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Read the Places

1 novel

Literary places in the Sichuan mountains

5 places from the Sichuan mountains, taken from the novels that put them there. Every one is anchored to a verbatim line from the text.

Mapped

2000
Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Dai Sijie
During the Cultural Revolution, two teenage sons of denounced doctors are sent for re-education to a remote mountain village in Sichuan, where they haul coal, work the paddies, and discover a hidden suitcase of forbidden Western novels that changes everything, above all for the tailor's daughter one of them loves. Dai Sijie, himself sent to the Sichuan hills, draws on that real world of re-education: the mountain village, the mine and the fields, the tailor's house, and the county town far below.
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