Lu Xun’s Ghosts 無常、女吊

This section starts with two passages from the writer Lu Xun (魯迅, 1881-1936) on the subject of ghosts, death and revenge. Gloria Davies has kindly given permission for us to reproduce here her discussion of Lu Xun’s essay-memoirs ‘Wu Chang or Life-is-Transient’ 無常 (1926) and ‘The Hanged Woman’ 女吊 (1936) from her Lu Xun’s Revolution: Writing in a Time of Violence, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.… Read

Exorcism in the Garden 大觀園符水驅妖孽

The following episode is from Chapter 102 of The Story of the Stone: The Dreamer Wakes 萬境歸空, translated by John Minford, Penguin Books, 1986. Charms and Holy Water are Used to
Exorcize Prospect Garden 大觀園符水驅妖孽   Skybright’s cousin, Wu Gui, lived, it will be remembered, opposite the rear gate-house of the Garden.… Read

Weird Accounts 志怪

During the Six Dynasties [六朝, 220-589 CE] a new prose genre, the zhiguai 志怪 tale [or ‘tales of the strange and supernatural’], emerged clearly from the mass of occasional writings of China’s literati.… Read

Hu Shih and Chinese language reform

This year, 2017, marks the beginning a momentous centenary for Chinese culture and the Sinophone world. Although the New Culture Movement 新文化運動 is conventionally dated from the founding by Chen Duxiu 陳獨秀 in Shanghai of the journal La Jeunesse 青年 in May 1915 (renamed 新青年 the following year), for many January 1917 is an equally important watershed.… Read

The Teddy Bear Chronicles

In 1989, the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi 西西 was diagnosed with breast cancer. Post-operative treatment damaged the nerves in her right hand, but she taught herself to write with her left and, in 1992, published Elegy for a Breast 哀悼乳房 (adapted for the screen as 2 Become 1).… Read

Nouvelle Chinoiserie

奇趣漢學 ‘Nouvelle Chinoiserie’ 奇趣漢學 qíqù hànxúe draws inspiration from the name of a ruined pavilion at the Qing-dynasty Garden of Perfect Brightness — Yuanming Yuan 圓明園 — to the northwest of Beijing.… Read