Fu Chonglan: Urbana istorija Kine

Chonglan Fu: Urban History of China

The book Urban History of China covers a wide range of content from the fields of economy, culture, architecture, history, geography and the environment of cities, but also those from many other fields such as philosophy, religion, ethics and aesthetics. The authors have invested considerable effort in collecting domestic and foreign, contemporary and ancient literature and historical materials, as well as thoughts and comments of domestic and foreign famous persons and scientists of the modern era. They also conducted detailed research based on the historical development and current state of Chinese cities.
This book creatively connects the city, history and culture. It does not discuss urban history in general, but clearly analyzes the source and ideological-cultural foundation of urban development. The historical background of the creation of cities is particularly closely connected with traditional culture, which opens up a new angle of looking at things, but also avoids some kind of closed, isolated research methodology, i.e. from the context of history one can only talk about history, and from the context of cities one can only talk about cities. The authors of the book have original interpretations of traditional Chinese philosophical thoughts, such as "the unity of man and nature", the theories of yin and yang, bagu and wu xing, which reflect on the culture of urban planning and architecture. Especially important is the fact that they established the concept of the "spirit of the courtyard" of Chinese residential buildings in a unique way. All of this speaks of the author's new views on history and urban development.
Unlike other literature of the same type, this book introduced novelty into the very structure of the text. Namely, she, abandoning the established system of historical literature, constructs a new structure that includes three independent but synthetically connected units. By researching and summarizing the evolution of Chinese cities, analyzing the characteristics of Chinese traditional residential spaces, examining the breaks and ups and downs in the development of urban squares, this book went beyond the analysis of only traditional urban forms and went a step further in building a completely new cultural and theoretical framework for researching Chinese urban history, which made it possible to carry out a comprehensive investigation of traditional Chinese urban culture from a philosophical point of view. In addition, this book collected and summarized a huge amount of historical documents, abounds with numerous quotations, and in simple and vivid language it evoked the rich Chinese culture and its deep thought.