What I really loved about this book was the blick into Ming China's culture, more specifically in the context of a rich young man, the excesses and the extravagances, the bureaucratic examination process, the spirituality and the governance. It was delightfully foreign and gave me a much needed introductory perspective on this era.

What I didn't like were the biographies of Zhang Dai's family members. Apart from a few interesting people, that got old quick and the names were quite impossible to keep track off. I get that this book is a spiced up collection of memoirs so no fault of the author, but the constant biographies were aggravating. ( )

Jonathan Spence: Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man
This is a fascinating account of the life of Zhang Dai, and of the life and death of the Ming dynasty, through Zhang Dai’s own words which amounted to millions of words through various works including biographies, essays, poetry and an extended history of the Ming dynasty. Spence sums up Zhand Dai well:
One cannot say that Zhang Dai was an ordinary man, but he was surely closer to ordinariness that he was to celebrity. He was a lover of history as much as he was a historian, an observer as much as an actor, a fugitive as much as a fighter, a son as much as a father. He had passions for many things and many people, as most of us do, but he tried to get into the deep and dark places as well, to be an excavator. He sensed that nothing need vanish if only someone can remember it, and he was determined to rescue as much of the Ming as he could from oblivion. We cannot be sure that everything he tells us is true, but we can be sure that he wanted later generations to know about the things he shares with us here.

This, as a philosophy, has its parallels in the great Herodotus who wrote his inquiry, “so that human achievements may not become forgotten in time, and great and marvelous deeds---some displayed by Greeks, some by barbarians---may not be without their glory….”. Zhang Dai’s breadth does not match that of Herodotus, but what does match is his passion to record not only the great events of past generations and of his own, but also the lives of ordinary people who would otherwise be forgotten in the march of time.

Zhang Dai was fascinated with the study, the writing, the representation of history. He knew that any incident could have various interpretations and descriptions, and he also knew that historical “truth” was an elusive concept at best; this he developed in what he called Historical Gaps, an effort to “create a deeper and more evocative level of the past than currently surviving records could provide”. And in his attempt to fill-in the gaps, he focused on illustrative power of events or descriptions that were either left out, or added in subtle fashion, both, if properly read, serving to bring greater illumination and understanding.

Zhang Dai lived through the collapse of the Ming dynasty with the invasion of the Manchus. He became a fugitive, lost his library of 30,000 volumes, lost the easy, pampered life of servants and retainers, of leisure and reading and study and plays and operas written and produced, lost the beautiful homes and gardens and places of study that had been his world. And the destruction of the society that he had known seemed to be reflected in the breakup of his own family and his concerns for the futures of his children. Yet, this became a journey of personal transformation for him. He moved, as Spence says, “beyond the concept of retribution to something altogether less grand and more banal---an ordinary acceptance of an ordinary existence”, all summed up nicely in his expounding upon the Six Satisfactions: “Be satisfied when you can alleviate your hunger with plain food. Be satisfied when you can keep warm in patched clothes. Be satisfied if you enjoy an old, damaged house. Be satisfied to get tipsy with watered-down or cheap wine. Be satisfied to save with an almost empty purse. Be satisfied if you can avoid the evil people when they seem to prevail”.

Zhang Dai’s writings, especially his biographies and descriptions of his extended family going back two or three generations, illustrate time and again the universality of the human experience on all levels, across time, race and societies, personal, social, and political, where people are a mixture of talents and interests, of good and bad, generous and grasping, murderous and kind, blinkered and far-sighted.

A book well worth reading and pondering. ( )

Sometimes I learn more about history by reading about what people from a different place and time ate for breakfast or what their summer homes looked like. This is one of those books that concentrates on the lives of individuals rather than historic events. Zhang Dai, a prolific diarist, was a mid-level scholar during the close of the Ming dynasty. He wrote with earnestness and honesty about his life and the lives of his family and friends. Though for generations the men in Zhang Dai's family have held government positions earned through academic merit, the story turns with the fall of the Ming dynasty, which costs Zhang Dai his property and sends him out eke out sustenance on a rented farm. Vivid images of a garden decked out with paper lanterns or a lake dotted with pleasure boats while drunken song wafts through the air punctuate the narratives, which I can only attribute to Jonathan Spence's artistry. Intricately detailed, well written, and with enough supporting historical evidence to help explain the story without detracting from it, this was a joy to read

Read. ( )