A Chronicle of Jianshui

A Chronicle of Jianshui is a collection of essays by the poet Yu Jian, a meditation on classical Chinese life, architecture, and craftsmanship, and a local chronicle written around the question of how one might dwell poetically. In the winter of 2015, Yu Jian brought the Belgian sinologist Mai Yuehan, steeped in Chinese culture for decades, to Jianshui in Yunnan; the latter sighed over this frontier town: the China he had sought all his life was right here. The book traces Jianshui's origins: in the late fourteenth century, the Ming court "moved great clans from the central plains to populate Yunnan," and hundreds of thousands of migrants traveled from the Central Plains and Jiangnan to Yunnan, bringing seeds, crafts, genealogies, and the ancestral "construction methods," building a dream city according to classical regulations dating from the Song and Yuan—its name then was Lin'an. Centuries later, most ancient cities of its era have been made new, yet Jianshui survived like a stubborn rock amid the tide of twentieth-century urbanization and mass demolition. To confirm that a poetic world of "carved balustrades and jade steps" once existed, and to recover those traditional architectural forms and ways of life, one can go almost nowhere but here. Over decades Yu Jian has moved constantly through Jianshui's streets and alleys, looking at water vats, windows, and door lintels, experiencing its residences, temples, wells, bridges, purple pottery, and everyday foods such as steam-pot chicken and grilled tofu, and consulting vast numbers of ancient texts and local documents, ultimately forging 37 essays and 134 photographs he selected himself into a written and visual archive of this ancient city.