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FOCUS ON
Beijing, the Invisible CityThis fourteenth issue of China Heritage Quarterly takes as its focus 'Beijing, the invisible city'. Material will be posted from late June to late August 2008, with updated and expanded contents being added to the site during the weeks leading up to and including the period of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad held in the Chinese capital. At the moment, the following articles are 'live' on the site: Dai Qing's lecture on the peaceful liberation of Beiping (in Features), and two speeches in Articles (one by the editor and the other by Pierre Ryckmans). More material, and related illustrations, will be published in the coming days. At a time when the city of Beijing is more visible than at any point in its dynastic, Republican or recent history, we consider the heritage of invisible Beijing, aspects of the city that cannot so readily be discerned. This issue is also about a Beijing unrealized, as well as the lost city and its heritages. We feature the historical investigative journalist Dai Qing's 2007 Morrison Lecture in which she discusses the 1948 'peaceful liberation' of Beiping and the plangent fate of some of the ancient city's men of letters. Other features introduce unrealized plans for Beijing that date from the 1900s (the late-Qing era) and through the period of high socialism. We also discuss the heritage of the planned evisceration of the city and its rebuilding, in both word and image. Readers are also introduced to some the parts of the city that are sequestered from the public, the secret Beijing known not merely to the 'cashed up' cognoscenti, but also to the nomenklatura and their progeny. A photographic essay by Lois Conner and an article on the Beijing City Planning Exhibition Hall by Kelly Layton depict the city made manifest through images and models. Continuing with the discussion of New Sinology that has been integral to the China Heritage Project since it was founded in 2005, in Articles we reprint Pierre Ryckmans' (Simon Leys) 1986 Morrison Lecture, 'The Chinese Attitude Towards the Past', and publish a new essay by the editor entitled 'Worrying China & New Sinology'. In light of the devastating and tragic 12 May Wenchuan Earthquake, we are also publishing a report from colleagues in Sichuan on the impact of the earthquake on the built heritage of south-west China. This issue is produced under the aegis of Geremie R. Barmé's 'Beijing as Spectacle' project which is supported by an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship and The Australian National University. The oral historian Sang Ye has made crucial contributions to a number of papers in the following. Previous issues of China Heritage Quarterly related to the 'Beijing as Spectacle' project are 'Yuan Ming Yuan, The Garden of Perfect Brightness' (Issue 8, December 2006) and 'Wangfu, the Princely Mansions of Beijing' (Issue 12, December 2007). |
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