A01=Madeleine Yue Dong
architecture
asia
Author_Madeleine Yue Dong
beihai
beihai park
beijing
brothels
Category=GTM
Category=JBSD
Category=NHF
china
chinese empire
chinese history
chinese literature
chinese republic
city development
city planning
commercialization of history
economics
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
folk art
historical memory
history
imperial city
markets
modernity
modernization
nonfiction
nostalgia
old beijing
paper collectors
ragpickers
recycling
republic
republican beijing
social change
social history
sociology
street food
tianqiao
tourism
tradition
urban
Product details
- ISBN 9780520230507
- Weight: 771g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 04 Aug 2003
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Old Beijing has become a subject of growing fascination in contemporary China since the 1980s. While physical remnants from the past are being bulldozed every day to make space for glass-walled skyscrapers and towering apartment buildings, nostalgia for the old city is booming. Madeleine Yue Dong offers the first comprehensive history of Republican Beijing, examining how the capital acquired its identity as a consummately "traditional" Chinese city. For residents of Beijing, the heart of the city lay in the labor-intensive activities of "recycling," a primary mode of material and cultural production and circulation that came to characterize Republican Beijing. An omnipresent process of recycling and re-use unified Beijing's fragmented and stratified markets into one circulation system. These material practices evoked an air of nostalgia that permeated daily life. Paradoxically, the "old Beijing" toward which this nostalgia was directed was not the imperial capital of the past, but the living Republican city. Such nostalgia toward the present, the author argues, was not an empty sentiment, but an essential characteristic of Chinese modernity.
Madeleine Yue Dong is Associate Professor of History at the Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington.
