Library

In Japan after the 1870s, people rushing to leave Asia and join Europe rushed to abandon the past and devoted themselves desperately to acquiring Western knowledge and technology. Tokyo, decorated with red brick buildings, horse-drawn carriages and top hats, has become a new mixed-race city in Asia under the inspiration of "Japanese soul and Western culture". It is filled with a new spirit of the times, linking the past and the future, the East and the West, as well as countless Asian losers and careerists.

After the Gengzi national disaster, the magnificent empire building was crumbling and in danger. The imperial rulers of Yongqian were shocked by the Western force and had to resort to methods that they had hated in the past to prolong the life of the last dynasty. Suspension of imperial examinations, elimination of subordinate officials, establishment of schools, training of new armies... History seems to have played a huge joke, allowing people who were once called "conservatives" to make deeper reforms than "reformers". However, can this reform "turn the tide" like the Meiji Restoration? On the road to self-redemption of the old system, the wildfire of revolution is slowly burning.

This book is Xu Zhiyuan's masterpiece in his early years and has been selling well for nearly twenty years. The chapters in the book are the reading thoughts and reading notes written by the author in places such as Starbucks cafes and the boys' dormitory on the Peking University campus. They are full of young people's yearning for human civilization and the brilliance of integrating into the great soul. At the same time, facing a rich and monotonous society, he analyzed his own heart again and again, determined the distance between ideals and reality, and searched for his own historical coordinates. The book shows the insistence on personal uniqueness and the vigilance against the closed and self-indulgent small world, which is quite inspiring to the younger generation.

This set contains three volumes, namely "Oriental History Review: The Eve of the Collapse: From Jiashen to Sino-Japanese War", "Oriental History Review: Tokyo Time", "Oriental History Review: The Fragile New Deal: A Comparison between the Meiji Restoration and the Late Qing New Deal".

From Jiashen to Sino-Japanese War, the Qing Dynasty's adoption of the "borrowing doctrine" in the previous twenty years has achieved initial results. Military, industry, commerce, trade, machinery, minerals, navy, schools, telegraph, etc., All have made great progress from scratch, making the rulers of the empire complacent. However, during these critical ten years, the Westernization New Deal, which aimed at self-improvement, did not further liberate society and release capital, nor did it achieve anything in the creation of institutions. It only acquired a deformed society and a deformed economic structure, which could not be condensed into a conscious and in-depth modernization process. And in these critical ten years, what opportunities did China miss?

"Wandering Collection" is Xu Zhiyuan's latest prose travelogue. It collects fragments of Xu Zhiyuan's thoughts during his journey: he wandered around San Francisco and Yokohama, drank whiskey with Jiang Wen in an afternoon, and listened to a Hong Konger singing "I Done Oil for the Motherland" in Tel Aviv... They were scattered on the dining table of a flight, in a bar in a certain county, or in Xu Zhiyuan's temporarily rented apartment...