The Twelve Years of Shaoxing (classic Series of Cultural Prose)
by Xia Jianyong
About This Novel
"Twelve Years in Shaoxing" is a long historical prose masterpiece by Xia Jianyong, winner of the Lu Xun Literature Award. This book has won the Jiangsu Province "Five One Project" Award, the "Zhongshan" Literary Award and other awards. "Shaoxing Twelve Years" attempts to comprehensively reflect the political situation and social life of that era through a cross-section of Shaoxing's twelve years of history, using the twelve months of the year as the longitude and a series of major events that occurred in that year as the latitude, and deeply revealing the inner world and behavioral logic of the parties involved. There are not only grand narratives about the political and military affairs of that era, but also subtle descriptions involving all aspects of social life, including customs, prices, imperial examinations, academic trends, arts and literature, officialdom, tea politics, horse politics, ultimatums, postal transmissions, geography, climate, industry, foreign trade, clans, and relatives. The details are meticulously embedded in the framework of a big and ups and downs plot. The author is not interested in popular explanations or jokes about history, nor is he satisfied with standing at the highest point of morality and repeating the characterization of characters and events by existing evaluation systems. Instead, he strives to present a kind of historical poetry and philosophy in his writing, restore the atmosphere and social texture of the time, and pursue the characters' mental journeys, thereby moving towards a deeper and broader historical time, space and spiritual world.
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