Return to Dragon Mountain: Memoirs of a Late Ming Man - Tapa dura

I have read Jonathan Spence's many previous books ... but Return to Dragon Mountain is his masterpiece to date ... Zhang Dai, an important historian of the Late Ming Dynasty, China's Golden Age, is so rendered by Return to Dragon Mountain that I am reminded of the narrator in Marcel Proust and also of Joseph Conrad's heroic but darkly fated heroes - Harold Bloom

His writing is authoritative, subtle, never over-complicated, and shows a rare elegance of phrase.... Immediacy, a rare commodity in Chinese history-writing, is what this book achieves, and it is indeed a joy - Literary Review

The writer and historian Zhang Dai is recognized as one of the intellectual heavyweights of China's Ming dynasty. When he was born into a wealthy family in 1597, the Ming dynasty had been in place for 229 years. Zhang Dai lived the first part of his life in a climate of political stability and cultural creativity: for China's late Ming period was a golden age - a time of wide-scale philanthropy, of significant achievements in the visual arts, literature and music, and of energetic inquiry in the fields of medicine and science. When the Ming were overthrown by the Manchu invasion of 1644, however, Zhang Dai's family lost its fortune and way of life. Zhang Dai fled to the countryside, where, as a writer of skill and acuity and passion, he spent his final 40 years recounting his previous way of life as a way of leaving a legacy to his children and rebuilding a spirit shattered by the violent upheaval he had witnessed. The distinguished China scholar Jonathan Spence has pored over Zhang Dai's extraordinary documents, and in Return to Dragon Mountain he brings 17th-century China vividly to life. Absorbing, subtle, and beautifully observed, Return to Dragon Mountain illuminates a complex and sophisticated society at a moment of profound cultural transformation. And in doing so, it reveals the ways in which China's history continues to affect its place in the world today.