History a hot topic for publishers

Memoirs about the lives of ordinary people were in abundant supply at the 2014 Beijing Book Fair.

Four Chinese, from Tsinghua University Press, follows the lives off our obscure craftsmen, who moonlight doing shadow plays or singing traditional funeral songs.

"They could be blue-collar workers by day, but they are also deeply committed to their own art," says Jiao Ruiqing, one of the book's authors from Tsinghua University. "It's not incongruous, it's how Chinese have always been for hundreds of years."