During the years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Beijing student, cosmopolitan intellectual Chen Zhen is forced to leave his hometown. His new home is the Elun steppe in Inner Mongolia, and his new family is Mongolian nomadic shepherds living a life that has changed little in several thousand years.
During the years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Beijing student, cosmopolitan intellectual Chen Zhen is forced to leave his hometown. His new home is the Elun steppe in Inner Mongolia, and his new family is Mongolian nomadic shepherds living a life that has changed little in several thousand years. Learning the customs of this harsh people, Chen Zhen gradually begins to understand the origins of the almost mystical connection of the Mongols with the land on which they live, with the sky under which their cattle graze, and with all the inhabitants of this closed archaic world. Having traveled a long way from contempt and misunderstanding of the “barbarian orders” to admiration for them, Chen Zhen himself becomes a part of the steppe microcosm and finds the deepest harmony with himself and the world, which, according to the author, is obviously not available to any inhabitant of the modern metropolis.
Book World, 544 p.