Why read The Last Days of Old Beijing?

Book cover of The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed

Book description

Journalist Michael Meyer has spent his adult life in China, first in a small village as a Peace Corps volunteer, the last decade in Beijing--where he has witnessed the extraordinary transformation the country has experienced in that time. For the past two years he has been completely immersed in the…

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Asian history

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Last Days of Old Beijing as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Isham Cook

Author

Books on Chinese cities by foreigners have long lamented the redevelopment juggernaut’s steamrolling of old buildings and neighborhoods (Juliet Bredon’s Peking for one). Meyer’s exhaustively researched study of the Beijing neighborhood in which he lived in the early 2000s takes this a step further to a grassroots political call for action, before “replicas replace architectural heritage across China.” By illuminating his neighbors’ lives and their histories and reaching back into the city’s past, Meyer attempts to immortalize the disappearing Dashilar neighborhood literally in the form of a book, which if nothing else will be of future documentary value. Driving the…

From Isham's list on The best books about old Beijing.