Wuzhen Scenic Area
Water town whose lakeside museum holds the smuggled prison notebooks of a Cultural Revolution-era painter and writer.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Wuzhen's lakeside museum follows the writer and painter Mu Xin, jailed three times during the Cultural Revolution, including eighteen months of solitary confinement beginning in 1971, when guards broke his fingers and destroyed hundreds of his paintings. It centers on the paper he was given for written confessions, and the riddle of how he turned thirty-three sheets into sixty-six pages of covert philosophy, arguing quietly with Nietzsche and Dostoevsky in his head. He later put it simply: by day he was a slave, by night he was a prince.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Wenlan Pavilion
Rebuilt garden library housing a rare surviving copy of an imperial Qing-era encyclopedia.
Gushan Park
Hillside garden holding an imperial library rebuilt page by page after Qing-era looters scattered its books.
Yue Fei Temple
Song-dynasty general's tomb and shrine, guarded by kneeling iron statues of the men who framed him.
China Animation Museum
Cloud-shaped national museum tracing a century of animation through twenty thousand original drawings, models and film reels.
West Lake Museum
Lakeside museum whose galleries sit almost entirely underground, lit by skylights beneath a grass roof.
Dreaming of Tiger Spring at Hupao Valley
Legendary tiger-dug mountain spring where a celebrated artist renounced fame to become a monk.