The New And The Old Of Late Qing Dynasty Shanghai Society

Biographies of Flowers in Shanghai is a Wu-dialect novel by Han Bangqing in 1894. Following the clue of Zhao Puzhai and his younger sister Zhao Erbao, the novel reflects the social life in Shanghai in the end of 19th century by describing the love affairs of some twenty female prostitutes and their benefactors. This period of time witnessed the rapid change of both social material life and moral principles and values– new things were introduced in, while the culture tradition of thousands of years remained its vitality, in which a complete set of tradition ways and attitudes of life kept working. Consequently, this novel has the characteristics of mixing, mixing the adoption and ending of tradition and the occurrence of new elements, by which it represents the flexible position of modern world between the traditional and the modern.This dissertation focuses on the causing background characteristics of times and history. The paper attempts to analyze Shanghai in the late 19th century from a comprehensive and cultural perspective, and to reveal the scenes of Shanghai as a early modernized city. The paper represents the modernization of Shanghai and the changes of high-ranking bordellos under the impact of times through text reading and history exploring and theory explanation, making it emerged that facing such impact, the traditional cultural formation maintained by prostitutes and benefactors together was declining and went to collapse.Facing with the era of the tradition and new, the writer composed an elegy for the old dreams of traditional literati in a dismal and sympathy mood, which is doomed to be destroyed. Yearning for the past, the writer described the traditional tites of"Ya Ji", which was maintained in the high-ranking bordello"Chang San Shu Yu", to oppose the eroticalized and commercialized prostitute industry and the Shanghai culture. The writer dealt with the characters and the world in the novel obscurely and sympathetically, and made little moral judgments on them, which showed his adaptation to the reality of Shanghai society and his inheritance of classical novel traditions.The modernization of this era is expressed by the complex conflicts in Shanghai of the late Qing Dynasty, between the new and the old, the traditional and the modern, the advantages and disadvantages. In the context that"modernization"is simplified and reduced to varying degrees, the writer provided us by his trivial descriptions the representations of the old and new in a particular city of Shanghai under the historical course of China's modernization, and different life styles of ordinary people which were influenced by the old and new era. The novel gives us a compatible perspective of view, which is more important. The novel is the foregoer of city pop novels, and is the start of the change for citizen popular literature to modernization, and takes its pioneer position in the narration of city.