Combining evocative historical description and cogent analysis, Song Full of Tears is a chronicle of nine hundred years of life in southeast China. It reveals the workings of Chinese society in times of environmental and military crises, how the Chinese reacted to changes, threats, and opportunities, and how they dealt with one another and the world of nature and the environment.
Until the eighteenth century Xiang Lake, in the province of Zheijiang, was the stage for morality battles between loyalty and betrayal, chastity and impurity, civic virtue and private greed. After the eighteenth century, concerns about ecology, public rights, and technology emerged as elements in the struggle, and in the twentieth century, the fate of the lake became linked to national political developments and then to technological and ecological realities. Song Full of Tears shows how Chinese views of life, society, and nature both changed and remained constant through the centuries.
