LIFE IN OLD PEKING

Leaving behind the magnificence of the walls and the monuments, relegating the Emperor with his Court behind the scarlet walls of the Forbidden City, also leaving behind the Mandarins and the officials of the various prefectures to their often repressive and always grasping activities, let us allow ourselves to be led by the hands of travellers from the past - missionaries, writers and photographers - to meet the Peking people of over one century ago. The author has collected together widely differing and sometimes contrasting testimonies, which clearly portray what must have been the life of Peking inhabitants in the past. Beyond the words and the written accounts the photographs are a clear, infallible testimony in themselves, without the need for explanations. Street arts and trades, funerals, weddings, festivals, ceremonies, birth and death as the extremes of life, but within these two extremes all the daily fervour of an immense population which fought to survive. The author of this book lets us have a glimpse, throbbing with life, of the old Peking. This is an unrivalled document of what is no longer to be seen today along the modern streets of this renewed capital - not even along the silent hutungs (residential alleys), where only slight traces remain in a few old facades of Tartar houses of a way of life that has been lost forever.