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Author: Michael Meyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802779123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the country has experienced in that time. For the past two years he has been completely immersed in the ancient city, living on one of its famed hutong in a century-old courtyard home he shares with several families, teaching English at a local elementary school--while all around him "progress" closes in as the neighborhood is methodically destroyed to make way for high-rise buildings, shopping malls, and other symbols of modern, urban life. The city, he shows, has been demolished many times before; however, he writes, "the epitaph for Beijing will read: born 1280, died 2008...what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn't eradicate, the market economy can." The Last Days of Old Beijing tells the story of this historic city from the inside out-through the eyes of those whose lives are in the balance: the Widow who takes care of Meyer; his students and fellow teachers, the first-ever description of what goes on in a Chinese public school; the local historian who rallies against the government. The tension of preservation vs. modernization--the question of what, in an ancient civilization, counts as heritage, and what happens when a billion people want to live the way Americans do--suffuse Meyer's story.
Author: Felicitas Titus
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462908896
Category : Antiques & Collectibles
Languages : en
Pages : 713
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Book Description
This collection of rare and vintage postcards offers a unique look at a vanished China and its storied capital. Comprising 355 black-and-white and hand-tinted Beijing photography postcards that span the period from the last years of Imperial China to the Japanese invasion of 1937, it is a treasure trove for buffs of Beijing history, collectors, Sinophiles, and anyone fascinated by people and cultures from times past. Readers will enjoy the wide selection of images showing different aspects of the life of old Peking--from the arrival of a camel train at a city gate to hand-colored views of the Forbidden City and an array of vendors, street performers, officials, gentry, commoners, and foreign tourists. Several chapters present the city's distinctive Beijing architecture--its walls and gates, towers, fountains, temples, pagodas, memorial arches, and public or imperial buildings, including the Summer and Winter Palaces and the Ming Tombs. Other chapters of Chinese photography look at the Manchu rulers, street life, the Legation Quarter and Western presence, and the Great Wall. Included are some rare scenes depicting the aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion and 1911 revolution; Manchu fashion, colorful means of transportation, and the coming of the railroad. Of particular note are images of the Empress Dowager, the child emperor Puyi, and other personalities at the Manchu Court. The book also includes eight color postcards of paintings by the famous artist Carl Wuttke and rare cards showing etched drawings of the Old Summer Palace--now only a field of ruins. The author, who was born and lived in China before 1949, has written an informative introduction to each chapter as well as a general introduction to classical Beijing. A foreword by historian and Beijing expert Susan Naquin situates this collection at once as a precious record of old Peking and a revealing snapshot of Western views of China in the first golden age of tourism. Old Beijing: Postcards from the Imperial City offers a visual time capsule of both Beijing's history and traditional Chinese culture in a unique and revealing postcard format.
Author: Michael Meyer
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802779123
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the country has experienced in that time. For the past two years he has been completely immersed in the ancient city, living on one of its famed hutong in a century-old courtyard home he shares with several families, teaching English at a local elementary school--while all around him "progress" closes in as the neighborhood is methodically destroyed to make way for high-rise buildings, shopping malls, and other symbols of modern, urban life. The city, he shows, has been demolished many times before; however, he writes, "the epitaph for Beijing will read: born 1280, died 2008...what emperors, warlords, Japanese invaders, and Communist planners couldn't eradicate, the market economy can." The Last Days of Old Beijing tells the story of this historic city from the inside out-through the eyes of those whose lives are in the balance: the Widow who takes care of Meyer; his students and fellow teachers, the first-ever description of what goes on in a Chinese public school; the local historian who rallies against the government. The tension of preservation vs. modernization--the question of what, in an ancient civilization, counts as heritage, and what happens when a billion people want to live the way Americans do--suffuse Meyer's story.
Author: Virginia S. Anami
Publisher: 五洲传播出版社
ISBN: 9787508503813
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 336
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Book Description
A beautifully-produced book in 330 pages of color, which examines Beijing through its trees, stone and water as a way of unlocking the city's past and appreciating its heritage in the relationship of man to nature. Author Virginia Stibbs Anami has been exploring Beijing for over 20 years, and has researched, written about and photographed the city for numerous publications and exhibitions.
Author: Liangyong Wu
Publisher: UBC Press
ISBN: 0774842032
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266
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Book Description
Seventy years of revolution and turmoil have had a severe impact on the miraculous ancient urban form of Beijing, but economic growth since the early 1990s has threatened to deal the coup de grace. In Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing, Wu Liangyong presents an impassioned plea to turn the tide of demolition and offers a new direction for the planning and development of China's capital. His project for the renewal of the Ju'er Hutong (Chrysanthemum Lane) neighbourhood in the heart of Beijing's Old City takes pride of place in this book. A thoughtful analysis of those aspects of the ancient capital's features, which the project aims to respect and conserve, is followed by a detailed account of the design and development process of the project itself.
Author: Robert F. Baldwin
Publisher: Lerner Publications
ISBN: 9780822532149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 68
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Book Description
Explores daily life in Beijing in both ancient and modern times.
Author: Chengbei Xu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
本书是散文集,通过真实的历史资料和历史图片,再现老北京昔日旧貌,使广大读者从另一个角度了解中国城市历史文化变迁。
Author: L. C. Arlington
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781927077214
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 434
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Book Description
In Search of Old Peking isportrait of one of the world's great cities in the 1930's and a lament for the end of a unique era. First published in 1935, this book was regarded as the standard guide to Peking. It remains astonishingly evocative today, for residents and visitors alike.
Author:
Publisher: Human Rights Watch
ISBN: 9780929692746
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 152
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Book Description
Author: Sheng-mei Ma
Publisher: Purdue University Press
ISBN: 1612492088
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 178
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Book Description
Drawing from Anglo-American, Asian American, and Asian literature as well as J-horror and manga, Chinese cinema and Internet, and the Korean Wave, Sheng-mei Ma's Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity probes into the conjoinedness of West and East, of modernity's illusion and nothing's infinitude. Suspended on the stylistic tightrope between research and poetry, critical analysis and intuition, Asian Diaspora restores affect and heart to the experience of diaspora in between East and West, at-homeness and exilic attrition. Diaspora, by definition, stems as much from socioeconomic and collective displacement as it points to emotional reaction. This book thus challenges the fossilized conceptualizations in area studies, ontology, and modernism. The book's first two chapters trace the Asian pursuit of modernity into nothing, as embodied in horror film and the gaming motif in transpacific literature and film. Chapters three through eight focus on the borderlands of East and West, the edges of humanity and meaning. Ma examines how loss occasions a revisualization of Asia in children's books, how Asian diasporic passing signifies, paradoxically, both "born again" and demise of the "old" self, how East turns "East" or the agent of self-fashioning for Anglo-America, Asia, and Asian America, how the construct of "bugman" distinguishes modern West's and East's self-image, how the extreme human condition of "non-person" permeates the Korean Wave, and how manga artists are drawn to wartime Japan. The final two chapters interrogate the West's death-bound yet enlightening Orientalism in Anglo-American literature and China's own schizophrenic split, evidenced in the 2008 Olympic Games.
Author: Chang-tai Hung
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520354869
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 468
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Book Description
This is the first comprehensive study of popular culture in twentieth-century China, and of its political impact during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 (known in China as "The War of Resistance against Japan"). Chang-tai Hung shows in compelling detail how Chinese resisters used a variety of popular cultural forms—especially dramas, cartoons, and newspapers—to reach out to the rural audience and galvanize support for the war cause. While the Nationalists used popular culture as a patriotic tool, the Communists refashioned it into a socialist propaganda instrument, creating lively symbols of peasant heroes and joyful images of village life under their rule. In the end, Hung argues, the Communists' use of popular culture contributed to their victory in revolution.
