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The World of a Tiny Insect: A Memoir of the Taiping Rebellion and Its Aftermath Paperback – February 1, 2014

4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 10 ratings

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"From the cry of a tiny insect, one can hear the sound of a vast world. . . ."

So begins Zhang Daye's preface to
The World of a Tiny Insect, his haunting memoir of war and its aftermath. In 1861, when China's devastating Taiping rebellion began, Zhang was seven years old. The Taiping rebel army occupied Shaoxing, his hometown, and for the next two years, he hid from Taiping soldiers, local bandits, and imperial troops and witnessed gruesome scenes of violence and death. He lost friends and family and nearly died himself from starvation, illness, and encounters with soldiers on a rampage.

Written thirty years later,
The World of a Tiny Insect gives voice to this history. A rare premodern Chinese literary work depicting a child's perspective, Zhang's sophisticated text captures the macabre images, paranoia, and emotional excess that defined his wartime experience and echoed through his adult life. The structure, content, and imagery of The World of a Tiny Insect offer a carefully constructed, fragmented narrative that skips in time and probes the relationships between trauma and memory, revealing both history and its psychic impact. Xiaofei Tian's annotated translation includes an introduction that situates The World of a Tiny Insect in Chinese history and literature and explores the relevance of the book to the workings of traumatic memory.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

"The author and narrator recounts his terrible experiences and miraculous survivals with a child's curiosity and in a vivid, straightforward way. But he also embeds what happened to him in a larger historical, philosophical, moral, and aesthetic context. No comparable primary source available in English does anything like this for the Taiping Rebellion."―Judith Zeitlin, University of Chicago

"As an important primary source, I highly recommend the English version of this memoir to students of the modern history of China."―Kent Dang,
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS)

"[L]ucid and erudite. . . . With Tian's translation, we now have represented in English a wide range of different primary source perspectives on the Taiping civil war. This is an important and highly readable translation and an outstanding resource for teaching."―Tobie Meyer-Fong,
Monumenta Serica

"[A] fascinating memoir. . . .
The World of a Tiny Insect makes the human cost of the rebellion more concrete and comprehensible, especially for students. . . . Xiaofei Tian has done an excellent job as translator. . . . [A] unique and extremely valuable source for understanding rebellion and its impact in nineteenth-century China. . . . [A]ccessible and highly engaging."―Carl Kilcourse, Journal of the American Oriental Society

Book Description

Tian

University of Washington Press

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Washington Press; Annotated edition (February 1, 2014)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0295993189
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0295993188
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.5 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.31 x 0.55 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 10 ratings

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Daye Zhang
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4.8 out of 5 stars
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2015
    The World of a Tiny Insect  is a wonderful memoir of a childhood spent in the violence of the Taiping Rebellion. The author was 7 years when the rebellion began. He wrote his memoir in 1893 , 30 years later. It is now translated into English in 2013. The translator Tian Xiao Fei is professor of Chinese literature at Harvard University. She has usefully annotated the text. According to her she stumbled upon this manuscript when the title The World of a Tiny Insect caught her eye though it is a pity she did not give the year of her discovery. For a good history of the Taiping Rebellion i highly recommend God's Chinese Son by Jonathan Spence and Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen R Platt .

     
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  • Reviewed in the United States on October 11, 2016
    Good read those interested in Chinese history. Journal account.