Vintage Ancient City Memories: Images of Flowing Years

Author: Qiu Yang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-11-01
Features: Vague images of the ancient city in dreams, childhood memories of deep hutongs, and the fading shadows of rubble. This book uses precious and powerful images and concise, enduring text to preserve fragments of ancient Beijing that are about to disappear. Open the dust jacket to reveal a nostalgic cultural map of Beijing's old city gates. Time flies, cherishing our fleeting days. Flow of Time and Flow of Time in Images are a series of cultural, historical, and geographical publications released successively. From today's perspective, they review history; through recorded texts, they document the progress of the times; and with highly impactful images, they witness past events. The scenery of Flow of Time yesterday is also today, and even more so, the future. Flow of Time mainly includes the collection and excavation of historical materials and ruins, reflections on history, and nostalgia for natural landscapes, among others. Flow of Time in Images is a companion to Flow of Time, intended to further expand and extend the theme of "Flow of Time" through images. The power of the camera is always immense—it requires no excessive words, only a genuine glimpse of real scenes to carry the essence of history. The Flow of Time Studio calls for the return of humanistic spirit in both text and image. Whether it is texts laden with profound history or simple accounts from eyewitnesses, they all embody the true spirit of cherishing the fleeting passage of time. This book selects 150 precious images of ancient Beijing shot by renowned photographers such as Shen Jiguang and Qian Yu, recorded in refined and accessible text. They capture fragments of lost memories of the ancient city, including various old objects no longer commonly used by people today, old hutongs and buildings that have now been demolished, and scenes of daily life in the 1970s and 1980s. All of them evoke our nostalgia and concern for the ancient city of Beijing.