Notes from a Mountain Residence - New Edition

Author: Yu Qiuyu
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: He arrived, and a majestic China immediately appeared before our eyes! Literature and history joined hands, reaching the pinnacle of prose art. Following "Cultural Hard Travel," Yu Qiuyu once again displayed his brilliance with a masterpiece about history, geography, culture, and art— "Mountain Residences Notes." After much anticipation, it has finally been published. The writing of "Mountain Residences Notes" began in 1992 and was completed in 1994, lasting over two years. To write this book, I resigned from my administrative position at the academy and stopped working, making these two years exceptionally pure, almost entirely devoted to the task. Spending so much time to write only eleven articles seems inefficient, but my writing was closely tied to research. Many of the places I wrote about required repeated visits, making it difficult to work quickly. I remember once needing to verify two characters in a couplet at a historical site in Hainan Island. After multiple inquiries, I couldn’t get an accurate answer, so I had to go there again. This approach would seem absurd if measured in economic gains and losses, but writing has its own rewards, often described as "knowing the gains and losses in one’s heart." In terms of the overall plan, this book is the second stage of my direct, experiential exploration of Chinese civilization. The first stage of the record was "Cultural Hard Travel," where the "I" in the book carried the of life, seeking one cultural relic after another and sharing my astonishment and emotions with readers. However, after completing the journey and writing, I realized there were still many overarching, unresolved questions that needed further exploration, such as—
the mutual obsession and intertwined fate between political ambitions and cultural complexes;
the exile, destruction, and revival of the cultural soul;
the collision and near-miss between commercial civilization and Chinese culture;
the legacy of the thousand-year imperial examination system to both social history and the collective character of the people;
the inevitable extinction of rare individualities in Chinese culture and the necessity of commemorating them;
for gentlemen and petty men...