Ruan Zhangjing

Also known as Pen name Honghuang · Pen name Xiaoqiu

Ruan Zhangjing, pen names Honghuang and Xiaoqiu, was born on 31 January 1914 at Xiangjiao in Shaxi, Xiangshan county, Guangdong (now part of Zhongshan). At thirteen he was apprenticed to a paint shop in Yongtou village, and after his apprenticeship worked as a house painter and was sometimes hired as a decorative painter. In the 1930s he published the short story The Rice Harvest in a Nanjing newspaper under the name Xiaoqiu, and in 1938 he wrote the dramatic interlude Song of the Autumn Wind. In 1947 he wrote the ballad story The Trap and in September finished the opera The Red Leaf River, first staged that October at Yetao in Wu'an. He finished the long narrative poem The Zhang River in 1949; it appeared that May in Taihang Literature and Art. In the 1950s he wrote the fairy-tale poem The Golden Conch and verse cycles on Inner Mongolia, followed by collections including Rainbow, Songs of the Prospectors and Havana in April; the first volume of his novel Mountain Soul, Frosty Sky, came out in 1997. He also made watercolour, ink and pen sketches and carved seals. He died on 11 February 2000. His collected works were published in ten volumes in 2022.