Space And Remembrance A Study On The Urban Diversity In The Reminiscences Of The Eastern Capital

A city is a place where various rituals and traditions are held. It stands for not only a scenery, but also a collective state of mind. City is always dense with population thus filled with economic and spiritual values. Citizens of the Northern Song Dynasty belonged to different classes, therefore had different identities, political rights and standpoints. By reexamine the classic work of the Reminiscences of the Eastern Capital, we can share their diverse ideas and memories of the capital city Pyankung.In the book Reminiscences of the Eastern Capital, the author Meng Yuanlao writes about the fictional streets, scenes, objects and figures but always echoes some specific reality or persons of the time. The narration is excursive yet reading it is like watching a theatrical piece or reviewing certain fragments of a movie. All the fragmented elements provide us an entrance, through where we can dive into the massive and complicated route networks of the capital. By imagining, we can immerse in the reminiscing of the author’s world intertwined with time and space. The words the author used to capture the temperatures, smells, sounds, as well as the human sympathies in his writing build up a mystical circle, which helps us to reflect on our conditions in order to reactivate our endeavors to fight for our aspirations of ideal living realities.The thesis aims to look into the Reminiscences of the Eastern Capital by examining the author’s writing context and the emotions he brought into the text, in order to find out the source of these emotions and the author’s means of expression. The thesis takes the text as its object of research not to scrutinize its historical authenticity but to study the diverse appearances and spaces Meng Yuanlao had built in his reminiscences, and to reveal the social reforms led by the spacial changes.