Mountain Residences Notes (New Edition)

Author: Yu Qiuwei
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-01-01
Features: He is here, and a majestic China unfolds before our eyes! A masterpiece where literature and history join forces, reaching the pinnacle of prose art. Following "Cultural Hard Travel," Yu Qiuwei showcases his brilliance once again with "Mountain Residences Notes," a timeless opus on history, geography, culture, and art. After years of anticipation, it is finally 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, so these two years were entirely pure, almost full-body dedication. Spending so much time to produce only eleven articles seems inefficient, but my writing is intertwined with research. Many places I wrote about had to be revisited multiple times, and it couldn’t be rushed. I remember once, to verify two characters in a couplet of a historic site in Hainan Island, I repeatedly sent inquiries but couldn’t get an accurate answer, so I had to visit again. This approach seems absurd if measured by economic gain or loss, but there are other gains and losses in writing, which is known as "gains and losses measured by the heart." In terms of overall planning, this book is the second stage of my direct, experiential exploration of Chinese civilization. The first stage of the record is "Cultural Hard Travel," where I, the author, carried the confusion of life, sought after one cultural relic and site after another, and then shared my surprises and emotions with readers. However, after completing the writing, I realized there were still many overall challenges beyond specific relics that needed further exploration, such as——the mutual coveting and intertwined fate between political ambitions and cultural complexes; the exile, destruction, and revival of cultural souls; the collision and near-miss between commercial civilization and Chinese culture; the achievements left by the millennium-old imperial examination system for social history and the harms it inflicted on collective character; the inevitable extinction and need for veneration of rare personalities in Chinese culture; and between gentlemen and petty men...