Return to Dragon Mountain:
Memories of a Late Ming Man
By Jonathan D. Spence
Viking (2007), 332 pages
This is not a business book, but if you're like us you sometimes need a break from those, anyway. With Return to Dragon Mountain, Yale professor and China historian par excellence Spence returns to the deeply detailed narrative style that made Treason by the Book and The Death of Woman Wang such pleasures to read.

This time, his subject is Zhang Dai, a member of the landed scholarly class much of the last half of his life writing down what he thought went wrong with the dynasty he had lived to see the end of, the Ming. Zhang himself had lost his home and many of his belongings and friends with the Ming's fall and the ensuing rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty to become a wild-haired fugitive travelling around the countryside.

In his writings, which spanned many genres, Zhang was nostalgic about the better times of the Ming - the festival lanterns of his hometown Shaoxing, the tea, the cockfights, the assignations with courtesans. "Spence's readers may feel as if they have strayed into one of Italo Calvino's 'invisible cities,' an exotic lost China of beguiling patterns and symmetries," writes Christopher Benphey in the New York Times.

Zhang was also clear-eyed about its faults, levelling criticisms at his own family members and even his ancestors. But mainly he wanted to preserve the high culture that he believed thrived in the Ming and declined in the Qing. "Spence is able to make vivid the differences between the highly cultured Ming period and the less cultured Qing," writes Lucien Pye in Foreign Affairs.

The title refers to Zhang's return, after a long exile, to his ancestral home, where he bemoaned his old concubines and his wastrel sons and continued to write about and dream of a more beautiful time.