsome and informative volume that it establishes beyond doubt that the Qing loyalist phenomenon was not some barely detectable backwash against the onward surge of progress and modernity but a substantial counter-current that indeed helped shape the modern perception of the Chinese past, especially the material past. The eight contributions go in more or less two by two, after a couple of pages of Foreword by Roderick Whitfield and an Introduction of a dozen or so pages by Yang Chia-ling.  Wang Cheng-hua and Shana J Brown survey the possibilities for collectors that arose at the fall of the Qing, while Pai Shih-ming and Robert Culp look more broadly at what antiquity meant to Luo and his friends; Tamaki Maeda and Hong Zaixin examine Luo’s relation with Japanese art scholars and dealers; and finally Yang Chia-ling and Shao Dan look at the...