I found this book in the "Friends of the Library" used bookstore. It's about the author's travels through China in the mid-1980s.
It has nothing really to do with FIRE / MMM except this passage found on page 131 of the version I am reading: "In Ming times, civil servants would retire here, as early as possible, to a reclusive contentment in walled gardens, plunged in self cultivation, conversing on aesthetics, practicing calligraphy, penning commentaries on the Classics."
So FIRE is nothing new...
An by the way, the "here" he references is the city of Suzhou.
