The Cradle of Modern Society
http://dzb.sznews.com/szwb/content/2007-11/05/content_1628691.htm
■ Liu Suli (book reviewer, founder of Wangshang Bookstore, Beijing)
*Looking at Europe from the Café*, by Yu Zemin, published by Shandong Pictorial Publishing House in October 2007.
If you take the book in your hand and regard it only as a guide map to cafés, then you have made a 50 percent mistake; if you take it as an ordinary book for leisure and diversion, then you have made a further 25 percent mistake.
To each his own. What I read in the book was this: the European café—the cradle of the birth of modern society.
I do not need to repeat all the stories. If you open the book carefully and turn its pages one by one, you will agree that what I say is no exaggeration.
The historical route of the café is very interesting. In the mid-seventeenth century, when it knocked on Europe’s door, we know that Europe was already nearing the end of the Renaissance, that the bugle of England’s “Glorious Revolution” was already sounding loudly, and that as it pitched its camp one country and one city at a time, what we heard was the rumbling march of modern European society. And the forerunners of modern European society—ideas, concepts, philosophy, art, science, and even newspapers, joint-stock companies, and the early “Internet”—all had a close relation to it. The café was almost the cradle of modern European society.
It was the Dutch who brought coffee to Asia, and then, on the eve of the “Meiji Restoration,” cafés with a strong Dutch flavor took root in Japan, later blossoming and bearing fruit as Japan moved toward modernization. During the Taishō period was the golden age of early Japanese café culture; when Japanese militarist thinking controlled Japan, that was also the time when cafés declined and withered. After the war, Japan embarked on the process of modern democratization, and cafés flourished along with it.
Historical records show that cafés entered the North American continent in the first half of the eighteenth century; this was precisely when the first shot of the War of Independence was fired, and modern America was born in the hands of a group of restless lawyers, politicians, and merchants who debated national affairs in cafés. The first boom in American cafés came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, just when the United States was about to rise as a world power.
The history of coffee cultivation in China is not short, but the history of cafés is not long. What can be confirmed is that cafés reached their first flourishing state in Shanghai during the period before and after the National Government in Nanjing, in a relatively peaceful era when China, after suffering long oppression from the imperialist powers and the cessation of domestic warfare, began modern nation-building. In Shanghai’s cafés of that period, one could find the figures of almost all the literary and artistic figures, thinkers, politicians, businessmen, and journalists who left an impact on modern China.
In the middle of the last century, along with the destruction of everything old, cafés and café culture were destroyed as well. Across the land of China, cafés were scarcely left at all, and the whole society strode forward with great strides toward the communist great canteen.
The café’s revival, as everyone knows, came in the 1980s after reform and opening up; and its large-scale comeback dates to after 1997.
Yu Zemin’s *Looking at Europe from the Café* carefully recreates the relationship between cafés and the birth of modern European society—this is very appealing. From there I stepped out of Europe and, following the same pattern, extended the logic to other regions and countries; indeed, it was enlightening. Why is this so? Open Yu Zemin’s book and look at the European examples, and the puzzle can be explained.
What interests me even more is whether the formula Yu Zemin provides will work just as well when applied to today’s China, doing a bit of arithmetic or solving a quadratic equation with it.
In China, the most representative cafés—whether the windswept, booming chain stores or the one-shop streets gathered grain by grain—have largely risen over the past ten years, which are also the ten years in which China has marched forward in embracing globalization and accelerating economic growth. As an operator of a coffee shop, I have personally witnessed discussions and clashes of all kinds of ideas and concepts in cafés, so naturally I can’t help asking: in the end, will the ideas, philosophy, art, and even scientific culture that ultimately brought about the birth of modern society also be born in cafés, whether those of a few dozen square meters or a few hundred square meters? I have faintly caught a hint of it, like the mellow fragrance and bitterness of coffee; I have also heard certain sounds, like the rapid yet intoxicating crackling when making iced coffee in summer; I have also seen certain scenes, images almost exactly the same as those described in Yu Zemin’s book, repeating every day without end…
50 percent a record of the birth of modern society, 25 percent an amplifier for coffee culture, 25 percent a treasure map to European cafés—this is the full content of Yu Zemin’s great work. In any case, that is how I read it.
////——At last I understand why Wangshang Bookstore absolutely had to run Xingke Café. But sorry—I did not choose to have Mr. Liu’s Xingke hold the fort. Perhaps after I have walked out of this island, I should go seek Mr. Liu’s guidance?
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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