Writing Beijing offers a comprehensive study of the textual representations of the city from the late Ming dynasty through the Republican era, interrogating how urban narratives were actively constructed, adapted, and repurposed across periods of political transformation. Scholars, officials, and travelers reshaped the capital’s identity by rewriting older texts, borrowing new surveys, and even inserting critiques into guidebooks.. This study reveals how the crises brought by intense social transformation, including dynastic collapse and foreign invasion, forced writers to reinvent Beijing on paper. Some turned the city into a monument to lost glory; others documented everyday life to resist imperialism. These narratives served to critique contemporary sociopolitical conditions, assert cultural legitimacy during times of crisis, and ultimately shape Beijing’s enduring cultural image as China’s symbolic capital.

Naixi Feng bridges literary studies, urban history, and critical historiography by examining a wide range of genres—including literary miscellanies, local gazetteers, Qing imperial compilations, Republican textbooks, social reports, and travel guides—to demonstrate how writing about Beijing was never merely descriptive but always a site of cultural and political contestation. 

Naixi Feng is Associate Professor at the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences at Tsinghua University.