Birth of Modern Literature

Although born in Shaoxing, Lu Xun, China’s greatest modern writer, lived in Shanghai from 1927 until his death of tuberculosis in 1936. One of the first founders of the Shanghai-based League of Left-Wing Writers, the highly influential modernist author dragged Chinese literature into the modern era.

Until Lu Xun’s radical Diary of a Madman in 1918, literary Chinese had been conceived in classical Chinese, a language that represented not Chinese as it was spoken or thought, but as it was communicated by the educated scholarly class. Classical Chinese was a terse, dry and inflexible language that bore little relevance to the real lives of Chinese people. Lu Xun’s decision to write his story in vernacular Chinese was a revolutionary act that instantly transformed the literary paradigms of the day, and helped underpin the New Culture Movement (Xin Wenhua Yundong) which sought to challenge traditional Chinese culture.

Lu Xun’s most famous work, the 1921 novella The True Story of Ah Q (Q Ā Q zhengzhuan) – a satirical look at early 20th-century China – is considered a modern masterpiece and was the first piece of literature to entirely utilise vernacular Chinese. Admirers of Lu Xun can visit his Shanghai residence (Click here).

Mao Dun (real name Shen Yanbing), an active leftist writer in the 1930s, penned Midnight (Ziye), one of the most famous novels about Shanghai (see the boxed text, Click here). Rainbow (1929), by the same author, tells the tale of a young girl from a traditional family background who travels to Shanghai on a journey of political awakening.

Ding Ling, whose most famous oeuvre is The Diary of Miss Sophie, lived in Shanghai, as did for a time the writers Yu Dafu and Ba Jin. Writers were not immune to political dangers; Lu Xun’s friend Rou Shi was murdered by the Kuomintang in February 1931.

LU XUN

A selection of Lu Xun’s books in English, French and German translation can be found in the museum bookshop at the Lu Xun Memorial Hall.

Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing, 1920–95) is one of the writers most closely connected to Shanghai, certainly among overseas Chinese. Born in Shanghai, she lived in the city only from 1942 to 1948 before moving to Hong Kong and then the USA. Seeped in the city’s details and moods, her books capture the essence of Shanghai. Chang’s most famous books include The Rouge of the North, The Faded Flower, Red Rose and White Rose, The Golden Lock and Love in a Fallen City. Her 1979 novella Lust, Caution was made into an award-winning film directed by Ang Lee (director of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain) in 2007.

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