Qian Mu and the world of Seven Mansions

the long version

Qian Mu is one of modern China's best known historians, author of its most influential comprehensive history in the 1940s and a leading advocate of traditional Chinese culture and social values. In this remarkable book, Jerry Dennerline has not only translated portions of Qian's memoirs and recounted his interviews with Qian, but has also interwoven Qian's recollections with his own research into the social, cultural, and political history of the era. In opium dens and lineage halls, in family courtyards and country schoolrooms, at weddings, funerals, rice riots, and student protests, the memoirs and the history meet and illuminate each other. For sixty years Qian has urged his country to look to look to Chinese roots - rather than the West - for guidance in the development of a modern China, addressing an issue that continues to vex China and its intellectuals today. This book recreates the bygone world that shaped Qian's views and, in the process, explores the validity of his belief in traditionalism in the postrevolutionary age.