Memories of the East Street in Xi'an Book

Press Kit

Unique Properties

The book "Memories of the East Street in Xi'an: Images, Words and Narratives" is a slice-by-slice study of the city of Xi'an. The entire book contains hand-drawn illustrations, architectural mapping, trademark advertisements, documentary photographs, and newspaper copies. At the same time, a variety of printing techniques are used to fully reflect the editor's original concept of presenting and reconstructing local memory through "artistic intervention".

Dimensions & Packaging

187mm x 244mm x 74mm
The entire book is divided into three units and a separate leaflet. In the first unit, interviews are conducted with people of different identities and ages to tell individual memories and family stories related to East Street. The second unit is dedicated to objects related to the memories of East Street, whether they are old bills or newspapers, to give a sense of the prosperity and bustle of the past. The third unit is a collection of images related to the memory and history of East Street, showing East Street in various historical periods. The fourth unit contains images of building facades and shop frontages from specific eras.

Tags

City Memory, Social Culture, Local Culture

Production Technology

This book tries to restore the memory of the times with various printing processes. The first unit uses the iron bicycle license plate from the 1980s as the cover and uses the embossing process. The cover of the second unit shows the advertisements of the businesses on East Street and the cover of the third unit shows the photographs taken in the 1970s. Both of them were printed in silver to enhance the meaning of historical marks. The photographs in the third unit are printed in a special black embossed silver process, imitating the effect of silver salt photographs, to restore the documentary and historical sense of the photographs.

Design Challenge

The most difficult part would be the lack of information. There are very few documents, images, and photographs of Xi'an over the past hundred years. Our team went through almost all the public cultural institutions in order to collect the relevant materials. Given the lack of information, it is especially important to record and organize the urban memories and oral narratives of ordinary citizens.

Project Duration

The book was compiled in Xi'an starting in December 2020, printed in Beijing in October 2022, and finally launched in December 2022.

Operation Flow

This book preserves the memory of the city in the form of texts and images. It is a theoretical and retrospective look at this street for a thousand years. It records the stories of the people who lived, worked, studied, and grew up on this street. This set of books is a civic archive for the city, for the public and citizens to look through, query, and quote.

Research

Research Type: Local Culture and Urban Memory.

Research Objective: To observe the historical changes in Xi'an, China's thousand-year-old capital, through an in-depth study of East Street, once the most prosperous main street in Xi'an, in order to show the people, events, and objects of the city over the past 100 years, and to reflect on the problems encountered in the development of the city and to explore the relationship between people and the city.

Research methods: Interviews, research, literature search, open call and photo collection, photography, and documentation. Through the above methods, we have established extensive contacts with museums, archives, researchers, school scholars, and volunteers, forming a close network of information sharing and gaining support from various sources.

This book has been published and has been well received by various fields of society. There are still very few books that study urban streets in a systematic way in China, perhaps even the only one. The publication of this book will provide an opportunity for urban policymakers and urban designers, as well as all those who have the potential to play a role in the future of cities, to look back and reflect on the past, but also to reconstruct the history of the city, the city that is everyone's city. At the same time, the book will provide a very indicative and reference model sample for the future study of Chinese cities.

Inspiration

Xi'an's East Street is located in the middle of the quadrangle. It has been the most important city street in Xi'an since the Ming Dynasty. The book "Memories of the East Street in Xi'an: Images, Words and Narratives" is a systematic record of the architectural form, street life, and cultural and commercial aspects of East Street. It attempts to create an archive of urban life in a folkloric and personal way, showing the daily life of Xi'an citizens and the city behind them.

Colors of Memories of the East Street in Xi'an Book

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