China’s Vanishing Worlds: Countryside, Traditions and Cultural Spaces

Matthias Messmer and Hsin-Mei Chuang are old Shanghailanders who’ve been writing a lot lately. Matthias published his book Jewish Wayfarers in Modern China last year, which is well worth a read. Now an interesting new book – China’s Vanishing Worlds has appeared. Matthias describes the book to me as, ‘…not a classic academic book but rather an encyclopedic photo-text collection about what has been disappearing, abandoned or destroyed in the urbanization process in rural China. It is a work of our
extensive research and field trips in the last 6-7 years to many corners of China’s rural areas. The result is more than 900 images in 336 pages and 24*30 cm in size.’ – and impressive it is too…

A photographic essay on the disappearance of cultural spaces and traditions in rural China

Just a few kilometers from the dramatic skylines of Chinese metropolises, we encounter a vast countryside, an often forgotten and seemingly limitless landscape stretching far beyond the glittering worlds of the large cities. Following traces of old trade routes, once-flourishing marketplaces, abandoned country estates, decrepit model villages and the sites of mystic rituals, the authors of this book have explored the vast interior of the country, where the majority of the Chinese still live. Over a period of seven years, they collected invaluable records in the form of image and text. The result is an impressive documentation of the consequences of the rapid modernization of a society that still lives under totalitarianism and a depiction of the difficult lives of the people of rural China. In this volume the scars of China’s recent history, the devastation and disappearance of once-rich cultural spaces as well as the decay of centuries-old traditions,are made visible.