Peking has peculiar features as capital city, and has gone through varioustransformations, with its name changed from Peking to Peiping to Peking. Evenwhen it did not serve as a capital city, it still played an unrivaled role in culturalaspects.
Laoshe, a great writer of 'Peking flavour' literature, is famous for works fullof cultural charms of Peking. In his works, which show the manners, norms,art, culture and optimistic life style of Peking, Peking culture is described asan extension of cultural traditions of Qiren. In addition, his critical view of realityis also expressed in the works.
Linhaiyin's literary works show ordinary hutongs she experienced in the 1920sin Chengnan, the southern part of Peking, and the quiet and simple life ofwarm-hearted people living there. Her vague memories of Peking, along withher nostalgia for the city, let her describe the city with recreated happy memoriesof it instead of the harsh critical view. Her works express the city in her recreatedmemory full of hope, with her dark memories of the city being glossed over.
As seen above, Laoshe realistically described the tragic and difficult life oflow class people in hutongs of Peking as well as lower middle class people ofthe city. Meanwhile, in ChengnanJiushi, Linhaiyin expresses the daily routineand ordinary life of people in Peking from the perspective of middle class people. In addition, she showed the sympathetic view of middle class citizens towardstheir low-class neighbors. In Peking Menghualu, Wangdewei mentioned that the'castle of memory' which old Peking people in Taiwan tried to establish fills animportant gap for the continuity of Peking cultural history and cultural imagination. This indicates that the 'Peking castle of memories,' which Linhaiyin, a Taiwanesewriter well known for ‘Peking flavour,' has established plays a big role in fillingpart of such gap.
ChengnanJiushi, Wuyigong's film based on Linhaiyin's novel of the same title,also describes the daily sceneries and culture of the southern Peking in the 1920s,which both Taiwanese and Chinese people miss, through sophisticated imageswith 'profound yearning tinted with calm sadness', accomplishing an artisticachievement different from that of the novel.