Description

Printed initially in the pages of Le Monde, this assortment of connected stories by Qiu Xiaolong had been a major best-seller in France (Cite de la Poussiere Rouge) and Germany (Das Tor zur Roten Gasse), where it and the writer was the topic of a major television documentary. The changes are traced by the stories in Years of Red Dust in contemporary China over fifty years—from the first days of the Communist revolution in 1949 for the modernization activity of the delayed nineties—all in the viewpoint of 1 little road in Shanghai, Red Dust Lane. In the early optimism at the conclusion of the Chinese Civil War, through the violence and trauma of the Cultural Revolution, for the death of Mao, the pro-democracy movements and the riots in Tiananmen Square—history, on both an impressive and individual size, originates through the programs published and the lives lived in this one street, this one part of Shanghai.