40 Facts About Qian Zhongshu

Qian Zhongshu, transliterated as Ch'ien Chung-shu or Dzien Tsoong-su, was a renowned 20th century Chinese literary scholar and writer, known for his wit and erudition.

Qian Zhongshu is best known for his satirical novel Fortress Besieged.

Qian Zhongshu played an important role in digitizing Chinese classics late in his life.

Qian Zhongshu believed that the source of emotion motivation is poems because poems can convey human's emotion.

Also, Qian Zhongshu insisted that humans cannot express their emotion as they want; instead, they should rationally control their emotion to a certain degree so that they can achieve an optimal appreciation status.

At the age of 6, Qian Zhongshu went to Qinshi primary school and stayed home for less than half a year due to illness.

At the age of 7, Qian Zhongshu studied in a private school of a relative's family.

When Qian Zhongshu was 11, he entered the first grade at Donglin Elementary School, and his uncle died this year.

Qian Zhongshu continued living with his widowed aunt, even though their living conditions drastically worsened as her family's fortunes dwindled.

Under the strict tutelage of his father, Qian Zhongshu mastered classical Chinese.

At the age of 14, Qian Zhongshu left home to attend Taowu middle school, an English-language missionary school in Suzhou, after being scolded by his father, he studied hard and improved his writing level.

In 1927, Qian Zhongshu was admitted to Furen Middle School, an English-language Missionary School in Wuxi, where he manifested his talent in language.

At Tsinghua, Qian studied with professors, such as Wu Mi, George T Yeh, Wen Yuan-ning, and others.

In 1933, Qian Zhongshu became engaged to Yang, and they married in 1935.

Two years after Qian Zhongshu graduated from Tsinghua University in 1933, Qian Zhongshu taught at Kwanghua University in Shanghai and contributed to English-language publications such as The China Critic.

In 1935, Qian Zhongshu received a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship to further his studies abroad.

Together with his wife, Qian Zhongshu headed for the University of Oxford in Britain.

Shortly after his daughter Qian Zhongshu Yuan was born in England in 1937, he studied for one more year in the University of Paris in France.

In 1939, after Qian Zhongshu returned to Shanghai to visit his relatives, he directly went to Hunan to take care of his sick father and temporarily left Southwestern United University.

In 1941, During the Pearl Harbor incident, Qian Zhongshu was temporarily trapped in Shanghai.

In 1949, Qian Zhongshu was ranked on the list of National First-class Professors and commenced his academic work in his alma mater.

Qian Zhongshu was relieved of teaching duties and worked entirely in the Institute of Literary Studies under PKU.

Qian Zhongshu is a senior researcher at the institute, and his wife Yang Jiang is a researcher.

Qian Zhongshu worked as part of a small team in charge of the translation of Mao Zedong's Selected Works and poetry.

Qian Zhongshu began to form the plan to write Limited Views during this period.

Qian Zhongshu then began working on Limited Views, which occupied the next decade of his life.

Qian Zhongshu's fame rose to its height when the novel was adapted into a TV serial in 1990 which was acted by some famous Chinese actors, such as Daoming Chen and Da Ying.

Qian Zhongshu consciously kept a distance from the mass media and political figures.

Qian Zhongshu was hospitalized in 1994, and his daughter became ill in 1995.

In 1926 his uncle Qian Zhongshu Sunqin built five buildings and several auxiliary rooms on the west side of the back of the house, covering an area of 667.6 square meters.

Qian Zhongshu lived in Shanghai from 1941 to 1945, which was then under Japanese occupation.

Qian Zhongshu's most celebrated work Fortress Besieged appeared in 1947, but not until 1980s that it receives more attention.

Besides rendering Mao Zedong's selected works into English, Qian Zhongshu was appointed to produce an anthology of poetry of the Song dynasty when he was working in the Institute of Literary Studies.

Qian Zhongshu took a range of Chinese classical texts as the basis of this work, including the I-Ching, Classic of Poetry, Verses of Chu, The Commentary of Tso, Records of the Grand Historian, Tao Te Ching, Lieh-tzu, Jiaoshi Yilin, Extensive Records of the T'ai-p'ing Era and the Complete Prose of the Pre-Tang Dynasties.

Broadly familiar with the Western history of ideas, Qian Zhongshu 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 is one of the best-known Chinese authors in the Western world.

Besides being one of the great masters of written vernacular Chinese in the 20th century, Qian Zhongshu was one of the last authors to produce substantial works in classical Chinese.

One of the most valuable parts of the edition which demonstrating Qian Zhongshu's writing ability while blending humor and irony, titled Marginalias on the Marginalias of Life, is a collection of Qian Zhongshu's writings previously scattered in periodicals, magazines and other books.

The facsimiles of parts of Qian Zhongshu's notebooks appeared in 2004, and have similarly drawn criticism on account of blatant inadvertency.

The Commercial Press has, per an agreement with Yang Jiang, begun publishing photoreproductions of Qian Zhongshu's reading notes, totaling several score volumes in both Chinese and foreign languages.