1. Cao Yu was a Chinese playwright, often regarded as one of China's most important playwrights of the 20th century.
15 Facts About Cao Yu
1. 2.
Cao Yu was the president of China's Premier Modern Drama Theatre, the chairman of the China Theatre Association and established the Beijing People's Art Theatre in 1952.
3.
Cao Yu is regarded as the paramount playwright of modern Chinese drama, "enthroned as China's Shakespeare" according to The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama.
4.
Cao Yu, the name most associated with this playwright, was a pen name; his birth name was Wan Jiabao.
5.
Cao Yu was born as Wan Jiabao in an upper-class family in Qianjiang in the province of Hubei, 1910.
6.
Between 1920 and 1924, Cao Yu attended Tianjin Nankai High School, which offered a western style study program.
7.
Cao Yu took acting roles in a number of the society's dramatic productions, even going so far as to assume the female role of Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House.
8.
Cao Yu is known to have assisted in the translation of Englishman John Galsworthy's 1909 work, Strife.
9.
Cao Yu's works launched the wave of "realistic drama" in the 1930s, which reflected the society's different sides and served as the instrument of criticism.
10.
In 1936, Thunderstorm debuted in Nanjing, with Cao Yu himself acting in the lead role.
11.
In 1940, Cao Yu completed the writing of his fifth play, Peking Man, considered his most profound and successful work.
12.
In 1941, while still in Chongqing, Cao Yu completed a theatrical adaptation of the famous work, The Family, by novelist, Ba Jin.
13.
Cao Yu's last written work during the Japanese occupation was The Bridge, published in 1945 but not produced as a play until 1947, after the end of the war.
14.
The attacks against intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution affected Cao Yu, causing him distress and alienation.
15.
On December 13,1996, at 86 years of age, Cao Yu died in Beijing.