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Beijing, the Invisible CityThis fourteenth issue of China Heritage Quarterly takes as its focus Beijing the Invisible City. Material will be posted up to late August 2008, with updated and expanded contents being added to the site during the weeks of the Games of the XXIX Olympiad held in the Chinese capital. 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, both in English and Chinese, 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; there is also an account of the Beijing Underground (as well as its 'cousin', the Pyongyang Metro), and a short discussion of the beginning of the end of the walls of Beijing during the 1910s (see 'The Silver Shovel of Zhu Qiqian'). We also discuss the heritage of the planned evisceration of the city and its rebuilding, in both word and image. In 'Hidden Mansions' readers are 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 in Features, and an essay on the Beijing City Planning Exhibition Hall by Kelly Layton, in Articles, 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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