In 1646, when he was 49 years old, Zhang Dai lost almost everything. His beautiful lakeside villa in Hangzhou, his spacious home in Shaoxing, his massive library, his paintings, the antiquities he had been collecting for decades, were all destroyed by fire or lost in the looting that was a consequence of the murderous fighting that had engulfed China after the Manchu invasion of 1644, which had brought down the once mighty Ming empire. Zhang's servants deserted him, his children scattered, his closest friend committed suicide. Abandoning his ravaged property, Zhang fled with his surviving family members to the hills south of Shaoxing, where they made a precarious living from farming. And as he tried to teach himself and his family the necessary mysteries of raising silk cocoons, hulling rice and hauling night soil, he began, with patience and absolute concentration, to rebuild in his mind and in words the world that he had lost. This work of mental reconstruction occupied him for close to 40 years, until he was almost 90. And when it was done, he died.

When I first grew interested in Zhang Dai about four years ago, it was because of his reputation as an essayist and a literary stylist. But it did not take long to discover that he was also a passionately involved historian, a poet, a dramatist, an art connoisseur, a romantic dreamer, a travel writer and a biographer who focused largely on his own family. He was also politically engaged in some of the great issues of his time, and even served briefly in the court of one of the Ming princes, trying to bolster resistance to the inexorable advance of the conquering Manchu armies. His power springs from this absorbing mixture of interests and skills. And his range makes him a man for our time as well as for his own.

The paradise that Zhang Dai recollected was a small and intimate private place. In his first depiction of it in words, Zhang described it as being cunningly concealed behind a cleft in the rocks, in a sparsely inhabited section of northern China. The prize that this paradise offered was all written knowledge that had accumulated since the world began. The extant corpus of Chinese texts was all there, of course, but so were the hitherto unknown texts in archaic scripts that provided the underpinnings for that later Chinese wisdom. These total records of the past were the anchors that held the quester steady in his disintegrating present.

The initial impulse to recapture the past, Zhang Dai tells us, sprang from a trip he made to the celebrated West Lake in Hangzhou in the early 1650s, when the fighting had ended in Manchu victory and he traveled back to the city to see what had survived. He found the villas laid waste, the people scattered, the charm vanished. His first reaction was simple despair, followed by a grinding sense of loss. But those emotions were superseded by the realization that he had known in detail what had now vanished, and thus the images he could conjure up might serve to replace the loss and the waste. The reality that he retained was the reality that would survive, and thus the loss was lessened. Similarly, his decision to write a series of brief intersecting biographies of the members of his own family would serve as a means to tell his children who they were and what they might make of themselves in the future. There was no need to flatter or embellish, wrote Zhang; on the contrary, biography (whether family or not) should focus on people's obsessions and their flaws, on their passions and their extremes, for these were where the truth could be found.

The content of Zhang Dai's paradise therefore was a mixture of three contrasting patternings of the past: the depth of scholarship, the power of memory and the frankness of biography. Our concept of paradise is typically vast, all-encompassing, beyond time and shape. Zhang's, to the contrary, was spatially precise and linguistically subtle. Paradise—which he referred to as fudi (happy land)—was perhaps not as far away as we might fear. It could be composed from the very elements that were all around us much of the time. It was also starkly secular: his personal paradise had no need of a transcendent element. It was self-contained, derived largely from his own experiences.

It took me some time to see the obvious: that for the past 40 years I had been an apprentice in the field where Zhang Dai was master. My fascination with Chinese history was that of an outsider, whereas Zhang wrote about things he had witnessed or else had understood in a deeply personal sense. Yet I also feel that in the harsh years after his terrible losses, he was exploring concepts similar to those that have occupied me throughout my life as a historian, and seeking to use the power of his words to extricate himself from a current world that he felt he no longer understood. Oddly enough, my own decision to study the history of China sprang from my fascination with the ways the Manchu conquest of 1644 brought back order and strength to a China that Ming mismanagement had brought to the edge of ruin and disintegration. I had been studying the conquerors. Now, some need had led me to try to understand the victims, to gain a truer sense of what it was that they thought they had lost.

As part of his recon-struction of the vanished past, Zhang Dai wrote a further essay offering his readers the chance to construct the paradise for themselves. He gave all of us a blueprint for the use of air and space, in which wisdom was not buried underground or hidden by rocks but was part of an airy spring and summer world, where the formal placement of halls and corridors and pavilions was given logic by its relationship to the landscape of hills and trees, sky and water, always visible beyond. The constructed spaces echoed nature's rhythms, and paths led to waterways that guided one naturally to a river, curling through paradise to the north. There stood the gate, clearly marked "Paradise," and there was a bridge that might take one farther if one chose. But what would happen if one crossed it? Zhang Dai did not say; his paradise ended at the bridge. If we chose to linger there, he provided a chair, a breeze, and the clear light of the moon. The rest was up to us.

Jonathan Spence, author of The Death of Woman Wang and The Search for Modern China, teaches modern Chinese history at Yale University. He is currently writing a book on Zhang Dai

Aug. 18, 2004	Aug. 19, 2003	Aug. 20, 2003