15 Facts About Cheng Xiaoqing

Cheng Xiaoqing was a Chinese detective fiction writer and foreign detective fiction translator.

Cheng Xiaoqing is known for his Huo Sang series, in which the main character, Huo Sang, is considered to be "the Eastern Sherlock Holmes".

Cheng Xiaoqing was born in a poverty-stricken family in Shanghai, China, on August 2,1893.

Cheng Xiaoqing died in 1903 under great pressure when Cheng was ten years old.

Cheng Xiaoqing's mother was a seamstress and worked hard to ensure her son was able to go to school.

However, severe economic conditions forced Cheng Xiaoqing to quit school when he was 15 to help his mother raising his younger sister.

Cheng Xiaoqing moved to Suzhou with his family and his new bride in 1915 as he accepted a teaching position to teach Wu.

At the age of sixteen, Cheng Xiaoqing became an apprentice in a watchmaker shop called Hope Brothers and Company in Shanghai, where he borrowed influential books and being taught horror and romance fictions in writing from a colleague.

Cheng Xiaoqing took night classes to learn English, which allowed him to read foreign novels by writers like Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils.

Cheng Xiaoqing published his first detective story titled "The Shadow in the Lamplight" in The Merry Magazine in 1914.

Cheng Xiaoqing later entered this piece in a Shanghai newspaper contest and won.

In 1946, Cheng Xiaoqing became the editor of detective magazine The New Detective, but because of the lack of story sources, the magazine then shut down.

Ten years later, Cheng Xiaoqing began to write adventure fiction; for example, one of the most famous movies in 1958 called "The Case of Xu Qiuying" was created based on Cheng Xiaoqing's fiction.

However, during the period of Cultural Revolution, Cheng Xiaoqing was criticized and denounced by the public, thus he had to stop writing.

Cheng Xiaoqing died of stomach illness in 1976 when he was 83 years old.