Urban Snapshots and Manners

This chapter focuses on a type of Beijing narrative that seizes instants in the floating, ephemeral, modern urban life while conveying an affective mapping of the city, its people, traditional charm, flow of emotions, and social manners. Serialized in literary supplements of newspapers, these writings became enormously popular between the 1920s and the 1930s. Zhang Henshui’s work represents the peak of the accomplishments in this subgenre. His Beijing romance explores a wide range of topics—from material culture of everyday life to cultural debates of the time, from family sagas to street gossip, from warlords’ cruelty to chivalric assassination—all of which register the transitional symptoms and long-lasting pains and sorrows in modern Beijing during the chaotic Warlord Era. From the courtesan house to the grand mansion, from zigzag alleyways to Heaven’s Bridge, Zhang Henshui anchors diversified urban locales and cultural sites and maps the spatial traces of his literary characters’ sentimental education in his urban images and imaginations, which amount to a subtle combination of realist depiction and romantic emplotment.