Water Lords presents the untold story of drinking water and its carriers in Beijing from the imperial Qing to the Republican period. It adds an ecological perspective to existing studies by foregrounding water as a distinctive force that shaped urban life in the realms of technology, society, and politics.

With this book, Lei Zhang makes a new and meaningful contribution to the field of Chinese environmental history by attending to water as a daily necessity and examining the previously neglected arrangements that provided urban denizens with predictable access to this critical resource.