The Wuxi Legacy

In the mid-2000s, as China prepared to host the world for the 2008 Beijing Olympics and international interest in the country was reaching a peak, a producer named Myra Quan identified a gap: dozens of China’s significant cities had virtually no English-language coverage. Her model was straightforward – approach local tourism administrations for sponsorship, commission young writers to travel to these cities as hosted guests, and produce English-language books that could represent these places to an international audience that had no other way to learn about them.

For Michael Arnold, a writer resident in China and building his understanding of the country, the commission to write The Wuxi Legacy was both an education and an early test of a principle that would shape his subsequent career: that a well-written book can establish presence, credibility, and relevance for a place just as effectively as it can for a person. Wuxi – a city on Lake Tai with ancient canals, as well as the Wu cultural legacy that underpins much of modern China’s East Coast prosperity – was the subject. The task was to make a city almost entirely unknown to international readers feel worth the flight.

The book was published by Atomic Energy Press in Beijing in 2007, with editing by Wang Jieping and design by Beijing Matric Culture Communications. The photography is Michael Arnold’s own. It was featured on china.org.cn and reviewed by Owen Grant of China Central Television’s Documentary, who described it as “one of those rare treasures for anyone interested in China.”

A city with no English-language book about it is, for most of the world, a city that doesn’t exist.

Thousands of years ago, a renegade king gave up his throne to follow an extraordinary dream: to develop the beautiful region on the shores of Lake Tai in the wild Chinese south. The legacy of his decision is the culture of the Wu people, whose studiousness and academic diligence spread throughout the region from the city of Wuxi. Now the most prosperous part of modern China, the East Coast centring on Shanghai owes much to Wuxi – and it is there where many great insights can be learned about the grand civilisation of China.

The Wuxi Legacy follows the story of Wuxi from its creation to the modern age, combining history, culture, economy, and the characters of import both past and present into a book that makes one of China’s most underexposed cities newly legible to international readers. Published ahead of the Beijing 2008 Olympics, when China was opening to the world on an unprecedented scale, it was among the first English-language volumes to give Wuxi the treatment its history deserves.

“Quietly in the morning mists, a vessel draws gently in towards the coast of Lake Tai. Deck hands pull at massive trapezoid sails; the wooden mast sounds in the fresh lake air as it turns. Through the fog, a few robed figures can be made out standing on the shore, pulling at their thin beards as they observe the passage of the boat.”

“This immense lake has always been a legion of sails, for the waterways are the means by which fishermen and traders such as these have made the entire region prosper and flourish. Across the vast freshwater shallows, they can trade with distant provincial towns; but via the ancient canals laid down centuries before, they can exchange goods as far away as the northern metropolis of Peking and deep into the savage lands to the West.”

— Michael Arnold, The Wuxi Legacy