The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed

It was the way of life. The density of the population. And its lack of connection to nature. To anything outside of the endless canyons and towers of man.

Luo Ji was impressed to no end by the urban design that elevated modern noise and crowdedness into the air and let the ground return to nature. Here, there was no shadow of the war, only human comforts and pleasures.

“The city population isn’t even one percent of what it was in our day. Do you know what the most worthless thing is? That house. You dedicated your entire life to it, Dad, but…

Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.

But once rumours started going around that the Soviet Union had collapsed some years earlier, the grown-ups began whispering about the poor shape the Republic was in. Chongjin had it better than other cities, though not as good as Pyongyang, of course; even so, there were times when rations were cut off for two months and then three months, and sha