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Dai Naidie
Gladys Yang (; 19 January 1919 – 18 November 1999) was a British translator of Chinese literature and the wife of another noted literary translator, Yang Xianyi. Biography She was born Gladys Margaret Tayler at the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing, China, where her father, John Bernard Tayler, was a Congregationalist missionary and a member of the London Missionary Society and where from childhood she became intrigued by Chinese culture. She returned to England as a child and from 1927 to 1937 boarded at Walthamstow Hall in Sevenoaks, Kent. She then became Oxford University's first graduate in Chinese language in 1940, following studies there under Ernest Richard Hughes. It was at Oxford that she met Yang. After their marriage, the couple were based in Beijing as prominent translators of Chinese literature into English in the latter half of the 20th century, working for the Foreign Languages Press. Their four-volume ''Selected Works of Lu Xun'' (1956–1957) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Yang Xianyi
Yang Xianyi (; January 10, 1915 – November 23, 2009) was a Chinese literary translator, known for rendering many ancient and a few modern Chinese classics into English, including '' Dream of the Red Mansions''. Life and career Born into a wealthy banking family in Tianjin, he was sent to Merton College, Oxford to study Classics in 1936. There he married Gladys Tayler. They had two daughters and a son, who committed suicide in 1979. Yang and his wife returned to China in 1940, and began their decades long co-operation of introducing Chinese classics to the English-speaking world. Working for the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, a government-funded publisher, the husband and wife team produced a number of quality translations. The works translated include classical Chinese poetry; such classic works as ''A Dream of the Red Mansions'', '' The Scholars'', Liu E's ''Mr. Decadent: Notes Taken in an Outing'' (), also known as ''The Travels of Lao Can'', and some of Lu Xun's stor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tiananmen Square Massacre
The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident (), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth Clearing () or June Fourth Massacre (), troops armed with assault rifles and accompanied by tanks fired at the demonstrators and those trying to block the military's advance into Tiananmen Square. The protests started on 15 April and were forcibly suppressed on 4 June when the government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army to occupy parts of central Beijing. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with thousands more wounded. The popular national movement inspired by the Beijing protests is sometimes called the '89 Democracy Movement () or the Tiananmen Square Incident (). The protests were precipitated by the death of pro-reform Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Hu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ding Ling
Ding Ling (; October 12, 1904 – March 4, 1986), formerly romanized as Ting Ling, was the pen name of Jiang Bingzhi (), also known as Bin Zhi (彬芷 ''Bīn Zhǐ''), one of the most celebrated 20th-century Chinese women authors. She is known for her feminist and socialist realist literature. Ding was active in leftist literary circles connected to the Chinese Communist Party and was imprisoned by the Chinese Nationalist Party for her politics. She later became a leader in the literary community in the Communist base of Yan'an, and held high literature and culture positions in the early government of the People's Republic of China. She was awarded the Soviet Union's Stalin second prize for Literature in 1951 for her socialist-realist work ''The Sun Shines Over Sanggan River''. After the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1958, Ding was denounced and purged and was sent to exile in Manchuria, to be rehabilitated only in 1979. She passed away in Beijing in 1986. Early life Ding Ling ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Travels Of Lao Can
''The Travels of Lao Can'' () is a novel by Liu E (1857-1909), written between 1903 and 1904 and published in 1907 to wide acclaim. Thinly disguising his own views in those of Lao Can, the physician hero, Liu describes the rise of the Boxers in the countryside, the decay of the Yellow River control system, and the hypocritical incompetence of the bureaucracy. Its social satire showed the limits of the old elite and officialdom and gave an in-depth look into everyday life in the countryside in the late Qing period. Publication history The first 13 chapters were serialized in the bi-weekly '' Xiuxiang Xiaoshuo'' (; Illustrated Fiction) from March 1903 to January 1904, in issues 9 through 18. It was published in the '' Tianjin Riri Xinwen Bao'' ( United States Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commercep. 188) in a 20 chapter version with a prologue.Doleželová-Velingerová, p724 Plot In the prologue Lao Can (T: 老殘, S: 老残; literally, "Old Decrepit"), a traveling medical pract ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Liu E (writer)
Liu E (; also spelled Liu O; 18 October 1857 – 23 August 1909), courtesy name Tieyun (), was a Chinese writer, archaeologist and politician of the late Qing Dynasty. Government and politics Liu was a native of Dantu (modern day Zhenjiang). In the government he worked with flood control, famine relief, and railroads. He became disillusioned with official ideas of reform and became a proponent of private economic development modeled after western systems. During the Boxer Uprising he speculated in government rice, distributing it to the poor. He was cashiered for these efforts, but shrewd investments had left him wealthy enough to follow his pioneering archaeological studies and to write fiction. Literature Liu's best known work is ''The Travels of Lao Can'', which the critic C.T. Hsia calls the "most beloved of all the novels" in the last decade of the Qing. Liu E's novels borrowed allusions and images from classical Chinese literature and used extensive symbolism. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist. His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond. He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as ''Man and Superman'' (1902), ''Pygmalion'' (1913) and '' Saint Joan'' (1923). With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education. By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic. Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer. Shaw had been writing plays for years ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shen Congwen
Shen Congwen (28 December 1902 – 10 May 1988), formerly romanized as Shen Ts'ung-wen, was a Chinese writer who is considered one of the greatest modern Chinese writers, on par with Lu Xun. Regional culture and identity plays a much bigger role in his writing than that of other major early modern Chinese writers. He was known for combining the vernacular style with classical Chinese writing techniques. Shen is the most important of the "native soil" writers in modern Chinese literature. Shen Congwen published many excellent compositions in his life, the most famous of which is the novella ''Border Town''. This story is about the old ferryman and his granddaughter Cuicui's love story. Shen Congwen and his wife Zhang Zhaohe were married in 1933, Shen Congwen and Zhang Zhaohe had two sons after their marriage. He was slated to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature, but died before he could be awarded the prize. Life Early life He was born Shen Yuehuan () on 28 December 1 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Dream Of Red Mansions
''Dream of the Red Chamber'' (''Honglou Meng'') or ''The Story of the Stone'' (''Shitou Ji'') is a novel composed by Cao Xueqin in the middle of the 18th century. One of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, it is known for its psychological scope, and its observation of the worldview, aesthetics, life-styles, and social relations of 18th-century China. The intricate strands of its plot depict the rise and decline of a family much like Cao’s own and, by extension, of the dynasty itself. Cao depicts the power of the father over the family, but the novel is intended to be a memorial to the women he knew in his youth: friends, relatives and servants. At a more profound level, the author explores religious and philosophical questions, and the writing style includes echoes of the plays and novels of the late Ming, as well as poetry from earlier periods. Cao apparently began composing it in the 1740s and worked on it until his death in 1763 or 1764. Copies of h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cao Xueqin
Cáo Xuěqín ( ; ); (4 April 1710 — 10 June 1765)Briggs, Asa (ed.) (1989) ''The Longman Encyclopedia'', Longman, was a Chinese writer during the Qing dynasty. He is best known as the author of ''Dream of the Red Chamber'', one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. His given name was Cáo Zhān () and his courtesy name was Mèngruǎn (). Family Cao Xueqin was born to a Han Chinese clan that was brought into personal service (as ''booi aha'' or bondservants of Cigu Niru) to the Manchu royalty in the late 1610s. His ancestors distinguished themselves through military service in the Plain White Banner () of the Eight Banners and subsequently held posts as officials which brought both prestige and wealth. After the Plain White Banner was put under the direct jurisdiction of the Qing emperor, Cao's family began to serve in civil positions of the Imperial Household Department. During the Kangxi Emperor's reign, the clan's prestige and power reached its height ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Records Of The Grand Historian
''Records of the Grand Historian'', also known by its Chinese name ''Shiji'', is a monumental history of China that is the first of China's 24 dynastic histories. The ''Records'' was written in the early 1st century by the ancient Chinese historian Sima Qian, whose father Sima Tan had begun it several decades earlier. The work covers a 2,500-year period from the age of the legendary Yellow Emperor to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han in the author's own time, and describes the world as it was known to the Chinese of the Western Han dynasty. The ''Records'' has been called a "foundational text in Chinese civilization". After Confucius and the First Emperor of Qin, "Sima Qian was one of the creators of Imperial China, not least because by providing definitive biographies, he virtually created the two earlier figures." The ''Records'' set the model for all subsequent dynastic histories of China. In contrast to Western historical works, the ''Records'' do not treat history as "a cont ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sima Qian
Sima Qian (; ; ) was a Chinese historian of the early Han dynasty (206AD220). He is considered the father of Chinese historiography for his ''Records of the Grand Historian'', a general history of China covering more than two thousand years beginning from the rise of the legendary Yellow Emperor and the formation of the first Chinese polity to the reigning sovereign of Sima Qian's time, Emperor Wu of Han. As the first universal history of the world as it was known to the ancient Chinese, the ''Records of the Grand Historian'' served as a model for official history-writing for subsequent Chinese dynasties and the Chinese cultural sphere (Korea, Vietnam, Japan) up until the 20th century. Sima Qian's father Sima Tan first conceived of the ambitious project of writing a complete history of China, but had completed only some preparatory sketches at the time of his death. After inheriting his father's position as court historian in the imperial court, he was determined to fulfill ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guan Hanqing
Guan Hanqing ( 1241–1320), sobriquet "the Oldman of the Studio" (齋叟 Zhāisǒu), was a notable Chinese playwright and poet in the Yuan Dynasty. He has been described as among the most prolific and highly regarded dramatists of the Yuan period. Life Guan Hanqing was undoubtedly the most productive and creative playwright of northern plays. Described by Jia Zhongming as “the leader of the Pear Garden” (liyuan lingxiu 梨園領袖), Guan was fully immersed in the theatrical scene of his time and was well known amongst both actors and his fellow peers. He is even said to have painted and powdered his face (mianfu fenmo 面傅粉墨) while acting on stage. He is credited with the writing of 68 plays, of which only 18 survive, three in fragments. These were written mostly in the vernacular of the time. In some cases, attribution is highly disputed. In addition to playwriting, Guan Hanqing is also said to be a master of songs (sanqu 散曲). 57 of his songs (xiaoling 小令) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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