Feng Jicai – författare

The port of Tianjin is where the ancient Chinese empire met the sea. The turn of the 20th century was a tumultuous time for the city, with the Qing dynasty on its last legs and the Boxers unleashing their ill-fated rebellion against the European trading concessions that had colonised its streets.For Tianjin’s inhabitants, daily life carried on. These hardy people were shaped by the bitter earth from which they sprang, and every once in a while, there would emerge someone so remarkable that a new name would be inducted into Tianjin’s hall of fame.From a miracle doctor to an ill-mannered mynah bird, they came from every walk of life and in all shapes and sizes. Together, their stories make up the rich tapestry of a city that the modern world has washed away...

1900. For Tianjin’s European colonists a profitable new century is dawning, but for the city’s downtrodden Chinese natives the Zodiac cycle’s end signals imminent catastrophe. Meanwhile the fearsome Boxer warriors – said by some to be bulletproof – are spilling in from the provinces.On restless streets, a dangerous liaison begins. Ouyang Jue, gentle layabout and heir to a merchant fortune, finds himself entangled with Xénia, a French officer’s daughter indulging every impulse on her first visit to China. Each sees liberation in the other; a chance to leap through the mirror and escape the mundane.Separated by the widening divide between their two worlds, the lovers were never meant to be. But as discontent sparks into all-out conflagration, will they find paradise behind the glass? Or will they join the ashes of what might have been?

Han Meilin is a titan of contemporary Chinese art, from Olympic mascots to the tails of planes, his works have drawn worldwide recognition. But behind the fame, he was forged in the crucible of China’s Cultural Revolution.In an uncertain political landscape where suspicion itself was as good as proof, the very thing that gave him purpose - his passion for art - doomed him to an indefinite Purgatory behind bars in No. 100 Dongshan detention centre. Branded a traitor to the revolution, he faced a decade of despair, but at its cruel depths, he discovered the values which would shape him as an artist. Now in conversation with the premier storyteller on China’s turbulent 1960s, Meilin recounts his turbulent path to Paradise. Filled with first-hand accounts of his complex relationship with the suffering he endured, and the many ways it continues to reverberate in the hyper-commercial today of the Middle Kingdom.

1960s China, and society is commanded to rebel against tradition.Amid the political turmoil, three young artists look out from their attic salon onto the streets of the northern port city of Tianjin. When economic reforms turn society on its head, they are given licence to indulge their artistic passions. Deluged by the increasingly materialistic masses, they paint themselves onto separate paths as they lose track of once sacred certainties. In this warming age where everything is fluid, can the bonds of winter hold?