China: City & Exile

(Paperback)

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For two thousand years in China, the empires of politics and of the written word cohabited and relied on one another. The Chinese classics became the bedrock of political and cultural legitimacy, centred on the empire's great cities. One such classic was the Book of Poetry, written perhaps three millennia ago. In the centuries that followed, poetry became China's highest art form. This collection gathers poems about four of those cities Chang'an (now Xi'an), Luoyang, Beijing and Hangzhou. The story of China itself and of its arts in particular is bound up with these cities as with no other.