I especially love how the wild, amoral, dangerous but beautiful magic contrasts with the petty and mundane English life, just like the moors of Yorkshire contrats with the streets of london

Also the later 1/3 of this book really carried me away and got me so excited. Probably because it’s been so long since I last read an old-fashioned, straightforward novel telling one story. And the depiction of magic in this book is SO GOOD

it’s a strange feeling - for me novels set in these parts of the world feels “closer” and more real to me than any other places. Guess the places where you spent your teenage years are indeed formative

and I still remember my bitter disappointment as a kid watching Disney’s little mermaid for the first time and realizing it’s nothing like the story I read (and I think more mainland chinese kids encountered these stories through storybooks first rather than disney

There are so many really good heroines in old fairytales and fairytale writings but unfortunately people just kept complaining about how backward old stories are without ever reading them

my favourite Hans Christian Andersen stories are Little Mermaid, Snow Queen & Marsh King’s Daughter, you could make great movies out of them without needing to yassify them.Oh and I’d really love to see an adapted Wild Swan movie!

pictures taken at Zhuo Zheng Yuan拙政园，Shi Zi Lin狮子林 and Wang Shi Yuan网师园

the delicate balance between everything being carefully designed and everything appears natural and free-flowing

Let's cut Dagnan-Bouveret some slack because he also painted this stunning "Madonna of the Trellis"
www.sothebys.com/en/articles/...

when reading about him on one hand I can definitely see why he failed - he was deeply flawed especially as a politician - but I can’t help liking him a lot

and his downfall could be directly attributed to his greatest shortcomings - his arrogance and stubbornness - and his greatest virtues - his kindness towards subjects, his strong sense of morals

for 25 years he was the greatest ruler China had seen for decades, the conqueror who seemed destined to bring an end to the past century of chaos and divisions, the next unifier. He himself definitely believed this. And with one lost battle, everything crumbled down

Btw the Jin dynasty and their han aristocrats, Liu Yu and the following southern warlords, they all failed as well. So we see centuries of people trying to make things work, creating beautiful art and literature and scholarship among all the destructions. And centuries of Buddhism taking roots

you choose, you would fail, your empire would crumble, your life’s work would turn to dust. Vanity vanity all is vanity, and everyone got their karma. Fu Jian and his grand dream of unification failed. On the other hand all those people who betrayed him in order to build their own empire also failed