Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio
  • Published: 6 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241568781
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $26.99

Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio

Essays on China and the World

Formats & editions
Paperback
6 Feb 2024
EBook
26 Oct 2023
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Daring essays on democracy, history and the nation state by one of China's leading twentieth-century intellectuals

The power, anger and fluency of Liang Qichao's writings make him one of the towering figures in modern Chinese literature. He saw his great, almost unmanageable task as an attempt to write China into the new era - to provide an ancient country, devastated by civil war and foreign predators with the intellectual equipment to renew itself. China could only recover through a clear-sighted, informed understanding of its enemies - and by engaging in a thorough-going self-critique. Then China would be able to expel its invaders, reform its society and become a great power once more.

Liang said that he wrote from an 'ice-drinker's studio', implying that underneath his dispassionate tone lay an ardour and passion which only ice could cool. This selection of pieces shows Liang's extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission which drove him on. Blending together Confucianism, Buddhism and the Western Enlightenment, Liang's ideas about nation, democracy and morality had a profound impact on Chinese visions of the political order, though the China that eventually emerged from the further disasters of the 1930s and 1940s would be a very different one.
  • Published: 6 February 2024
  • ISBN: 9780241568781
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $26.99
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Praise for Thoughts From the Ice-Drinker's Studio

China's first iconic modern intellectual. His lucid and prolific writings, touching on all major concerns in his own time and anticipating many in the future, inspired several generations of thinkers including the much younger Mao Zedong.

Pankaj Mishra

I have been waiting a very long time for a volume like this one, [it is] a real milestone [...] Peter Zarrow has finally undertaken the considerable scholarly effort to translate, masterfully and lucidly, key essays from Liang Qichao [...]They often succeed in capturing distinctive elements of Liang’s style, including his seeming breathlessness as he lists ever more historical examples or his full-throated urgency as he rushes to convince his readers of the crisis they are facing at any given moment [... it] should be read by all serious students of modern politics

Leigh Jenco, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture

Not being aware of Liang Qichao is like not being aware of Nietzsche or Hegel… eclectic and robustly cosmopolitan, a fascinating figure

Jeffery Wasserstrom
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