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The northeast of China used to be called Manchuria. Another name was “the cockpit of Asia.” Many wars were fought there. A French priest who traveled through the region in the 1920s wrote: “Although it is uncertain where God created paradise, we can be sure He chose some other place than this.” The quote is from Michael Meyer’s splendid book In Manchuria.Manchuria must be one
The province of Shanxi, in northern China, is famous for coal mining, and the industry’s impact is etched across the landscape. But the province’s southern counties, which lie near the Yellow River, are known for a very different commodity—red dates.In 2015, a slump in the market for red dates (known in Chinese as jujubes) became big news in China.
In winter the land is frozen and still. A cloudless sky shines off snow-covered rice paddies, reflecting light so bright, you have to shield your eyes. I lean into a stinging wind and trudge north up Red Flag Road, to a village named Wasteland.The view is flat, lifeless, and silver fresh. The two-lane cement road slices through the paddies like the courses plowed across frozen
Kaiser Kuo and David Moser are joined by Michael Meyer, the author of The Last Days of Old Beijing and now In Manchuria, a part literary travelogue and part journalistic account of three years spent living with family in rural Jilin.{vertical_photo_right}Starting with stories of crime and punishment on the rural bus network and the ever-delicate question of where rice tastes
James Carter spent much of the 1990s researching the modern history of Harbin, China’s northernmost major city, in the region that is today known as dongbei, the northeast. That region is the subject of Michael Meyer’s forthcoming book, In Manchuria: A Village Called Wasteland and the Transformation of Rural China. We invited Carter and Meyer to discuss the book, the region,