Here we remember and commemorate the work of Wang Xiaobo 王小波, a writer of prose and fiction who died twenty years ago. In a celebrated essay titled ‘The Silent Majority’ 沈默的大多數, Wang wrote about what he called the yin and yang of public expression in China, or the World of Silence and the World of Speech: … people keep silent for any number of reasons, some because they lack the ability or the opportunity to speak, others because they are hiding something, and still others because they feel, for whatever reason, a certain distaste for the world of speech.… Read

In the 1980s, after completing his monumental translation of the first eighty chapters of The Story of the Stone 紅樓夢, David Hawkes retired with his wife Jean to an old stone farmhouse called Bryn Carregog (Stony Hill), in the mountains of Mid-Wales.… Read

The name Wang Xifeng is a byword for guile, treachery and cunning. A brilliant creation among the many brilliant creations of Cao Xueqin, author of the eighteenth-century novel The Story of the Stone (The Dream of the Red Chamber), Wang is familiar not only to students of Chinese literature, but to anyone who has dealt with people whose personalities are distorted by authoritarianism, patriarchy and the myriad forms of repression resulting from hypocrisy.… Read

The Fourth of April 2017 marks the day for ‘sweeping the tombs’ 掃墓, a festival on which respect is paid to loved ones and forebears. Known since ancient times as Qingming 清明, ‘Clear and Bright’, it is the Eighth Day of the Third Month (depending on the year, this can be the 4th, 5th or 6th of April according to the Gregorian Calendar).… Read

The day was fine, the air clear, and a gentle breeze regaled us, so that on looking up we responded to the vastness of the universe, and on bending down were struck by the manifold riches of the earth.… Read

Here we introduce two more figures in The Teddy Bear Chronicles 縫熊誌, created by the Hong Kong writer and teddy bear artist Xi Xi 西西, and translated by Christina Sanderson. The teddies and essay below feature Xi Kang 嵇康 and Ruan Xian 阮咸, two of the famed Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove 竹林七賢.… Read