This innovative work is the first to approach the awakening of China as an historical problem in its own right, and to locate this problem within the broader history of the rise of modern China. It analyses the link between the awakening of China as an historical narrative and the awakening of the Chinese people as a political technique for building a sovereign and independent state. In sum, it asks what we mean when we say that China ‘woke up’ in this century. Fiction and fashion, architecture and autobiography, take their places alongside politics and history to show how the idea of a national awakening made room for Nationalist politics in personal culture and helped to conscript personal culture to the service of the revolutionary state. The book focuses on the Nationalist movement in south China, highlighting the role of Sun Yat-sen as director of awakenings in the Nationalist Revolution and the place of Mao Zedong as his successor.