Yu Qiuyu's New Mountain Residency Notes

Author: Yu Qiujiu
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2002-01-01
Features: Preface to the New Edition, Introduction, The Back of an Empire, Exiled Land, Fragile Capital, Su Dongpo's Escape, Millennial Courtyard, Shameful Shanxi, Where is the End of the World, Ten Thousand Scholars, The Distant Echo, Dark Corners of History, Appendix: On "Small People" (Wei Jianmin), Supplementary Essays: Mirror of the Heart (Four Pieces), Q&A with Students, Modeling Was Not That Important, Sleeping in the Cold Wind... 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-plus years were very pure, almost entirely devoted to the project. Spending so much time to write only eleven articles seems inefficient, but my writing was intertwined with research. Many places I wrote about required multiple visits, making it difficult to move quickly. I remember once needing to verify two characters in a couplet at a historical site in Hainan Island. Despite multiple inquiries, I couldn’t get an accurate answer and had to visit again. This approach would seem absurd if measured by economic gain or loss, but writing has its own metrics—what is often referred to as "knowing gains and losses in one’s heart." In terms of the overall plan, this book is a record of the second phase of my direct exploration of Chinese civilization. The record of this phase is Cultural Hardship Journey. In that book, I, the author, carried the confusion of life, seeking out one cultural relic and site after another, then sharing my surprises 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 fates between political ambitions and cultural complexes;
the exile, destruction, and revival of cultural souls;
the confrontation and near-miss between commercial civilization and Chinese culture;
the achievements of the millennium-old imperial examination system for society and history, and its harms to collective character;
the inevitable extinction of rare personalities in Chinese culture and the necessity of honoring them;
the omnipresence and difficulty of distinguishing between the important boundary of gentlemen and small people.