Writers › Writer / Poet
Qian Zhongshu
Scholar and novelist from Wuxi, author of the novel Fortress Besieged and the vast reading notes Limited Views, married to the writer Yang Jiang
In a study at night, a desk holds a brush pot, a porcelain vase with a plum branch, a lit red lantern, a folded fan and an unrolled blank scroll, with no one seated there, while through a round window the moon rises over a lake with a sailboat.
Also known as Zi Mocun
- Roles
- Writer / Poet
Qian Zhongshu, courtesy name Mocun and literary name Huaiju, came from Wuxi in Jiangsu; his father Qian Jibo was a professor of classical learning. He graduated in foreign languages from Tsinghua University in 1933, married Yang Jiang in 1935 and went with her to Exeter College, Oxford, where he took a B.Litt., before further study in Paris. Back home in 1938 he taught at Southwest Associated University and the national normal college at Lantian in Hunan, then spent the last war years in occupied Shanghai, where he wrote the novel Fortress Besieged (Weicheng), published in 1947, and the poetry criticism On the Art of Poetry (Tan yi lu), published in 1948. After 1949 he taught at Tsinghua and then joined the Institute of Literature, publishing an annotated anthology of Song poetry in 1958 and, in 1979, Limited Views (Guanzhui bian), notes on classical texts. He died in Beijing in December 1998, aged eighty-eight, and Yang Jiang edited his manuscripts and notebooks for publication.
Life and times
Dates 1910 CE–1998 CE