Synopses & Reviews
A renowned historian captures a critical moment in Chinese history
Zhang Dai is recognized as one of the finest historians and essayists of Chinas Ming dynasty. When he was born into a wealthy family in 1597, the Ming dynasty had been in place for 229 years. Zhangs early life was marked by the expansive sense of progress that permeated Ming culture: the flourishing of reformist schools of Buddhism; wide-scale philanthropy; the education of women; a celebration of the visual arts, writing, and music; intellectual pursuit of medicine and sciencethis was truly a time of cultural creativity and renaissance in China.
When the Ming dynasty was overthrown in the Manchu invasion of 1644, Zhang Dais family lost their fortune and their way of life. Zhang Dai fled to the countryside, where, as a writer of tremendous skill, acuity, and passion, he spent his final forty years recounting his previous life as a way of leaving a legacy to his children and rebuilding a spirit shattered by the violent upheaval he had witnessed.
Celebrated China scholar Jonathan Spence has pored over Zhang Dais extraordinary documents and vividly brings to life seventeenth-century China. This absorbing book illuminates a cultures transformation and reveals how Chinas history affects its place in the world today.
Review
Praise for Return to Dragon Mountain:
Selected as a “Best Book of the Year” by The Washington Post
“Westerners seeking to understand China should shelve that big pile of anxious new volumes on Chinas economic ascent, and read instead Return to Dragon Mountain. Jonathan Spence is arguably the best living English-language Chinese historian . . . An extraordinary life and a fascinating story.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Spence takes us inside the mind of a fellow historian. . . . [Zhang Dai] left a timelessly human record of a pivotal and fascinating era, and Spence has employed patience and empathy to bring him back to life.”
—The Washington Post
“Beguiling . . . Spence only enhances his fine reputation with seasoned perceptions of the accessible, multifaceted Zhang Dai.”
—Booklist
“Beautiful . . . in Return to Dragon Mountain, Spence has himself opened an unsuspecting world, a magic-lantern realm lost until now and movingly retrieved.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“Impressive.”
—The New York Review of Books
Synopsis
Splendid . . . One could not imagine a better subject than Zhan Dai for Spence.” (The New Republic)
Celebrated China scholar Jonathan Spence vividly brings to life seventeenth-century China through this biography of Zhang Dai, recognized as one of the finest historians and essayists of the Ming dynasty. Born in 1597, Zhang Dai was forty-seven when the Ming dynasty, after more than two hundred years of rule, was overthrown by the Manchu invasion of 1644. Having lost his fortune and way of life, Zhang Dai fled to the countryside and spent his final forty years recounting the time of creativity and renaissance during Ming rule before the violent upheaval of its collapse. This absorbing tale of Zhang Dais life illuminates the transformation of a culture and reveals how Chinas history affects its place in the world today.
About the Author
Jonathan D. Spence is the author of more than a dozen books on China, including Mao Zedong, Treason by the Book, and The Gate of Heavenly Peace. A Sterling Professor of History at Yale, he is the past president of the American Historical Association and has been awarded a Guggenheim and a MacArthur fellowship. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.