As a single-party state, Communist China had a precedent in Nationalist China. As a vestimentary regime the party state of the People’s Republic of China shared important features with its predecessor, most noticeably the cadre suit. The shared human resources of the two party states included the Red Group tailors, masters of Western tailoring in the former Treaty Ports, especially in Shanghai. The story of the Zhongshan suit takes various forms but most involve the Red Group. Chapter 1 relates their story, important in Chinese history not only because of this hagiographical element but also because of the manifest significance of the group as agents in the transformation of tailoring techniques. In a historical context characterized by often sharp oppositions between West and East, China and Japan, and Nationalists and Communists, the history of the Red Group shows the links between the Western suit and the Zhongshan suit, tailoring techniques in Japan and China, and dress practices in the Nationalist and Communist eras respectively.

The early twelfth century marked a crucial point in the formation of the religio-commercial network. Archeological discoveries show that around 1100, a “Chinese quarter” with residents who were mostly sea merchants took shape in the port city of Hakata on Japan’s Kyushu Island. After taking up permanent residence in Japan, those Chinese merchants also sought patronage from local religious establishments in Kyushu for protection. During this period, merchants and the religious establishments grew increasingly closer to each other, and the merchants from the “Chinese quarter” even appeared in Buddhist texts and helped facilitate the spread of Buddhist teachings to Japan.

Like many other sub-fields of sociolinguistics, two seemingly unbridgeable gaps exist in the sociolinguistic study of multilingualism and identity in urban settings. First, existing studies tend to examine Western and/or English-speaking societies only; and moreover, they do so by using either quantitative or qualitative methods and rarely considering both approaches. As a result, relevant theories have been developed without taking into consideration cases outside these sites using a more comprehensive methodological approach. This chapter presents a case study of urban multilingualism in Ningbo in Eastern China to demonstrate how investigations of non-Western/non-English multilingual settings incorporating interdisciplinary methodologies can help to validate, challenge and, more importantly, expand our understanding of the sociolinguistics of multilingual identity, both theoretically and methodologically. Informed by a variationist approach and mixed-methods designs, the case study not only presents the multilingual sociolinguistic reality of Ningbo, but also shows how an interdisciplinary perspective enriches the field of sociolinguistics.