Qian Zhongshu
Encyclopedia
| Names Chinese name Personal names in Chinese culture follow a number of conventions different from those of personal names in Western cultures. Most noticeably, a Chinese name is written with the family name first and the given name next, therefore "John-Paul Smith" as a Chinese name would be "Smith John-Paul"... |
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| Simplified Chinese: | 钱锺书 |
| Traditional Chinese: | 錢鍾書 |
| Pinyin Pinyin Pinyin is the official system to transcribe Chinese characters into the Roman alphabet in China, Malaysia, Singapore and Taiwan. It is also often used to teach Mandarin Chinese and spell Chinese names in foreign publications and used as an input method to enter Chinese characters into... : |
Qián Zhōngshū |
| Wade-Giles Wade-Giles Wade–Giles , sometimes abbreviated Wade, is a romanization system for the Mandarin Chinese language. It developed from a system produced by Thomas Wade during the mid-19th century , and was given completed form with Herbert Giles' Chinese–English dictionary of 1892.Wade–Giles was the most... : |
Ch'ien Chung-shu |
| Zi Chinese style name A Chinese style name, sometimes also known as a courtesy name , is a given name to be used later in life. After 20 years of age, the zì is assigned in place of one's given name as a symbol of adulthood and respect... : |
Zheliang (哲良) |
| Mocun (默存) | |
| Hao Chinese style name A Chinese style name, sometimes also known as a courtesy name , is a given name to be used later in life. After 20 years of age, the zì is assigned in place of one's given name as a symbol of adulthood and respect... : |
Huaiju (槐聚) |
Qian Zhongshu (November 21, 1910 – December 19, 1998) was a Chinese
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
literary
Literature
Literature is the art of written works, and is not bound to published sources...
scholar and writer, known for his wit and erudition
Erudition
The word erudition came into Middle English from Latin. A scholar is erudite when instruction and reading followed by digestion and contemplation have effaced all rudeness , that is to say smoothed away all raw, untrained incivility...
.
He is best known for his satiric
Satire
Satire is primarily a literary genre or form, although in practice it can also be found in the graphic and performing arts. In satire, vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement...
novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....
Fortress Besieged
Fortress Besieged
Fortress Besieged was written by Qian Zhongshu, published in 1947, and is widely considered as one of the masterpieces of twentieth century Chinese literature. The novel is a humorous tale about middle-class Chinese society in the late 1930s...
(圍城，围城). His works of non-fiction are characterised by their large amount of quotations in both Chinese and Western languages (including English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, Italian
Italian language
Italian is a Romance language spoken mainly in Europe: Italy, Switzerland, San Marino, Vatican City, by minorities in Malta, Monaco, Croatia, Slovenia, France, Libya, Eritrea, and Somalia, and by immigrant communities in the Americas and Australia...
, Spanish
Spanish language
Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...
, and Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
). He also played an important role in digitizing
Digitizing
Digitizing or digitization is the representation of an object, image, sound, document or a signal by a discrete set of its points or samples. The result is called digital representation or, more specifically, a digital image, for the object, and digital form, for the signal...
the Chinese classics late in his life.
Life
Most of what is known about Qian's early life relies on an essay written by his wife Yang JiangYang Jiang
Yang Jiang , born Yang Jikang , is a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She has written several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Don Quixote from the Spanish original.-Biography:Yang Jiang was graduated from The University Of...
. Born in Wuxi
Wuxi
Wuxi is an old city in Jiangsu province, People's Republic of China. Split in half by Lake Tai, Wuxi borders Changzhou to the west and Suzhou to the east. The northern half looks across to Taizhou across the Yangtze River, while the southern half also borders the province of Zhejiang to the south...
, Qian Zhongshu was the son of Qian Jibo (錢基博，钱基博), a conservative Confucian scholar. By family tradition, Qian Zhongzhu grew up under the care of his eldest uncle, who did not have a son. Qian was initially named Yangxian (仰先 "respect the ancients"), with the courtesy name Zheliang (哲良 "sagacious and upright"). However, when he was one year old, according to a tradition practised in many parts of China, he was given a few objects laid out in front of him for his "grabbing". He grabbed a book. His uncle then renamed him Zhongshu, literally "being fond of books", and Yangxian became his intimate name. Qian was a talkative child. His father later changed his courtesy name to Mocun (默存), literally "to keep silent", in the hope that he would talk less.
Both Qian's name and courtesy name predicted his future life. While he remained talkative when talking about literature with friends, he kept silent most time on politics and social activities. Qian was indeed very fond of books. When he was young, his uncle often brought him along to tea houses during the day. There Qian was left alone to read storybooks on folklore and historical events, which he would repeat to his cousins upon returning home.
When Qian was 10, his uncle died. He continued living with his widowed aunt, even though their living conditions worsened drastically as her family's fortunes dwindled. Under the severe teaching of his father, Qian mastered classical Chinese
Classical Chinese
Classical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
. At the age of 14, Qian left home to attend an English-speaking missionary school in Suzhou
Suzhou
Suzhou , previously transliterated as Su-chou, Suchow, and Soochow, is a major city located in the southeast of Jiangsu Province in Eastern China, located adjacent to Shanghai Municipality. The city is situated on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River and on the shores of Taihu Lake and is a part...
, where he manifested his talent in language.
Despite failing in mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
, Qian was accepted into the Department of Foreign Languages of Tsinghua University
Tsinghua University
Tsinghua University , colloquially known in Chinese as Qinghua, is a university in Beijing, China. The school is one of the nine universities of the C9 League. It was established in 1911 under the name "Tsinghua Xuetang" or "Tsinghua College" and was renamed the "Tsinghua School" one year later...
in 1929 because of his excellent performance in Chinese and English languages. At Tsinghua, Qian earned the admiration of many prominent scholars, but rarely socialized and was considered arrogant by his peers; one of his few friends was the budding Sinologist and comparatist Achilles Fang
Achilles Fang
Achilles Fang was a sinologist and comparatist. He was held in great esteem by those who knew him in life; Marianne Moore called him "the word wizard." His correspondence with Ezra Pound significantly influenced Pound's understanding of Chinese subjects, and his doctoral dissertation on Pound, an...
. Qian also frequently cut classes, though he more than made up for this in Tsinghua's large library, which he boasted of having "read through." It was probably in his college days that Qian began his lifelong habit of collecting quotations and taking reading notes. At Tsinghua, Qian met his wife, Yang Jiang
Yang Jiang
Yang Jiang , born Yang Jikang , is a Chinese playwright, author, and translator. She has written several successful comedies, and was the first Chinese person to produce a complete Chinese version of Don Quixote from the Spanish original.-Biography:Yang Jiang was graduated from The University Of...
, who was to become a successful playwright and translator; they married in 1935. For the biographical facts of Qian's following years, the two memoirs by his wife can be consulted.
In that same year, Qian received government sponsorship to further his studies abroad. Together with his wife, Qian headed for the University of Oxford
University of Oxford
The University of Oxford is a university located in Oxford, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest surviving university in the world and the oldest in the English-speaking world. Although its exact date of foundation is unclear, there is evidence of teaching as far back as 1096...
in Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. After spending two years at Exeter College, Oxford
Exeter College, Oxford
Exeter College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in England and the fourth oldest college of the University. The main entrance is on the east side of Turl Street...
, he received a Baccalaureus Litterarum (Bachelor of Literature). Shortly after his daughter Qian Yuan (錢瑗，钱瑗) was born, he studied for one more year in the University of Paris
University of Paris
The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...
in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, before returning to China in 1938, in which year he was, as an exception, appointed a professor at Tsinghua University at the age of 28.
Owing to the unstable situation during the Second Sino-Japanese War
Second Sino-Japanese War
The Second Sino-Japanese War was a military conflict fought primarily between the Republic of China and the Empire of Japan. From 1937 to 1941, China fought Japan with some economic help from Germany , the Soviet Union and the United States...
, Qian did not hold any long-term jobs until the People's Republic of China
People's Republic of China
China , officially the People's Republic of China , is the most populous country in the world, with over 1.3 billion citizens. Located in East Asia, the country covers approximately 9.6 million square kilometres...
was founded in 1949. However, he wrote extensively during the decade.
In 1949, Qian was ranked on the list of National First-class Professors(國家一級教授) and commenced his academic work in his Alma Mater. Four years later, an administrative adjustment saw Tsinghua changed into a science and technology-based institution, with its Arts departments merged into Peking University
Peking University
Peking University , colloquially known in Chinese as Beida , is a major research university located in Beijing, China, and a member of the C9 League. It is the first established modern national university of China. It was founded as Imperial University of Peking in 1898 as a replacement of the...
(PKU). Qian was relieved of teaching duties and worked entirely in the Institute of Literary Studies (文學研究所，文学研究所) under PKU. He also worked in an agency in charge of the translation of Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
's works for a time.
During the Cultural Revolution
Cultural Revolution
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, commonly known as the Cultural Revolution , was a socio-political movement that took place in the People's Republic of China from 1966 through 1976...
, like many other prominent intellectuals of the time, Qian suffered persecution. Appointed to be a janitor, he was robbed of his favorite pastime, reading. Having no access to books, he had to read his reading notes. He began to form the plan to write Guan Zhui Bian (管錐編，管锥编) during this period. Qian and his wife and daughter survived the hardships of Cultural Revolution, but his son-in-law, a history teacher, was driven to suicide.
After the Cultural Revolution, Qian returned to research. From 1978 to 1980, he visited several universities in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Japan, impressing his audience with his wit and erudition. In 1982, he was instated as the deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences , established in 1977, is the premier and highest academic research organization in the fields of philosophy and social sciences as well as a national center for comprehensive studies in the People's Republic of China. It was described by Foreign Policy...
. He then began working on Guan Zhui Bian, which occupied the next decade of his life.
While Guan Zhui Bian established his fame in the academic field, his novel Fortress Besieged introduced him to the public. Fortress Besieged was reprinted in 1980, and became a best-seller. Many illegal reproductions and "continuations" followed. Qian's fame rose to its height when the novel was adapted into a TV serial
TV series (China)
Chinese television drama are similar to television drama in North America, but are often longer in length, and portray a story too lengthy to be made into a movie....
in 1990.
Qian returned to research, but escaped from social activities. Most of his late life was confined to his reading room. He consciously kept a distance from the mass media and political figures. Readers kept visiting the secluded scholar, and the anecdote goes that Qian asked an elderly British lady, who loved the novel and phoned the author, "Is it necessary for one to know the hen if one loves the eggs it lays?"
Qian entered a hospital in 1994, and never came out. His daughter also became ill soon after, and died of cancer
Cancer
Cancer , known medically as a malignant neoplasm, is a large group of different diseases, all involving unregulated cell growth. In cancer, cells divide and grow uncontrollably, forming malignant tumors, and invade nearby parts of the body. The cancer may also spread to more distant parts of the...
in 1997. On December 19, 1998, he died in Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
. The Xinhua News Agency
Xinhua News Agency
The Xinhua News Agency is the official press agency of the government of the People's Republic of China and the biggest center for collecting information and press conferences in the PRC. It is the largest news agency in the PRC, ahead of the China News Service...
, the official press agency of the PRC government, labelled him "an immortal".
Works
Qian dwelled in ShanghaiShanghai
Shanghai is the largest city by population in China and the largest city proper in the world. It is one of the four province-level municipalities in the People's Republic of China, with a total population of over 23 million as of 2010...
from 1941 to 1945, which was then under Japanese occupation. Many of his works were written or published during this chaotic period of time. A collection of short essays, Marginalias of Life (寫在人生邊上，写在人生边上) was published in 1941. Men, Beasts and Ghosts (人‧獸‧鬼), a collection of short stories, mostly satiric, was published in 1946. His most celebrated work Fortress Besieged appeared in 1947. On the Art of Poetry (談藝錄，谈艺录), written in classical Chinese, was published in 1948.
Besides rendering Mao Zedong's selected works into English, Qian was appointed to produce an anthology of poetry of the Song Dynasty
Song Dynasty
The Song Dynasty was a ruling dynasty in China between 960 and 1279; it succeeded the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period, and was followed by the Yuan Dynasty. It was the first government in world history to issue banknotes or paper money, and the first Chinese government to establish a...
when he was working in the Institute of Literary Studies. The Selected and Annotated Song Dynasty Poetry (宋詩選注，宋诗选注) was published in 1958. Despite Qian's quoting the Chairman, and his selecting a considerable number of poems that reflect class struggle
Class struggle
Class struggle is the active expression of a class conflict looked at from any kind of socialist perspective. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote "The [written] history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle"....
, the work was criticized for not being Marxist
Marxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
enough. The work was praised highly by the overseas critics, though, especially for its introduction and footnotes. In a new preface for the anthology written in 1988, Qian said that the work was an embarrassing compromise between his personal taste and the then prevailing academic atmosphere.
Seven Pieces Patched Together (七綴集), a collection of seven pieces of literary criticism written (and revised) over years in vernacular Chinese
Vernacular Chinese
Written Vernacular Chinese refers to forms of written Chinese based on the vernacular language, in contrast to Classical Chinese, the written standard used from the Spring and Autumn Period to the early twentieth century...
, was published in 1984. This collection includes the famous essay "Lin Shu
Lin Shu
Lin Shu , courtesy name Qinnan , was a Chinese man of letters, most famous for his introducing Western literature to a whole generation of Chinese readers, despite his ignorance of any foreign language...
's Translation" (林紓的翻譯，林纾的翻译).
Qian's magnum opus is the five-volume Guan Zhui Bian, literally the Pipe-Awl Collection, translated into English as Limited Views. Begun in the 1980s and published in its current form in the mid-1990s, it is an extensive collection of notes and short essays on poetics
Poetics
Aristotle's Poetics is the earliest-surviving work of dramatic theory and the first extant philosophical treatise to focus on literary theory...
, semiotics
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
, literary history and related topics written in classical Chinese.
Qian's command of the cultural traditions of classical and modern Chinese, ancient Greek
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek is the stage of the Greek language in the periods spanning the times c. 9th–6th centuries BC, , c. 5th–4th centuries BC , and the c. 3rd century BC – 6th century AD of ancient Greece and the ancient world; being predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
(in translations), Latin, English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish allowed him to construct a towering structure of polyglot and cross-cultural allusions. He took as the basis of this work a range of Chinese classical texts, including I-Ching, Classic of Poetry, Chuci, Zuozhuan, Shiji, Tao Te Ching
Tao Te Ching
The Tao Te Ching, Dao De Jing, or Daodejing , also simply referred to as the Laozi, whose authorship has been attributed to Laozi, is a Chinese classic text...
, Liezi
Liezi
The Liezi is a Daoist text attributed to Lie Yukou, a circa 5th century BCE Hundred Schools of Thought philosopher, but Chinese and Western scholars believe it was compiled around the 4th century CE.-Textual history:...
, Jiaoshi Yilin
Jiaoshi Yilin
Jiaoshi Yilin is a Chinese book of divination composed during the Western Han Dynasty. Modeled on the I Ching, the work was attributed to Jiao Yanshou , though not much is known about the author....
, Taiping Guangji
Tàipíng guangjì
The Extensive Records of the Taiping Era is a collection of stories compiled under the editorship of Li Fang, first published in 978. The book is divided into 500 volumes and consists of about 3 million words...
and the Complete Prose of the Pre-Tang
Tang Dynasty
The Tang Dynasty was an imperial dynasty of China preceded by the Sui Dynasty and followed by the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period. It was founded by the Li family, who seized power during the decline and collapse of the Sui Empire...
Dynasties (全上古三代秦漢三國六朝文，全上古三代秦汉三国六朝文).
Familiar with the whole Western history of ideas, Qian shed new lights on the Chinese classical texts by comparing them with Western works, showing their likeness, or more often their apparent likeness and essential differences.
Qian Zhongshu was one of the Chinese authors best known to the Western world. Fortress Besieged has been translated into English, French, German, Russian
Russian language
Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...
, Japanese
Japanese language
is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...
and Spanish.
Besides being one of the few acknowledged masters of written vernacular Chinese in the 20th century, Qian was also one of the last authors to produce substantial works in classical Chinese. Some regard his choice of writing Guan Zhui Bian in classical Chinese as a challenge to the assertion that classical Chinese is incompatible with modern and Western ideas, an assertion often heard during the May Fourth Movement
May Fourth Movement
The May Fourth Movement was an anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement growing out of student demonstrations in Beijing on May 4, 1919, protesting the Chinese government's weak response to the Treaty of Versailles, especially the Shandong Problem...
.
Posthumous publications
A 13-volume edition of Works of Qian Zhongshu (錢鍾書集，钱锺书集) was published in 2001 by the Joint Publishing, a hard-covered deluxe edition, in contrast to all of Qian's works published during his lifetime which are cheap paperbackPaperback
Paperback, softback or softcover describe and refer to a book by the nature of its binding. The covers of such books are usually made of paper or paperboard, and are usually held together with glue rather than stitches or staples...
s. The publisher claimed that the edition had been proofread by many experts. One of the most valuable parts of the edition, titled Marginalias on the Marginalias of Life (寫在人生邊上的邊上), is a collection of Qian's writings previously scattered in periodicals, magazines and other books. The writings collected there are, however, arranged without any visible order.
Other posthumous publications of Qian's works have drawn harsh criticism. The 10-volume Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi (宋詩紀事補正), published in 2003, was condemned as a shoddy publication. The editor and the publisher have been criticized for neglecting such obvious printing mistakes. A facsimile of Qian's holograph (known as 宋詩紀事補訂(手稿影印本) in Chinese) has been published in 2005, by another publisher. The facsimiles of parts of Qian's notebooks appeared in 2004, and have similarly drawn criticism on account of blatant inadvertency. In 2005, a collection of Qian's English works was published. Again, it was lashed for its editorial incompetence.
Further reading
Innumerable biographies and memoirs in Chinese have been published since Qian's death.An introduction to Qian's style of thinking can be found in the English (selected) translation of Guan Zhui Bian:
Five of Qian's essays on poetry have been translated into French: