City of Heavenly Tranquillity by Jasper Becker Penguin, HK$157
This book should be read by Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, who bewildered an audience at the Foreign Correspondents' Club recently by saying conservation did not mean leaving things as they are. City of Heavenly Tranquillity chronicles what happens when such convictions are put into action, although it is Beijing that Jasper Becker has written about. His is an angry lament at the levelling of the ancient capital, whose historic architecture has been supplanted by buildings that are culturally aspecific. The changes since 1997, when a secret plan was adopted to eradicate old Beijing, have turned the city into a 'laboratory for foreign architects' . 'A country ruled by engineers and devoted to modernity was perhaps the only place where it could have happened,' writes Becker; even the Cultural Relics Bureau had a property development company that bulldozed buildings it was supposed to protect. By telling the stories of the people affected by the upheavals - including She Youzhe, who tried in vain to save a shrine that had been her family's for 17 generations - Becker also reminds us that no amount of propaganda will ever right such wrongs.