Summary of "Ai Li Garden"
In the second half of the 19th century, Shanghai opened as a port and the Huangpu River was turbulent. All forces competed in this "adventurer's paradise". Silas Hartung, a Jewish young man, arrived in Shanghai with bare hands and joined the Sassoon Company. With his extraordinary shrewdness and ruthlessness, he was well versed in colonial rules and the secrets of land speculation, gradually building his real estate empire, and spending huge sums of money to build the most luxurious private residence in the Far East - Elysian Garden (Hartung Garden). The novel centers on Hartung and his Chinese wife Luo Jialing, and radiates a broad picture of Shanghai in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China: imperialism plundered wildly through permanent land leases and financial speculation; the Chinese national capitalists represented by Shen Moxuan struggled to survive in the cracks and initially awakened; the embryonic form of bureaucratic capital loomed; and the people at the bottom, such as the coolie Ah Fu, struggled with blood and sweat. Through the construction, heyday and decline of Hartung Garden, the work is intertwined with real historical events such as the May 30th Movement and the Revolution of 1911, profoundly revealing the exploitative nature of the colonial economy, and vividly showing the early game between national capital and bureaucratic capital. Against the grand historical background, it depicts a majestic picture of the collision between China and the West, the conflict of wealth, the distortion of civilization and the self-rescue of the nation, and reveals the historical destiny of the inevitable end of the colonial era of old Shanghai.
