Before the epidemic constrains us to go far away, it also makes us look more at the cities where we live. It may be full of monuments, buildings, or the simplest everyday fireworks. Travel, not only in the distance, outdoors, but also around, under your feet.
Beijing Tobacco Tree
Hou Lei/Author; Beijing October Literature and Art Publishing House; 2022-1-1
There is a scene of "Jimen Smoke Tree" in the "Eight Views of Yanjing", which means that the walls of the ancient city of Jicheng, the predecessor of Beijing, are lush with trees and fog like smoke. The author Hou Lei took this opportunity to transform the title of the book "Beijing Tobacco Tree", hoping to be in the willow smoke, recounting the changes in the world, tasting people's feelings cold and warm, and thinking of the ancients.
The book is a collection of essays with strong regional colors and a book about daily life in Beijing. Hou Lei is a descendant of old Beijing, and in a series of memories, he recounts the life of hutongs, the streets of the rivers and lakes, and the imperial city, and tells the story of the rise and fall of his own photo studio, the changes of the Dong'an market, and the present and past of the central axis; the afterglow of the hutong shouting, the old shadow of the Dejong negative, the Beiping bathhouse, and the taste of the Guijie restaurant, these hundred years of color and sound and fragrance are described one by one, showing the fireworks in the eyes of a young writer after the 80s.
Along with the text are the thirty-one exquisite illustrations tailored by two Beijing painters for the book, which retain many of the styles before the demolition of the hutongs, and blend the elegant nostalgia into the beauty of the memory of color ink. It can be said that reading this book makes people feel like visiting his beloved city with a very knowledgeable and enthusiastic guide, every archway, every alley, every bathhouse has its own origin, and there have been people laughing and dancing in the middle, although the writing is interesting, it will eventually teach people to have a sense of the past and the present.
Tracing Nanjing: Nanjing Key Cultural Security Guidebook
Huagu Nanjing Team/Author; Nanjing Publishing House; 2021-12
The Huagu team is spontaneous and non-governmental, has no funds and no background, and all activities are based on personal income and spare time. In the past eight years, they have continuously searched, visited, taken photos, recorded the current situation and changes of monuments, established a cultural protection database, launched a website, developed an APP, marked a map, opened a public account, held sharing meetings, and launched a cultural protection and rights protection action.
"Tracing Nanjing: Nanjing Key Cultural Protection GuideBook" is the result of years of searching by the Huagu team. As the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties and a famous historical city, Nanjing's cultural relics and monuments do not only exist in magnificent historical buildings and museums, they are scattered in many corners of the city and between the landscape and water, and even hidden in the farmland and barren grass on the outskirts of the city, which are not yet known to the public. Huagu team members entered 622 pictures, wrote more than 100,000 words, and carefully designed 39 tour routes. The book is beautifully illustrated, and the selection is careful, which will produce the impulse to go to the scene to "punch the clock". Readers commented that there is this guide to Nanjing to pass the customs.
Zhuye China: 1914-1935 Henry Maofei was in China for twenty years
Guo Weijie/Author; Lu Wei/Translation; Cultural Development Press; 2022-1
The first architect to revive classical Chinese architecture in modern times was an American: Henry Mao fei. Centered on China during the Republic of China, the book focuses on henry maofei's architecture and urban planning. The little-known American architect originally came to China in 1914 to design the Yale-China campus, but later found himself drawn to a professional and cultural challenge that lasted two decades: how to preserve China's rich architectural heritage while designing new buildings using the latest Western techniques. During his two decades in China, Mao Fei designed buildings throughout the country, especially for campus architecture and planning. The Capital Plan he helped draw up to build Nanjing was hampered by the war, the company he set up had long since closed its doors, and many of the buildings he designed had gone through vicissitudes. However, in the "Chinese Renaissance" trend initiated by the May Fourth Movement, the "adaptability of Chinese architecture" and "the revival of Chinese architecture" advocated by this foreign architect showed tenacious vitality in both theoretical speculation and architectural practice, because this is not only architecture, but also the problem that the entire Chinese culture must face and answer.
From the auditorium, library, science museum and gymnasium in Tsinghua Garden, to boya tower and Bei Gonglou in Yanyuan, to the National Revolutionary Army Fallen Soldiers Cemetery and Jinling Women's University in Nanjing (now the Suiyuan Campus of Nanjing Normal University), to Fudan College (now Fudan University), Diners Club and St. Mary's Girls' School (Zhang Ailing's alma mater) in Shanghai, to the early buildings of Xiangya Hospital and Medical College in Changsha, to Fuzhou Union University in Fuzhou, from Lü Yanzhi, who designed the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, to Zhuang Jun, the first president of the Chinese Institute of Architects, from the "Greater Shanghai Plan." From President Zhou Yichun of Tsinghua University, President Lee Teng-hui of Fudan College, and President Stuart Leiden of Yenching University, to Sun Ke, Kong Xiangxi, Wang Zhengting, Song Ziwen and Chiang Kai-shek, Henry K. Maofei is not the greatest architect in American history, but one with the deepest ties to China.
Mao Fei's architecture is a compromise —he once called it "old bottles of new wine"—and the book takes the lens of these "bottles" to understand Mao Fei's quest to find a middle ground for his architecture in China, while also examining a turbulent society with an unpredictable future.
The tea shop on that street corner
Wang Di/Author; People's Literature Publishing House; 2021-10
The tea shop is a representative of Chengdu culture. This is one of the most obvious signs that distinguishes Chengdu from other cities. "The Tea Shop on The Corner of That Street" is the latest non-fiction historical reading of Wang Di, a famous historian and representative figure of microhistory and new cultural history.
In the book, the author says that the tea shop is the life history of the people of Chengdu. Focusing on the Chengdu Tea Shop from 1900 to 1950, he uses fieldwork, official archives and novels and poems to vividly show the daily life of the Chengdu Tea Shop, the mass culture, and the economy, society and politics presented in that public space with the research orientation of microhistory and the literary writing technique of deep painting. This book is also a continuation of the historical mission of "writing history for the people". To write history, we need to have details; history with details is history with flesh and blood. Details seem to lack grand narratives, but they provide support for grand narratives. Those seemingly inadvertent chickens and dogs are the needles of the sea god that return to the scene of history. ”