| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Henrietta Harrison. The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village, 1857–1942. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2005. Pp. viii, 207. cloth $40.00, paper $16.95.
Biography has become unfashionable in Chinese studies. Yet it offers an irreplaceable window into alien worlds. In the case of Liu Dapeng, long before his death, most Chinese would have found his mental and spiritual world as alien as may the readers of this journal. Liu (1857–1942) was a local notable in Shanxi Province, a prestigious provincial degree-holder (juren 1894) who nonetheless never became an official, lived in relative poverty (real poverty by the 1930s), worked as a kind middle-man in the coal industry and as a farmer, and hated all "progress." Liu would seem to be another candidate for the title of "last Confucian," as he remained devoted to his interpretation of Confucian principles, which, Henrietta Harrison shows, formed the basis of his identity.	1
Liu meticulously kept a diary—even using scraps of newspapers when necessary—for fifty years. A highly abridged version of the diary was published in 1990, but Harrison makes use of the nearly complete version in the Shanxi Provincial Library to offer a sympathetic analysis of Liu's life. To a great extent, Harrison allows Liu to speak for himself; she provides readers with historical context and perceptive appraisals of Liu's conduct, but she does not probe impertinently. The advantage of this approach is that the reader is left in a good position to make his or her own judgments; the disadvantage is that when Harrison is best equipped to answer certain questions, she refrains from doing so. For example, I was left uncertain whether Liu gradually became less moralistic and self-righteous over time.	. . .

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