A vivid study of China's modernization through the lens of one schoolteacher's life: "A tour de force of originality, clarity, and skillful organization." —Chinese Historical Review
In this beautifully crafted study of one emblematic life, Henrietta Harrison addresses large themes in Chinese history while conveying with great immediacy the textures and rhythms of everyday existence in the countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liu Dapeng was a provincial degree-holder who never held government office. Through the story of his family, the author illustrates the decline of the countryside in relation to the cities as a result of modernization, and the transformation of Confucian ideology as a result of these changes.
Based on nearly four hundred volumes of Liu's diary and other writings, the book illustrates what it was like to study in an academy and to be a schoolteacher, the pressures of changing family relationships, the daily grind of work in industry and agriculture, people's experience with government, and life under the Japanese occupation.
"Should be on any short-list of 'necessary' books on modern China." —American Historical Review
"Harrison does nothing less than open up for us a whole new world." —Journal of Asian Studies