{
  "id": "lu-xun",
  "title": "Lu Xun",
  "lang": "en",
  "source_lang": "en",
  "summary": "Chinese writer, essayist, translator, and scholar whose fiction and cultural criticism helped shape modern Chinese literature.",
  "category": "arts",
  "subcategory": "literature",
  "type": "person",
  "aliases": [
    "Lu Hsun",
    "Lu Hsün",
    "Lusin",
    "Zhou Shuren",
    "Chou Shu-jen",
    "Zhou Zhangshou",
    "鲁迅",
    "魯迅"
  ],
  "generated_at": "2026-10-22",
  "model": "pro/gpt-6.1-sol",
  "url": "https://aiwiki.page/en/lu-xun/",
  "translations": {
    "zh-Hans": {
      "url": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/lu-xun/",
      "json": "https://aiwiki.page/zh/lu-xun.json"
    }
  },
  "sections": [
    {
      "heading": "",
      "text": "Lu Xun (25 September 1881–19 October 1936), the principal pen name of Zhou Shuren, was a Chinese writer, essayist, translator, and literary scholar. A leading figure in the New Culture and May Fourth movements, he helped establish vernacular fiction as a major form of modern Chinese literature. His best-known works include “Diary of a Madman” (1918) and the novella <i>The True Story of Ah Q</i> (1921–1922), whose satire examines social hierarchy, self-deception, and the difficulties of cultural and political change. (luxunmuseum.cn)\n\nHis work extended beyond fiction to experimental prose poetry, autobiographical essays, literary history, translation, and commentary on contemporary life. Alongside his writing, he introduced foreign literature, supported younger writers, and promoted modern woodcut printmaking. His combination of literary experimentation and social criticism made him a central figure in twentieth-century Chinese cultural life; subsequent scholarship has examined both the complexity of his writing and the ways his public image became a cultural and political symbol. (doi.org)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Family background and education in late Qing China",
      "text": "Lu Xun was born on 25 September 1881 in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, under the Qing dynasty. His birth name was Zhou Zhangshou (周樟壽); he adopted the name Zhou Shuren (周樹人) in 1898, when he left home to study in Nanjing. The Zhou family belonged to the landowning, scholar-official milieu, in which classical learning and success in the imperial examinations sustained social standing. His paternal grandfather, Zhou Fuqing, had entered the Hanlin Academy, while his father, Zhou Boyi, held the lower scholarly qualification of xiucai. “Lu Xun,” the literary pseudonym, belonged to a later stage of his career, beginning in 1918. (en.wikipedia.org)\n\nThe family’s circumstances deteriorated sharply in 1893, when Zhou Fuqing was imprisoned for attempting to bribe an examination official on behalf of his son and other candidates. Expenditure associated with the case depleted the household’s resources. Zhou Boyi subsequently became seriously ill and died in 1896. In later autobiographical accounts, Lu Xun recalled taking possessions to pawnshops and obtaining medicines for his father, experiences through which the family’s loss of status became materially apparent. These recollections connect its decline not simply with reduced income but with humiliating dependence on relatives, creditors, and medical practitioners. (luxunmuseum.cn)\n\nHis early education nevertheless provided substantial grounding in classical texts. After instruction at home, he entered the Sanwei Shuwu, or Three-Flavour Study, in 1892, studying under Shou Jingwu. Having already encountered elementary texts and the Four Books and Five Classics, he proceeded to the Book of Odes. Lessons involved reading aloud, memorization, explanation, brush writing, and exercises in matching phrases. This schooling trained him in the language and textual traditions associated with Confucian scholarship, even though he did not ultimately pursue an examination-based official career. His later recollections of the school should be distinguished from a contemporary classroom record. (u.osu.edu)\n\nOutside formal lessons, household storytelling and Shaoxing’s popular religious culture offered another field of experience. His nursemaid, remembered as Ah Chang, told supernatural stories and obtained an illustrated Classic of Mountains and Seas for him. Local opera, temple festivities, and processions brought narrative into public performance. In his retrospective essay “Wuchang,” he remembered the white-clad, comic messenger of death appearing in religious festivities and Mulian plays. Such examples place his childhood encounters with ghosts and legends within domestic oral tradition, illustrated books, and communal ritual, rather than within classical schooling alone. (marxists.org)\n\nIn 1898 he moved to Nanjing and entered the Jiangnan Naval Academy, a government-supported institution that offered an affordable alternative to continued private study. In 1899 he transferred to the School of Mines and Railways attached to the Jiangnan Military Academy. Its curriculum included mathematics, geology, mineralogy, geography, drawing, and German, placing technical subjects alongside his existing literary training. He also encountered translated foreign writing, including works introduced by Yan Fu and Lin Shu. After completing his studies in 1902, he received government support for further education in Japan and departed that year. (en.wikipedia.org)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Study in Japan and the turn toward literature",
      "text": "Lu Xun arrived in Japan in spring 1902 as a scholarship student sponsored by Zhejiang province. In Tokyo he attended Kōbun Gakuin, a preparatory institution for Chinese students, studying the Japanese language before entering medical school. His literary activity had already begun: in 1903 he contributed “The Soul of Sparta” to the Chinese student journal Zhejiang chao. After completing his preparation, he enrolled at Sendai Medical College, a predecessor of Tohoku University’s medical faculty. University archives identify his application as dated 1 June 1904 and the entrance ceremony as 12 September 1904. He remained until March 1906, leaving during his second year after approximately eighteen months of study. (archives.tohoku.ac.jp)\n\nAt Sendai, Fujino Genkurō taught him anatomy, a compulsory first-year subject with four hours of instruction each week. Fujino’s assistance extended beyond classroom teaching: he examined Lu Xun’s lecture notebooks and supplied detailed corrections in red ink. This mentorship has a surviving documentary basis. The university’s exhibition includes a reproduction of an annotated notebook on the vascular system, dated 1904, whose original is held by the Beijing Lu Xun Museum. The corrections provide concrete evidence of the teacher’s attention to his student’s work, independently of the affectionate portrait Lu Xun later composed. (archives.tohoku.ac.jp)\n\nThe later essay “Mr. Fujino” (1926) nevertheless requires reading as retrospective literary memoir rather than as a contemporary classroom record. Its recollections can be compared with surviving notes, timetables, and other students’ materials. For example, Lu Xun remembered Fujino beginning his teaching with the history of anatomy in Japan. Medical historian Tatsuo Sakai’s examination of the records, published in 2008, found no such passage in Lu Xun’s surviving notebook, but identified related material in senior students’ notes and confirmed that the timetable assigned the opening anatomy lecture to Fujino. Such comparisons support particular recollections without making the memoir and the archival record interchangeable. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)\n\nLu Xun’s best-known explanation for abandoning medicine appears in his preface to Call to Arms, dated 3 December 1922. There he recalled that lantern slides used in microbiology instruction were sometimes followed by images of scenery or current events. During the Russo-Japanese War, he said, one projected image showed a bound Chinese man identified as a spy for Russia, about to be executed by Japanese soldiers, while other Chinese watched. In his account, the spectators’ apparent indifference was decisive: bodily strength offered no protection against becoming either the victim of a public spectacle or its unreflective audience. The celebrated episode is thus Lu Xun’s own retrospective account. Tohoku’s surviving glass slides include war scenes, but none depicting the execution he described. (marxists.org)\n\nThe distinction he drew was between treating individual bodies and changing collective attitudes. In the 1922 preface, he explained that literature had seemed the most effective means of transforming people’s spirit, redirecting his ambitions from clinical practice toward a literary movement. After returning to Tokyo, he sought collaborators for a journal called Xinsheng (“New Life”). His account records a practical failure rather than an immediate literary breakthrough: contributors withdrew, financial backing disappeared, and the journal never issued its first number. The turn toward writing therefore involved attempts to organize publication and reach readers, not simply the abandonment of a medical course. (marxists.org)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Teaching, public service, and the New Culture movement",
      "text": "Lu Xun returned from Japan in 1909 and taught scientific subjects at Zhejiang Normal College in Hangzhou, including biology, physiology, and chemistry; he also interpreted for Japanese instructors. In 1910 he moved to Shaoxing Middle School, where he taught natural science and served in an administrative position. These appointments placed him within the new educational institutions established during the final years of the Qing dynasty, rather than the classical examination system. During the 1911 Revolution, he and students organized teams to explain the changed political situation to Shaoxing residents. After the revolution, he also headed the Shanhui junior normal school, which trained teachers. (u.osu.edu)\n\nIn 1912, under the new republican government, he joined the Ministry of Education in Nanjing, then headed by Cai Yuanpei. He moved with the ministry to Beijing in May. Working under his official name, Zhou Shuren, he served in its Department of Social Education, including as head of its first section. His government employment thus concerned education beyond ordinary classroom instruction, while his literary work developed alongside a salaried administrative career. The move followed the overthrow of the monarchy, but republican institutions did not produce the transformation he had anticipated: in a retrospective account, he associated his growing doubts with successive political upheavals, including Yuan Shikai’s assumption of the imperial title and Zhang Xun’s attempted restoration. (districtcouncils.gov.hk)\n\nThe New Culture movement supplied a new setting for his writing. Chen Duxiu founded the periodical that became *New Youth* in 1915; its contributors promoted science and democracy, challenged inherited moral authority, and advocated literary reform. Hu Shi’s January 1917 proposals called for writing with substantive content and abandoning imitation of ancient models. The campaign sought to give the modern vernacular, or baihua, authority as a medium of serious literature, rather than reserving that status for classical Chinese. It preceded the student demonstrations of 4 May 1919, although its literary and intellectual activities became closely associated with the broader May Fourth movement. (en.wikipedia.org)\n\nQian Xuantong urged Lu Xun to contribute to New Youth in 1917. “Diary of a Madman” appeared in its May 1918 issue and was the first work he published under the pen name “Lu Xun.” It was also his first published vernacular short story, not the invention of vernacular Chinese fiction: earlier storytelling and novel traditions had long employed vernacular forms. Its particular historical importance lay in bringing an experimental, socially critical short story into the new literary campaign. “Kong Yiji” and “Medicine,” both published in 1919, extended his contribution beyond a single programmatic work. Their appearance in periodicals made fiction itself—not only manifestos about literary reform—part of the movement’s public discussion. (u.osu.edu)\n\nTeaching again became a substantial part of his Beijing career from 1920, when Peking University appointed him a part-time lecturer in Chinese fiction history. He subsequently taught at other institutions, including Beijing Normal University and Beijing Women’s Normal University; Xu Shoushang recruited him to the latter’s predecessor institution in 1923. These were concurrent teaching appointments rather than an immediate replacement for government service. His fiction-history lectures provided the basis for A Brief History of Chinese Fiction, linking his participation in literary renewal with the university study of older narrative traditions. (news.pku.edu.cn)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Personal relationships and the move to Shanghai",
      "text": "Lu Xun’s mother, Lu Rui (1858–1943), remained a central member of his household during his adult years. His younger brothers were Zhou Zuoren, a writer and translator, and Zhou Jianren. In 1906, while studying in Japan, Lu Xun returned to Shaoxing for a marriage arranged by his mother to Zhu An. The marriage continued formally, although the couple did not establish a romantic partnership; Lu Xun continued to provide financial support for her. Zhu An subsequently lived with Lu Rui in Beijing. (luxunmuseum.cn)\n\nIn 1919, Lu Xun brought family members from Shaoxing to Beijing, where the extended household occupied a compound at Badaowan. This shared domestic arrangement ended after his estrangement from Zhou Zuoren in 1923. Lu Xun moved out, and his wife and mother subsequently lived with him separately. The rupture also ended the close personal relationship between two brothers who had previously collaborated in translation and literary work. Neither publicly supplied a definitive explanation of the disagreement; the documented separation should be distinguished from later conjectures about its causes. (en.wikipedia.org)\n\nXu Guangping had been Lu Xun’s student at Beijing Women’s Normal College before their correspondence began in March 1925. Their letters developed from discussions of education, student affairs, and personal difficulties into an intimate relationship. Correspondence remained especially important after their separate departures from Beijing: during his appointment in Xiamen in 1926–1927, she was in Guangzhou. Their subsequently edited collection, Liangdi shu, commonly translated as Letters from Two Places or Letters between Two, contains 135 letters dating from March 1925 to June 1929 and was published in 1933. Because Lu Xun revised the letters for publication, the collection is an edited presentation of their relationship rather than an untouched private archive. (pure.uva.nl)\n\nLu Xun arrived at Xiamen University on 4 September 1926, serving as professor in its Chinese department and Institute of Chinese Studies until January 1927. He taught Chinese literary history and the history of Chinese fiction. In January he moved to Guangzhou to become head of the Chinese literature department and director of academic affairs at Sun Yat-sen University. His tenure there was also brief: after the arrests of students in April 1927, he unsuccessfully sought university action to secure their release and resigned his posts. (news.xmu.edu.cn)\n\nOn 3 October 1927, Lu Xun and Xu Guangping arrived in Shanghai, where they established a shared household. Unlike his preceding moves, this relocation did not lead to another university appointment: writing, translation, and editorial work became the basis of his working life. Their son, Zhou Haiying, was born in Shanghai on 27 September 1929. Lu Rui and Zhu An remained in Beijing, so the Shanghai household did not replace all his existing family responsibilities. (chiculture.org.hk)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "“Diary of a Madman” and <i>Call to Arms</i>",
      "text": "Nahan (1923), commonly translated as Call to Arms or Outcry, brought Lu Xun’s early vernacular fiction together in his first short-story collection. Its preface, dated 3 December 1922, presents literary intervention as necessary but uncertain. Recalling a conversation with a friend urging him to write, Lu Xun imagines sleepers suffocating inside a windowless iron house: awakening some might merely make them conscious of an unavoidable death. His friend counters that awakened people might yet destroy the house. The metaphor therefore poses an ethical problem rather than announcing confidence in enlightenment: can writing justify the suffering that awareness brings? Lu Xun’s decision to write rests on the impossibility of conclusively denying hope, not on assurance that literature will transform society. (perlego.com)\n\nThe collection opens with “Diary of a Madman” (1918), whose contrasting linguistic registers establish competing claims to authority. A classical-Chinese introduction describes a former schoolmate’s illness, presents his diary as evidence of persecution mania, and reports that he has recovered and departed to take an official post. Thirteen vernacular diary entries then disclose his conviction that neighbours, a physician, and his elder brother intend to eat him. Reading history, he discovers cannibalism beneath its declarations of benevolence and morality. The contrast makes the supposedly disordered voice a vehicle for questioning respectable social language, while leaving its account unreliable as literal testimony. His suspicion eventually includes himself: he may unknowingly have eaten his younger sister’s flesh. The closing appeal to save the children thus emerges from feared complicity, not an innocent outsider’s denunciation. The diarist’s perceptions should not be treated as Lu Xun’s unmediated statements; the frame’s account of “recovery” also leaves open whether social reintegration represents health or renewed conformity. (web.ung.edu)\n\n“Kong Yiji” (1919) relocates exclusion to a tavern, where a young attendant observes a failed scholar who wears the long gown associated with educated status but drinks standing alongside poorer customers. Having never passed even the lowest civil-service examination, Kong possesses learning without the position it was supposed to secure. His literary expressions and knowledge of variant written forms become occasions for ridicule rather than recognition. Customers laugh at his poverty and alleged thefts; subsequently, a successful degree-holder has him beaten until his legs are broken. When Kong returns, moving with his hands, the tavern keeper still demands payment. His eventual disappearance is registered through repeated reminders of nineteen unpaid copper coins. The narrator’s uncertain report of his death makes neglect, rather than a witnessed final catastrophe, the story’s concluding action. (marxists.org)\n\n“Medicine” (1919) examines collective belief through two intersecting deaths. A father buys a steamed bun soaked in an executed prisoner’s blood, believing it will cure his son’s consumption. In the teahouse, customers confidently endorse the remedy while dismissing the executed revolutionary’s ideas as madness. The same community that consumes his blood cannot understand his political commitment. The final cemetery scene brings the dead men’s mothers together across a path separating paupers’ graves from those of executed prisoners. A deliberately arranged wreath on the revolutionary’s grave introduces an unexplained sign of remembrance. In the collection’s preface, Lu Xun identifies the wreath as an addition made to keep the story from extinguishing hope; within the narrative, however, the bereaved mother cannot establish who placed it there. (academic.mu.edu)\n\n“My Old Home” (1921) makes remembered companionship the measure of present social distance. Returning to leave his family’s sold house, the narrator recalls Runtu as a resourceful boy familiar with birds, shells, and melon fields. The adult Runtu, burdened by poverty and family responsibilities, instead addresses him as “Master,” restoring a hierarchy their childhood friendship had temporarily crossed. Yet the narrator also questions his own idealized memories and his hope that the younger generation might live differently. His nephew Hong’er’s friendship with Runtu’s son Shuisheng supplies a possibility, not a demonstrated escape. The concluding comparison of hope to a path formed through repeated walking makes a different future dependent on human activity rather than on recovering an intact childhood community. (afe.easia.columbia.edu)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "<i>The True Story of Ah Q</i>",
      "text": "The True Story of Ah Q (A Q zhengzhuan, 阿Q正传) appeared in nine chapters in the supplement to Beijing’s Morning News between 4 December 1921 and 12 February 1922, under the pseudonym Ba Ren. It was subsequently included in Call to Arms (Nahan, 1923). Its episodic novella form moves from accounts of the protagonist’s habitual behaviour through sexual humiliation, economic insecurity, and apparent advancement to revolutionary upheaval and execution. The opening chapter interrupts this progression before it begins: instead of establishing a securely documented life, the narrator rehearses the difficulties of finding an appropriate biographical title and identifying his subject. (en.wikipedia.org)\n\nThis parody of biographical authority makes social exclusion a problem of narrative as well as status. The narrator cannot establish Ah Q’s surname, the correct Chinese characters for his personal name, or his birthplace. When Ah Q claims kinship with the prosperous Zhao family, Mr Zhao slaps him and denies his right to the surname. An apparently scholarly question about ancestry thus exposes the power to decide whose ancestry counts. The narrator’s elaborate distinctions among official biography, family history, and other prestigious genres contrast with the fragmentary record available for a casual labourer. His professed uncertainty also complicates his authority to explain Ah Q’s thoughts and experiences. (marxists.org)\n\nAh Q lives in Weizhuang’s temple of the local tutelary god and survives through temporary work. His “spiritual victories” convert defeats into imagined superiority without altering their material consequences. After other men beat him, he consoles himself by imagining that a son has beaten his father, turning physical subordination into genealogical seniority. When forced to call himself an insect, he instead congratulates himself on being foremost in self-abasement. After losing his gambling winnings in a disturbance, he strikes his own face and gradually experiences the incident as though he had beaten somebody else. These reversals are not simply optimistic thoughts: they detach satisfaction from any effective resistance to humiliation. (marxists.org)\n\nHis vulnerability nevertheless coexists with aggression toward others. Following humiliating encounters with stronger men, he harasses a young Buddhist nun, while the wine-shop spectators reward him with laughter. Later, his return from town with money and goods briefly changes the villagers’ treatment of him: people who had dismissed him now approach him as a useful source of desirable possessions. His prestige declines when his subordinate involvement with thieves becomes known. These episodes make his social position relational and unstable; he can be exploited, admired, feared, or mocked according to the resources and connections others attribute to him. (marxists.org)\n\nThe 1911 Revolution enters this village world through rumours, frightened elites, altered hairstyles, and claims to revolutionary affiliation. Initially hostile to revolutionaries, Ah Q becomes enthusiastic when he discovers that they terrify local notables. His imagined revolution promises revenge, possessions, and sexual access rather than an articulated political programme. Meanwhile, established officials retain authority under changed titles, and locally influential men acquire revolutionary credentials. When Ah Q tries to join them, the foreign-educated man he habitually insults drives him away. The contrast between political renaming and continued exclusion locates the story’s criticism in specific mechanisms of power, rather than making its protagonist an empirical portrait of all Chinese people. (marxists.org)\n\nAfter the Zhao household is robbed, Ah Q is arrested despite having been excluded from the robbery. Unable to write, he is instructed to make a circle on a document and worries about its imperfect shape rather than understanding the proceedings. His execution turns public punishment into another spectacle: spectators complain that he fails to provide entertaining operatic singing, while villagers treat the execution itself as proof of guilt. The final episode extends the novella’s irony beyond Ah Q’s self-deceptions to the officials who manufacture an authoritative account of his actions and the public that accepts it. (marxists.org)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "<i>Wandering</i> and the limits of emancipation",
      "text": "Panghuang (1926), translated as Wandering or Hesitation, collects eleven stories written in 1924–1925. Compared with Call to Arms, it gives greater prominence to isolated intellectuals whose rejection of inherited values has not produced a sustainable alternative. Its title suggests uncertainty of direction rather than merely geographical movement: characters leave home, challenge convention, or seek independent livelihoods, yet remain dependent on institutions and relationships they distrust. The collection examines emancipation through particular constraints—employment, domestic labour, kinship, and communal recognition—rather than presenting individual awakening as sufficient to transform a life. (hkupress.hku.hk)\n\n“The New Year’s Sacrifice” (1924) locates these constraints in the successive losses of Xianglin’s Wife. Widowed, she escapes her husband’s household and becomes a servant, but her mother-in-law has her abducted and forcibly remarried. After her second husband dies and her son is killed by a wolf, she returns to domestic service. Her employers accept her labour but prohibit her from handling ancestral offerings because her remarriage supposedly makes her impure. Ritual exclusion thus reinforces an unequal social position: she may prepare the household’s necessities without participating fully in its ceremonial life. Told that her two husbands will fight over her in the afterlife, she spends twelve silver dollars on a temple threshold, to be trodden on as an expiation. When this purchase fails to remove the household’s prohibition, her confidence collapses. The story makes exclusion operate through repeated, ordinary commands rather than through an abstract statement of doctrine. (marxists.org)\n\nThe story’s narrative perspective also places the educated observer under scrutiny. Asked by Xianglin’s Wife whether souls, hell, and reunion after death exist, the returning narrator gives contradictory, evasive answers and then retreats. After learning of her death, he worries about responsibility but also seeks reasons to absolve himself. This framing does not establish his words as the cause of her death; instead, it exposes the distance between possessing an education and responding adequately to another person’s distress. His eventual absorption into the reassuring atmosphere of the New Year celebrations makes his relief troubling: the community’s renewed sense of well-being coincides with the disappearance of someone it has excluded. (marxists.org)\n\n“In the Wine Shop” (1924) and “The Loner” (1925), also translated as “The Misanthrope,” approach disappointed reform through former dissenters. In the first, Lü Weifu, once an opponent of conventional practices, now earns his living teaching classical texts. He compares his return to an insect flying in a small circle before settling where it started. Yet his apparently futile errands—reburying his brother to comfort his mother and taking artificial flowers to a young woman who has already died—retain an attention to particular people that complicates a simple verdict of surrender. Wei Lianshu in “The Loner” follows a more destructive course. Dismissal, poverty, and estrangement precede his employment as an adviser to a military commander. Material success accompanies a deliberate reversal of his former convictions, turning survival into an embittered accommodation with the power he despised. (marxists.org)\n\n“Regret for the Past” (1925) brings the problem into a household formed through freely chosen love. Zijun breaks with her relatives to live with Juansheng, whose discussions of equality and liberation initially sustain their relationship. Domestic work, however, leaves her little time to read or go out; his dismissal then exposes their economic insecurity. Juansheng increasingly treats their attachment as an obstacle to his own survival and tells her that he no longer loves her. She returns to her father’s household and subsequently dies. Presented as Juansheng’s retrospective notes, the story gives his remorse substantial space without granting it unquestioned authority. Zijun’s experience remains mediated by the man who abandoned her, while the unequal distribution of work, income, and opportunities gives concrete limits to their proclaimed personal freedom. (marxists.org)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "<i>Wild Grass</i> and classical-style poetry",
      "text": "Yecao (Wild Grass), published in July 1927, collects twenty-three experimental prose pieces written between 1924 and 1926 and first published in the journal Yusi; an introductory inscription added in 1927 brings the total to twenty-four texts. These are generally classified as prose poems, rather than conventional short stories: rhythm, repetition, concentrated imagery, and abrupt changes of consciousness frequently take precedence over continuous plot and developed characterization. The collection nevertheless includes several distinct forms—dream narratives, fable-like encounters, reminiscence, and theatrical dialogue—rather than following a uniform lyrical model. (collectionscanada.gc.ca)\n\n“Autumn Night,” dated 15 September 1924, transforms a garden into a confrontation among personified natural forces. Its opening identifies two trees separately, only to establish that both are jujube trees: repetition makes an ordinary observation strangely insistent. Their bare branches thrust against a sky endowed with watchful eyes, while small flowers dream of spring. The closing movement turns indoors, where insects collide with a lampshade and one enters the flame. Read together, these images suggest resistance, vulnerability, and expenditure of life, but they do not establish a simple opposition between victorious light and defeated darkness. The shift from trees to insects also changes the scale of struggle without resolving its outcome. (zh.wikisource.org)\n\n“The Passer-by,” dated 2 March 1925, replaces descriptive narration with speakers’ names and stage directions. An exhausted traveller encounters an old man and a young girl beside a track leading westward. The old man identifies the country ahead as a graveyard; the girl emphasizes its wild roses and lilies. The traveller cannot explain his origin or destination, yet continues to hear a summons to move forward. Her gift of cloth for his bleeding feet introduces another difficulty: accepting care creates an attachment that may impede departure. His eventual continuation offers neither a destination nor assurance of success. Survival and resistance appear here as actions undertaken despite uncertainty, not as the consequences of confident belief in progress. (zh.wikisource.org)\n\nDreams and divided selves make inward conflict equally concrete. In “The Shadow’s Farewell,” a shadow addresses the person from whom it separates, refusing the available alternatives of light and darkness. “Epitaph” places its dreaming narrator before a damaged tomb inscription and an exposed corpse whose missing organs correspond to an account of cutting out and eating its own heart to discover its taste. The corpse then speaks without moving its lips, and the narrator flees. Self-examination becomes bodily violence, while the speaking dead unsettle the boundary between observer and observed. Such scenes permit readings involving despair, self-accusation, and persistence, but their unstable voices resist conversion into a single political code or a transparent autobiographical confession. (zh.wikisource.org)\n\nLu Xun’s classical-style verse constitutes a separate body of writing, not simply a metrical counterpart to Wild Grass. It chiefly employs inherited shi forms, including four-line jueju and eight-line regulated verse associated with Tang and Song poetry. Fixed line lengths, rhyme, tonal organization, and parallel phrasing provide structures for compressed personal and historical reference. The seven-character quatrain commonly called “Inscription on My Photograph,” associated with his early years in Japan, illustrates the density of its allusions: the “spirit tower” recalls vocabulary in the *Zhuangzi*, while the concluding invocation of Xuanyuan, the Yellow Emperor, introduces an ancestral figure into an expression of commitment. Its archaic diction leaves relationships among speaker, addressee, and homeland partly implicit, making allusion integral to the poem’s meaning rather than ornamental decoration. (jonvonkowallis.com)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Memory and autobiography in <i>Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk</i>",
      "text": "<i>Zhaohua xishi</i>, also translated as <i>Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk</i>, comprises ten retrospective essays written in 1926 and first collected in September 1928. Originally serialized in <i>Mangyuan</i> under a title meaning “Old Matters Revisited,” they move from childhood recollections to schooling and adult friendships without constituting a continuous autobiography. The preface, dated 1 May 1927, explicitly acknowledges that remembered events may differ from actuality. Its example of childhood fruits—delicious in recollection but unexceptional when tasted again—makes memory itself an object of scrutiny. The collection therefore presents a selective literary memoir, shaped by the distance between the experiencing child or student and the adult arranging the recollections. (zh.wikisource.org)\n\n“Ah Chang and the <i>Classic of Mountains and Seas</i>” constructs its portrait of a household servant through successive revisions of the child’s judgment. Initially, Ah Chang appears intrusive, physically inconsiderate, and burdened with tiresome rules, including New Year greetings and food customs. Her purchase of the illustrated book that the child desperately wants transforms his attitude: someone excluded from scholarly learning accomplishes what more educated adults have neglected. Her mispronunciation of its title preserves her distinctive speech rather than assimilating her to the narrator’s literary language. The closing remembrance also exposes the limits of the household’s knowledge: the adult narrator still cannot supply her surname or full personal name. Gratitude thus coexists with evidence of the social distance that left her life largely unrecorded. (zh.wikisource.org)\n\n“From Hundred-Plant Garden to Three-Flavour Study” organizes childhood through contrasting spaces and forms of education. The garden offers insects, berries, bird-catching, and Ah Chang’s tale of a beautiful woman who is actually a snake; observation and oral tradition jointly furnish its imaginative life. School introduces recitation, calligraphy, and regulated questions, but the contrast is not simply freedom against cruelty. The teacher is described respectfully, rarely uses corporal punishment, and becomes absorbed in his own reading. Meanwhile, pupils slip into the small school garden or trace illustrations from novels. Read through these details, the essay depicts curiosity surviving within formal instruction, while its shifts between immediate sensations and later commentary prevent childhood from becoming an uncomplicated lost paradise. (zh.wikisource.org)\n\n“Mr. Fujino” makes affection inseparable from embarrassment and retrospective obligation. Fujino Genkurō’s corrections to lecture notes and anatomical drawings establish care through repeated, concrete actions. Against the narrator’s account of fellow students’ suspicions about his examination results, this attention acquires particular significance. Yet the remembered student is not idealized: he resists correction, conceals his intentions when leaving medicine, and subsequently fails to send the promised photograph or letters. At the close, Fujino’s photograph becomes an imagined source of encouragement for the adult writer’s contentious prose. The essay thereby turns a former teacher into a continuing moral presence without erasing the narrator’s failures toward him. Eileen J. Cheng’s discussion of the collection emphasizes precisely this distinction between its constructed narrative voice and the author treated as a fixed biographical identity. (zh.wikisource.org)\n\n“Fan Ainong” similarly revises an initially hostile judgment through later friendship. The narrator first interprets Fan’s opposition to a protest telegram in Tokyo as callousness; their subsequent conversations reveal mutual misunderstanding. Their work together after the 1911 Revolution briefly places Fan’s diligence against an environment of political opportunism, before unemployment and poverty again marginalize him. His drowning reaches the narrator through reports, and the essay explicitly leaves accident and suicide unresolved. This uncertainty is integral to the portrait rather than a gap filled by retrospective authority. Its final question about Fan’s daughter extends remembrance beyond the dead friend to the surviving family whose circumstances remain outside the narrator’s knowledge. (zh.wikisource.org)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Myth and historical fiction in <i>Old Tales Retold</i>",
      "text": "<i>Gushi xinbian</i> (<i>Old Tales Retold</i>), published in Shanghai in January 1936 by the Cultural Life Publishing House, collects eight stories written between 1922 and 1935. Its materials range from creation myths and heroic legends to anecdotes about ancient philosophers. The collection was therefore not simply a late-career departure: “Mending Heaven,” originally titled “Mount Buzhou,” had appeared in the first edition of <i>Call to Arms</i> in 1923. In his preface dated 26 December 1935, Lu Xun described a discontinuous thirteen-year undertaking, resumed while he was reading ancient books in Xiamen in 1926 and completed only after further interruptions. (marxists.org)\n\nThese stories do not attempt to reconstruct antiquity through consistently period-appropriate speech, objects, or institutions. Lu Xun combines inherited plots with colloquial dialogue, irony, bureaucratic absurdity, and conspicuous anachronisms. In “Resurrecting the Dead,” for example, an ancient philosopher carries a police whistle. Such intrusions prevent the legendary past from becoming a sealed, reverential world: its inhabitants behave like recognizable officials, spectators, and intellectuals. The preface explicitly distinguishes documentary historical fiction from freer invention based on a small narrative starting point. Yet Lu Xun also expressed reservations about his own <i>youhua</i>—facetiousness or flippancy—rather than presenting every comic interruption as an unqualified artistic success. (marxists.org)\n\n“Mending Heaven” treats creation as bodily effort rather than an orderly act of divine command. Nüwa fashions human beings from mud, then struggles to repair a shattered world, exhausting herself until she dies. Against the scale and physical vitality of the goddess, her creatures appear petty and acquisitive. A diminutive man in ancient ceremonial dress condemns her nakedness in the language of moral propriety; after her death, armed descendants occupy her body while claiming legitimate descent from her. The contrast makes creation inseparable from the subsequent appropriation of the creator’s labor and authority. Lu Xun’s account of the story’s composition connects its moralizing intruder to contemporary attacks on love poetry, identifying a specific point where literary controversy entered the myth. (chinawriter.com.cn)\n\n“Forging the Swords” turns a swordsmith’s revenge legend into a narrative of hesitation, trust, and self-sacrifice. Meijianchi learns that the king murdered his father after receiving an extraordinary sword. Initially shown wavering between cruelty and pity toward a trapped rat, the youth eventually entrusts both his sword and his severed head to a mysterious black-clad avenger. The avenger gains access to the king by displaying the head’s supernatural performance, kills the ruler, and sacrifices himself to help defeat him: three severed heads fight in a boiling cauldron. Once their remains become indistinguishable, all receive royal burial. This grotesque ending frustrates a clean separation between victorious avenger and defeated sovereign, while the surrounding court ceremony and spectators turn revenge into public spectacle. (marxists.org)\n\n“Resurrecting the Dead,” written in 1935 in dramatic dialogue with stage directions, tests philosophical authority against material need. Its antecedents include the skull episode in chapter 18 of the <i>Zhuangzi</i> and later popular adaptations. Whereas the classical skull refuses restoration to life, Lu Xun’s revived peasant urgently demands clothes. Master Zhuang wants historical information but refuses to surrender his own garments, since he needs them for an audience with the king of Chu. His claims about the relative insignificance of possessions thus collide with his attachment to status and comfort. Police intervention does not resolve the peasant’s predicament; the final struggle and renewed whistle-blowing leave the practical consequences of resurrection unanswered. (dash.harvard.edu)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Essays and cultural criticism",
      "text": "Lu Xun’s *zawen*—literally “miscellaneous writings”—constitute a flexible practice of short critical prose rather than a single, fixed essay form. They encompass polemic, satire, reflection, literary commentary, and responses to immediate events. Their occasions matter: an opponent’s article, a public lecture, or a controversy could supply both the argument and its vocabulary. The collections preserve interventions in ongoing debates, not simply statements of a systematic philosophy. (jstor.org)\n\nQuotation frequently becomes an instrument of irony: Lu Xun reproduces another writer’s formulation, provisionally accepts it, and then tests its implications. “Why ‘Fair Play’ Should Be Deferred” (1926), for example, answers Lin Yutang’s discussion in issue 57 of Yusi (Threads of Talk). Lin had explained fair play through the injunction against beating a drowning dog. Lu Xun turns that animal caricature into a dispute about whether temporary defeat necessarily makes a harmful adversary harmless. The compressed argument depends on its original exchange rather than on an abstract rejection of fairness. (jstor.org)\n\n“What Is Required of Us as Fathers Today?” appeared in New Youth, volume 6, number 6, in November 1919. It challenges the assumption that giving birth and providing sustenance establish a permanent debt of obedience. Lu Xun distinguishes children’s needs from adults’ interests in preserving lineage or securing support in old age. Education consequently becomes preparation for an independent future, not training in reproducing parental conduct. His comparison of a wealthy parent’s expensive nourishment with a poor parent’s bean milk locates the value of care in the absence of demands for repayment, rather than in its monetary cost. The essay’s central reversal makes parental responsibility, rather than paternal entitlement, the basis of the family relationship. (zh.wikisource.org)\n\n“What Happens After Nora Walks Out?” originated as a lecture to the Literary and Arts Society of Beijing Women’s Normal College on 26 December 1923 and first appeared in its journal in 1924. Taking the ending of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House as his starting point, Lu Xun asks what resources make departure from an oppressive household sustainable. Without economic means, Nora risks either returning or being forced into prostitution; awakening alone cannot provide subsistence. He therefore discusses equal distribution of family property and equal economic rights in society. The argument shifts attention from the exemplary gesture of leaving to the material arrangements that allow women to remain independent. (researchgate.net)\n\nHis criticism also questions the cultivation of intellectual authority. In “Waiting for a Genius,” delivered to the alumni of Peking Normal University’s middle school on 17 January 1924, he replaces the isolated exceptional writer with the metaphor of cultural soil. Readers, translators, critics, and ordinary writers create the conditions in which achievement becomes possible. He caricatures critics who demand masterpieces while trampling immature work, and rejects the assumption that preserving inherited culture requires excluding foreign ideas. Here intellectual responsibility includes sustaining imperfect beginnings and undertaking unglamorous literary work, rather than merely pronouncing judgments. (marxists.org)\n\nRepresentations of ordinary people receive a related scrutiny. His 1933 preface to an English edition of selected stories objects to images of laboring people as contented natural creatures, detached from suffering. (jstor.org) In “How I Came to Write Fiction,” dated 5 March 1933 and first published that June in Experiences of Creation, he states that he selected unfortunate people from an unhealthy society to expose suffering and draw attention to its remedy. These are retrospective statements of purpose, not proof of literature’s actual effects. Like the earlier preface to Call to Arms, they present writing as an attempted intervention while acknowledging compromises: the 1922 preface explains that certain hopeful details were introduced partly to encourage others working against isolation and despair. (zh.wikisource.org)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Language, narrative technique, and literary influences",
      "text": "Lu Xun’s literary language draws on both literary Chinese (wenyan) and the written vernacular (baihua), making differences of register part of characterization rather than simply replacing one language with another. In “Kong Yiji” (1919), the impoverished scholar’s classical particles and learned expressions contrast with the tavern customers’ colloquial taunts. His language asserts an educated identity that his listeners refuse to recognize; their incomprehension and laughter expose the social failure of that claim. Regional speech also enters his writing selectively. His personal idiom combined Shaoxing speech and northern Mandarin, but his fiction is not a systematic transcription of Shaoxing dialect. Local expressions operate within a more widely accessible written language. (languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu)\n\nTranslation supplied another means of extending Chinese expression. Lu Xun defended the importation of unfamiliar sentence structures and expressions instead of requiring every foreign work to sound immediately native. The resulting syntax could interrupt habitual reading and preserve distinctions that smoother paraphrase might erase. In his dispute with Liang Shiqiu over “hard translation,” beginning in 1929, the issue was therefore not fidelity alone: it concerned whether Chinese could acquire additional expressive resources through contact with foreign languages. This position helps explain the experimental possibilities of his prose, although it does not make every unusual construction in his original writing a foreign borrowing. (scholars.ln.edu.hk)\n\nChanges of register also organize narrative perspective. “Diary of a Madman” (1918) encloses vernacular diary entries within a literary-Chinese preface whose speaker presents them as the record of an illness. The preface reports that the diarist has recovered and obtained an official appointment; the diary instead makes social normality itself appear threatening. Neither voice transparently delivers the author’s judgment. The diarist’s suspicious interpretations make him unreliable as a factual witness, yet the apparently sober framing voice cannot settle the ethical questions his testimony raises. Read against each other, the two registers make “recovery” ambiguous: medical reassurance can also suggest renewed accommodation to the society the diary condemns. (marxists.org)\n\nOmission and mediated testimony similarly prevent narrators from becoming unquestioned authorities. In “Kong Yiji,” the tavern boy encounters the scholar intermittently, while important violence reaches him through other people’s reports. Readers must distinguish what this witness observes from what the surrounding community assumes or finds entertaining. More generally, the speaking subject in Lu Xun’s fiction and autobiographical prose is a constructed voice, not an automatic substitute for the historical author. Eileen J. Cheng has emphasized this deliberate distance, while David Damrosch has identified affinities between Lu Xun’s layered voices and modernist experiments elsewhere. Such affinities are comparisons of form, not evidence that he borrowed directly from every comparable writer. (chinese220.voices.wooster.edu)\n\nHis work consequently crosses the boundaries between social realism and modernist experimentation. Recognizable occupations, poverty, and social hierarchies coexist with grotesque perception, symbolic compression, and unstable voices. Chinese traditions of satire and rebellious “madness” intersect with foreign literary models rather than disappearing beneath them. Nikolai Gogol is a documented example: in “How I Came to Write Fiction” (1933), Lu Xun recalled Gogol and the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz among his preferred authors during his Japanese years. The shared diary form and title connect the two writers’ “Diary of a Madman,” but Lu Xun reworks the device through a distinct Chinese linguistic and historical setting. (hasp.ub.uni-heidelberg.de)\n\nEngagement with Friedrich Nietzsche is likewise established by named discussions and translation, rather than inferred solely from rebellious fictional characters. Lu Xun discussed Nietzsche in “On Cultural Extremes” (1907), and his vernacular translation of the prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra appeared in New Tide on 1 June 1920 under the pseudonym Tang Si. These documents establish sustained attention to Nietzsche’s language and ideas. Claims that a particular narrator embodies the Übermensch, or that Nietzsche supplies a single philosophical key to Lu Xun’s fiction, remain interpretations distinct from that documentary evidence. (geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Translation and the circulation of foreign literature",
      "text": "Lu Xun’s early translations of Jules Verne reached Chinese readers through Japanese intermediary texts rather than directly from French. His Yuejie lüxing (Journey to the Moon, 1903), adapted from From the Earth to the Moon, used Inoue Tsutomu’s Japanese version; the opening chapters of Journey to the Centre of the Earth appeared in Zhejiang Tide in December 1903, before publication in book form in 1906. These were adaptations, not complete reproductions: Journey to the Moon compressed twenty-eight chapters into fourteen, while Journey to the Centre of the Earth changed first-person narration into third-person narration. In his introductory statement, Lu Xun connected scientific fiction with spreading knowledge and challenging inherited superstition, but also explained his mixture of classical and vernacular Chinese as a means of reducing length. Japanese editions thus supplied both access to European writing and textual forms that he further reshaped for Chinese readers. (wyb.chinawriter.com.cn)\n\nIn 1909, Lu Xun and his younger brother Zhou Zuoren published the two-volume Yuwai xiaoshuo ji, commonly translated as Stories from Abroad or Tales from Abroad, in Tokyo, with distribution in Tokyo and Shanghai. Its sixteen stories included Russian and other European fiction. Zhou translated most of the collection; Lu Xun contributed Vsevolod Garshin’s “Four Days” and Leonid Andreev’s “The Lie” and “Silence.” Unlike the extensive restructuring of Verne, the brothers’ stated purpose emphasized careful selection and preserving the literary qualities of the source texts. Their classical-Chinese translations presented the short story as a concentrated literary form rather than an abbreviated version of the long chaptered novel familiar to many Chinese readers. (xuges.com)\n\nThe collection’s circulation was initially extremely limited. The preface prepared for its 1921 reissue recalled that the Tokyo outlet sold twenty-one copies of the first volume and twenty of the second; insufficient sales prevented the projected continuation. That retrospective account also acknowledged the translations’ difficult language. The enlarged reissue included explanatory notes and authors’ biographies, making contextual information part of the reading experience. Lu Xun’s introduction to Andreev in the original collection characterized his writing as mysterious and profound and mentioned The Red Laugh, his work concerning the Russo-Japanese War. Selection and commentary therefore introduced not simply foreign plots but unfamiliar literary reputations, styles, and historical settings. (zh.wikisource.org)\n\nHis later work on Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls likewise depended on multilingual mediation. Lu Xun used Otto Buek’s German translation as his principal source and consulted Japanese versions, rather than translating directly from Russian. He worked on the novel during 1935–1936, completing Part I and translating three chapters of the surviving Part II before his death. This undertaking required comparison between intermediary versions, including attention to omissions: in an October 1935 letter, he noted that an English edition had removed the episode concerning Captain Kopeikin. Translation here involved evaluating competing textual witnesses, not merely transferring the wording of a single foreign edition. (metamorphosis.univie.ac.at)\n\nLu Xun also helped circulate Maxim Gorky through translation, selection, and introductions to other translators’ work. He wrote an introduction for Cao Jinghua’s translation of January Ninth and translated Gorky’s Russian Fairy Tales, published by the Cultural Life Publishing House in 1935. In the latter’s introduction, he described the sixteen pieces as caricatural representations of Russian society whose characters could nevertheless seem recognizable to Chinese readers. Such commentary proposed a comparative use for foreign literature: readers could attend to another society’s particular circumstances while finding connections with their own surroundings. (luxunmuseum.cn)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Literary history and the preservation of older texts",
      "text": "A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilüe) developed from Lu Xun’s teaching of traditional fiction at Peking University, beginning in 1920. Published in two parts in 1923 and 1924 and combined in 1925, it gave fiction a sustained historical treatment rather than treating individual works chiefly as supplementary material for biography, moral instruction, or bibliography. Its twenty-eight chapters organized a heterogeneous body of writing into a chronological account supported by textual evidence. By bringing this material into university teaching and a dedicated scholarly monograph, Lu Xun helped establish fiction as a subject of systematic literary study. He continued revising the book; his final lifetime revision appeared in the tenth edition in June 1935. (u.osu.edu)\n\nThe history begins with earlier historians’ definitions and cataloguing of xiaoshuo, a category whose historical meanings were broader than the modern “novel.” It proceeds through myth and legend, writings attributed to the Han period, Six Dynasties accounts of spirits and marvels, and the anecdotes associated with A New Account of Tales of the World (Shishuo xinyu). Separate chapters examine Tang chuanqi, or literary tales, and Song huaben, narratives associated with storytelling. The later chapters distinguish historical narrative, stories of gods and demons, and fiction of social life under the Ming, followed by Qing satire, domestic fiction, displays of erudition, courtesan fiction, chivalric and judicial narratives, and late-Qing exposé novels. Major works such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, and *Dream of the Red Chamber* thus appear within changing narrative traditions rather than as isolated masterpieces. (marxists.org)\n\nCompiling reliable source texts was an essential counterpart to writing this history. In Gu xiaoshuo gouchen, Lu Xun recovered fragments of thirty-six early narrative collections whose original texts had been lost or survived incompletely. His later Tang Song chuanqi ji collected tales from the Tang and Song periods. Its preface, dated 10 September 1927, explicitly challenged the altered titles, false attributions, and unreliable texts transmitted by some Ming and Qing anthologies. The editorial procedure involved comparing witnesses rather than simply reproducing a convenient printed edition: Xu Guangping helped transcribe selections, chiefly from Taiping guangji, while Wei Jiangong checked that collection against a Ming edition in Peking University Library. Lu Xun also specified that the anthology principally selected independently circulating tales, not every celebrated narrative embedded in a larger collection. (zh.wikipedia.org)\n\nHis edition of Ji Kang’s writings likewise rested on close examination of textual transmission. Working principally from a ten-juan manuscript associated with the Ming collector Wu Kuan’s Congshutang library, he repeatedly revised his collation between 1913 and 1931. In a postscript dated 20 October 1913, he distinguished the manuscript’s original readings from corrections entered by earlier readers in red and black ink. He sometimes retained an original reading where a correction was inferior, or where both readings were defensible, rather than silently regularizing the text according to a familiar edition. This was textual criticism directed toward preserving evidence of older wording, not a modern literary rewriting of Ji Kang’s work. The edition appeared posthumously in the 1938 collected works. (marxists.org)\n\nLu Xun also collected and transcribed inscriptions, using ink rubbings to study documents and images preserved on stone and other durable materials. The Beijing Lu Xun Museum preserves more than 6,000 rubbings from his collection, representing over 4,000 distinct items. They include commemorative inscriptions, epitaphs, Buddhist dedicatory inscriptions, and pictorial carvings; these offered evidence for historical customs, institutions, and calligraphy beyond transmitted books. His transcription and cataloguing preserved the wording and material contexts of such records. This evidentiary work differed from the deliberate anachronism and transformation of inherited stories in Old Tales Retold: the former sought to establish what older sources transmitted, whereas the latter made antiquity material for new fiction. (chinamuseum.org.cn)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Editing, mentorship, and modern woodcut art",
      "text": "Lu Xun helped sustain new writing through periodicals, small publishing societies, and direct editorial work. He participated in the circle behind Yusi (Threads of Talk), the weekly established in Beijing in November 1924, which provided a regular outlet for essays, criticism, and literary experiment. In April 1925 he began editing Mangyuan (Wilderness), initially a supplement to the newspaper Jingbao. When it became a semimonthly in January 1926, the Weiming Society undertook publication. Established in 1925, this group brought him together with younger writers and translators, including Wei Suyuan, Wei Congwu, Li Jiye, and Tai Jingnong. Its journals and book series placed original fiction alongside foreign literature and literary theory, making editorial collaboration and translation part of the same publishing enterprise. (zh.wikipedia.org)\n\nHis assistance extended to the practical work between manuscript and printed book. Li Jiye recalled that, after receiving his translation of Leonid Andreev’s To the Stars in 1924, Lu Xun read it promptly and invited him to discuss passages requiring revision. Such exchanges gave inexperienced translators both detailed criticism and access to publication. Later, in Shanghai, Lu Xun supported Xiao Hong and Xiao Jun by editing work, finding publishers, providing financial assistance, and contributing prefaces. His preface to Xiao Hong’s The Field of Life and Death, dated 14 November 1935, acknowledged weaknesses in its narration while identifying the distinctive observation and unconventional writing of its author. The book appeared that December in the Slave Series: his endorsement did not erase critical reservations, but supplied an introduction through which an unfamiliar writer could reach readers. (chinawriter.com.cn)\n\nA similarly practical approach shaped his encouragement of woodcut art. From 17 to 22 August 1931, he organized a six-day workshop in Shanghai for thirteen participants. The instructor was Uchiyama Kakichi, a Japanese art teacher; Lu Xun arranged the teaching and interpreted his explanations into Chinese. The division of responsibilities matters: Lu Xun was the organizer, intermediary, and supporter, rather than the workshop’s technical instructor. He also obtained instructional manuals and print collections for young artists whose schools did not provide comparable training in the medium. (asianart-gateway.jp)\n\nCollecting, exhibition, and reproduction complemented this instruction. In October 1930 Lu Xun exhibited seventy woodcuts and etchings from his own collection. Foreign prints also entered literary publishing: Carl Meffert’s woodcuts accompanied the 1931 Chinese edition of Fyodor Gladkov’s Cement, while Lu Xun’s later publications included Soviet graphic art, Frans Masereel’s Sufferings of a Man, and selected prints by Käthe Kollwitz. These projects made images available as objects of study and as works encountered alongside fiction and essays, rather than restricting access to privately owned originals. (nga.gov.au)\n\nThe “creative woodcut” he encouraged differed in production from the traditional division of labour among designer, block-cutter, and printer: the artist could draw, carve, and print the image personally. Cutting was therefore an expressive act, not merely the reproduction of somebody else’s drawing. Black-and-white contrasts and visible knife marks offered resources for representing labour, hardship, and collective action. Lu Xun’s publications nevertheless included historical Chinese woodcuts as well as contemporary foreign examples; the new medium developed through renewed attention to inherited printing practices as well as international exchange. (repository.hkust.edu.hk)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Political engagement and literary organizations",
      "text": "On 18 March 1926, troops guarding Duan Qirui’s government headquarters in Beijing fired on demonstrators, killing more than forty people. Among them were Liu Hezhen, Lu Xun’s student at the National Beijing Women’s Normal College, and her fellow student Yang Dequn. Lu Xun attended the college’s memorial service on 25 March and wrote “In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen” on 1 April. The essay explicitly distinguishes his recollections of Liu from reports he received about the shootings: he had not witnessed her death. Remembering her gentle manner and concern for the college, he rejected both the authorities’ characterization of the demonstrators as rioters and suggestions that the victims had merely been manipulated by others. His commemoration also questioned the practical value of unarmed petitioning under such conditions, rather than simply celebrating sacrifice. (marxists.org)\n\nHis subsequent cooperation with revolutionary writers developed through disagreement as well as solidarity. In 1928, writers associated with the Creation Society and Sun Society attacked his political and literary position during disputes over “revolutionary literature.” The issue was not merely whether writing should address politics, but who could claim to represent the proletariat and what qualified a work as revolutionary. These antagonisms did not prevent organizational cooperation. Preparatory discussions in early 1930 brought Lu Xun together with representatives of the groups that had criticized him, while his own contributions continued to question the adequacy of radical declarations unsupported by sustained work. (u.osu.edu)\n\nOn 2 March 1930, Lu Xun participated in founding the League of Left-Wing Writers at the Chinese Art University in Shanghai. Established with the involvement of the Chinese Communist Party, the League brought together writers from previously competing literary circles. Lu Xun was elected to its seven-member standing committee alongside Tian Han, Xia Yan, Feng Naichao, Qian Xingcun, Zheng Boqi, and Hong Lingfei. In his inaugural address, “Opinions on the League of Left-Wing Writers,” he advocated persistent opposition to established social powers, an expanded field of struggle, and the development of new writers. His role therefore included publicly articulating the organization’s tasks, not merely lending it his name. (zh.wikipedia.org)\n\nPolitical repression directly affected this literary network. On 7 February 1931, Kuomintang authorities executed five League members—Rou Shi, Hu Yepin, Yin Fu, Li Weisen, and Feng Keng—at Longhua in Shanghai. Lu Xun responded through commemorative essays and protests, including “The Present Condition of Art in Darkest China” and “The Revolutionary Literature of the Chinese Proletariat and the Blood of the Pioneers.” These writings connected the circumstances of literary production with arrests and executions, while preserving accounts of particular writers and friendships rather than treating repression solely as an abstract political question. (u.osu.edu)\n\nThe publication of “For the Sake of Forgetting,” written in February 1933 to commemorate the executed writers, illustrates the constraints on such testimony. After difficulties finding an outlet, it appeared in Xiandai (Les Contemporains), volume 2, number 6, under editor Shi Zhecun. Shi’s account of his decision emphasized both the essay’s literary quality and his assessment that its wording did not directly violate publication restrictions. Within the left, Lu Xun also remained subject to criticism: his 1932 essay “Hurling Insults and Threats Is Certainly Not Fighting” prompted accusations of right opportunism in 1933. Cooperation within the League thus coexisted with continuing disputes over polemical methods, literary judgment, and political effectiveness. (wxs.sass.org.cn)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "Death, commemoration, and canonization",
      "text": "Lu Xun died at his home in Shanghai on 19 October 1936, aged fifty-five. His funeral on 22 October became a public commemoration involving writers, students, and political figures. Xiao Jun and other mourners helped carry his coffin, which was taken to Wanguo Cemetery for burial. Cai Yuanpei, Shen Junru, and Song Qingling spoke at the graveside. A white banner bearing Shen’s calligraphy, minzu hun—“soul of the nation”—was placed over the coffin. This formulation presented the writer as a national figure rather than simply a representative of a literary school; the funeral speeches also connected mourning with the contemporary movement for resistance to Japanese aggression. (luxunmuseum.cn)\n\nThe preservation of his domestic surroundings subsequently became part of institutional commemoration. His last Shanghai residence, at No. 9 Continental Terrace, now No. 9, Lane 132, Shanyin Road, had housed Lu Xun, Xu Guangping, and their son Zhou Haiying from April 1933. After his death, Xu and Zhou moved elsewhere, taking the furniture with them. When the house was restored in 1950, Xu donated the original furnishings, allowing the rooms to be presented through surviving possessions rather than architectural reconstruction alone. The Shanghai Lu Xun Memorial Hall opened in January 1951. In 1956, the twentieth anniversary of his death, his remains were transferred from Wanguo Cemetery to Hongkou Park, now Lu Xun Park. The new tomb bore the inscription “Tomb of Mr. Lu Xun” in Mao Zedong’s handwriting. (english.shanghai.gov.cn)\n\nThese memorial institutions combined public exhibition with the preservation of documentary and artistic collections. The Shanghai institution administers the memorial museum, former residence, and tomb; its holdings include manuscripts, editions, photographs, and objects associated with the writer and his contemporaries. Its commemorative displays have also included a plaster cast of his face made shortly after his death by the Japanese artist Okuda Kōka. A separate Lu Xun Museum in Beijing opened on 19 October 1956 around his former home. Its collections preserved books and other materials he had left in Beijing, supplemented by holdings transferred from elsewhere. Manuscripts, correspondence, books, and collected prints thus became both research evidence and exhibited cultural heritage. (english.shanghai.gov.cn)\n\nHis incorporation into the literary canon of the People’s Republic drew on political formulations established before 1949. In On New Democracy (1940), Mao called him “the chief commander of China’s cultural revolution” and described him as a writer, thinker, and revolutionary. Here “cultural revolution” referred to the transformation of Chinese culture discussed in that essay, not to the later movement beginning in 1966. Mao’s account situated Lu Xun within a revolutionary succession linking the May Fourth movement to a new national culture under proletarian leadership. These were Mao’s retrospective political characterizations, not Lu Xun’s own descriptions of his entire literary career. (marxists.org)\n\nAfter 1949, school curricula made this canonical status part of successive generations’ reading experience. Textbooks included fiction such as “Kong Yiji,” “Medicine,” “My Old Home,” and “The New Year’s Sacrifice,” alongside memoirs, commemorative essays, and polemical prose. Canonization therefore operated through selection across genres, not solely through the reproduction of an official biographical label. The distinction between author and narrator remained important within classroom interpretation: a school teaching framework published in 2024, for example, grouped “Village Opera,” “My Old Home,” and “Kong Yiji” specifically to examine their first-person narrators and their relationships to Lu Xun, rather than treating fictional testimony as his direct autobiographical statement. (culture.people.com.cn)"
    },
    {
      "heading": "International reception, editions, and scholarship",
      "text": "English-language translations differ both in their selection of Lu Xun’s writings and in the literary identity they present. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang’s four-volume Selected Works, issued by Beijing’s Foreign Languages Press beginning in 1956, offered fiction alongside essays and other prose; their separately published Call to Arms and A Brief History of Chinese Fiction also circulated beyond China. William A. Lyell’s Diary of a Madman and Other Stories (1990) foregrounded fiction, providing an extensive introduction, annotations, and a translation of the early classical-language story “Remembrances of the Past.” Julia Lovell’s The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun (2009) brought his fiction into Penguin Classics. Such titles as “The True Story of Ah Q” and “The Real Story of Ah-Q” identify different translations of the same work, not separate Chinese texts. “Complete fiction” likewise does not mean complete writings: it excludes the substantial bodies of essays, correspondence, and scholarship. (e-aoi.uzh.ch)\n\nEileen J. Cheng’s translations extend access beyond the short stories. Jottings under Lamplight (2017), co-edited with Kirk A. Denton, contains sixty-two essays, twenty appearing in English for the first time in that collection. Cheng’s Wild Grass and Morning Blossoms Gathered at Dusk (2022) pairs experimental prose poetry with literary memoir. These volumes make available forms inadequately represented by fiction-only editions and support readings attentive to stylistic experimentation, remembrance, and everyday cultural criticism rather than exclusively to national or revolutionary themes. Cheng has explicitly questioned interpretations that allow Lu Xun’s political symbolism or the treatment of his stories as national allegories to overshadow his engagement with art. (easc.osu.edu)\n\nReception in East Asia involved distinct processes of translation, literary adaptation, classroom use, and political interpretation. In Japan, translations circulated during Lu Xun’s lifetime; Takeuchi Yoshimi’s book-length Lu Xun (1944) became a major point of reference for subsequent Japanese scholarship. Takeuchi’s translation of “My Old Home” also entered Japanese school textbooks, giving one story a pedagogical circulation distinct from the reception of his critical writings. Korean reception began in the 1920s. Shijung Kim’s study in Lu Xun and World Literature (2025) distinguishes five historical phases and examines how Korean writers reworked elements of his writing within their own literary and geopolitical circumstances. Translation and borrowing therefore require separate documentation from claims that Lu Xun served as an emblem of resistance, revolution, or national renewal. (uhpress.hawaii.edu)\n\nThe documentary basis of scholarship includes collected writings, correspondence, diaries, contemporary publications, and recollections by associates. The first twenty-volume Lu Xun quanji appeared in 1938; subsequent editions expanded access to materials from different stages of his career. These sources answer different questions: publication records establish the public context of a polemic, letters document exchanges with particular recipients, and diaries help reconstruct chronology and personal networks. Literary memoirs and later reminiscences require comparison with contemporary records rather than treatment as interchangeable testimony. David E. Pollard’s The True Story of Lu Xun (2002), for example, reads autobiographical accounts against other evidence, identifying omissions and differences between retrospective narrative and documented circumstances. (jstor.org)\n\nMajor approaches in literary criticism overlap rather than form successive, mutually exclusive schools. Lyell’s Lu Hsün’s Vision of Reality (1976) connects biography, Shaoxing’s cultural environment, and close analysis of the stories. Studies of narrative perspective examine the authority of narrators, framing voices, and the distance between testimony and authorial judgment. Historical and comparative readings ask how these formal choices relate to Chinese modernity and international literary exchange. Xiaobing Tang’s 1992 essay on “Diary of a Madman” challenges its classification as simply realist, emphasizing its treatment of time and its politics of language as features of modernism. The interpretive question is not merely which social conditions a story represents, but how its aesthetic construction produces—or complicates—its social criticism. (ucpress.edu)"
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      "title": "Lu Xun",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lu_Xun"
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      "title": "Madmen and Other Survivors: Reading Lu Xun’s Fiction",
      "url": "https://hkupress.hku.hk/image/catalog/pdf-preview/9789622098251.pdf"
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    {
      "title": "Lu Xun Biography | MCLC Resource Center",
      "url": "https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/lu-xun/"
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    {
      "title": "鲁迅启蒙老师三味书屋创办人寿镜吾之墓被发现，复旦大学通过DNA确认",
      "url": "https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_32773838"
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    {
      "title": "阿长与山海经",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/chinese/reference-books/luxun/06/004.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "杨义：鲁迅与中国文化的现代启示（6）",
      "url": "https://www.nopss.gov.cn/n/2012/1126/c352444-19700154-6.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "“Lu Xun biography:” (Web, 2002) — China und der Westen",
      "url": "https://www.e-aoi.uzh.ch/apps/china-west/documents/12448"
    },
    {
      "title": "关于鲁迅手稿的初步调查及保护对策",
      "url": "https://www.nopss.gov.cn/n1/2017/1214/c358211-29706859.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "On the lecture on the history of anatomy which Lu Xun heard in Sendai",
      "url": "https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19579818/"
    },
    {
      "title": "Preface to “Call to Arms”",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1922/12/03.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "Selected Stories of Luxun: Preface to the First Collection of Short Stories—Call to Arms",
      "url": "https://cti.lib.virginia.edu/cll/chinese_literature/luxun/LXnxu.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "Lu Xun",
      "url": "https://en.chinaculture.org/focus/focus/cities/2010-08/11/content_390572.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "香港中西區文學徑研究報告",
      "url": "https://www.districtcouncils.gov.hk/central/doc/2012_2015/common/working_groups_doc/literarytrail/1022/20141218-NPWGCWDLTHK-Paper-3-2014.pdf"
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    {
      "title": "New Youth",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Youth"
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    {
      "title": "New Culture Movement",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Culture_Movement"
    },
    {
      "title": "Lu Xun’s ‘Diary of a Madman’ 100 years on | MCLC Resource Center",
      "url": "https://u.osu.edu/mclc/2018/09/28/lu-xuns-diary-of-a-madman-100-years-on/"
    },
    {
      "title": "狂人日記 · 狂人日记 Diary of a Madman — 吶喊 Call to Arms",
      "url": "https://duwen.app/works/nahan/read/1/"
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    {
      "title": "“红楼星火”专栏 第二章新文化-新道德",
      "url": "https://news.pku.edu.cn/mtbdnew/d9450800d6ea48b3971cb3e1058e389d.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "鲁迅的职称",
      "url": "https://news.pku.edu.cn/info/3021/140381.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "北京大学校史馆",
      "url": "https://www.xsg.pku.edu.cn/heros/scholar/detail/826.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "University of Amsterdam: chapter on Lu Xun and Xu Guangping",
      "url": "https://pure.uva.nl/ws/files/3747821/17304_UBA002000477_07.pdf"
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    {
      "title": "比俗世之情更深层次、更宽厚的爱：鲁迅与许广平的《两地书》",
      "url": "https://dxs.moe.gov.cn/zx/a/ds_ts/211201/1738685.shtml"
    },
    {
      "title": "新书推荐：少年中国 少女中国",
      "url": "https://www.sohu.com/a/885802069_619610"
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    {
      "title": "百年中大学脉，从这里开始",
      "url": "https://xiaobao.sysu.edu.cn/phone/content.aspx?id=5476"
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      "title": "周海婴",
      "url": "https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%91%A8%E6%B5%B7%E5%A9%B4"
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      "title": "Jottings under Lamplight",
      "url": "https://www.perlego.com/book/1133616/jottings-under-lamplight-pdf"
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      "title": "Compact Anthology of World Literature",
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      "title": "Lu Xun, Ye Shaojun, and the Moral Impediments to Realism",
      "url": "https://complit.utoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/JLE5116_Marston_Anderson.pdf"
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      "title": "Kung I-chi",
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      "title": "Lu Xun: Medicine",
      "url": "https://academic.mu.edu/meissnerd/medicine.html"
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      "title": "“My Old Home” By Lu Xun",
      "url": "https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/main_pop/ps/ps_china-luxun-myoldhome.htm"
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      "title": "My Old Home",
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      "title": "The True Story of Ah Q",
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      "title": "The True Story of Ah-Q: Chapter One—Introduction",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/ch01.htm"
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    {
      "title": "The True Story of Ah-Q: Chapter Two—A Brief Account of Ah-Q’s Victories",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/ch02.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "The True Story of Ah-Q: Chapter Three—A Further Account of Ah-Q’s Victories",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/ch03.htm"
    },
    {
      "title": "The True Story of Ah-Q: Chapter Six—From Restoration to Decline",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/ch06.htm"
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      "title": "The True Story of Ah-Q: Chapter Seven—The Revolution",
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      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/ch08.htm"
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    {
      "title": "The True Story of Ah-Q: Chapter Nine—The Grand Finale",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1921/12/ah-q/ch09.htm"
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    {
      "title": "The New Year's Sacrifice",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1924/02/07.htm"
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    {
      "title": "In the Wine Shop",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1924/04/16.htm"
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      "title": "The Misanthrope",
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      "title": "Regret for the Past",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/archive/lu-xun/1925/10/21.htm"
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    {
      "title": "“Autumn Night” & “A Splendid Tale”",
      "url": "https://writingchinese.leeds.ac.uk/storyhub/autumn-night-a-splendid-tale/"
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    {
      "title": "秋夜 (魯迅)",
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    {
      "title": "影的告别",
      "url": "https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/%E5%BD%B1%E7%9A%84%E5%91%8A%E5%88%AB"
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    {
      "title": "墓碣文",
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    {
      "title": "Lu Xun’s Classical Poetry",
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    {
      "title": "朝花夕拾",
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    {
      "title": "阿長與《山海經》",
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    {
      "title": "從百草園到三味書屋",
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    {
      "title": "藤野先生",
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      "title": "范愛農",
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      "title": "Lu Xun, Translation, and World Literature: Four Insights",
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    {
      "title": "序言",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/chinese/reference-books/luxun/07/001.htm"
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    {
      "title": "Free and Easy Wanderings: Lu Xun’s Resurrecting the Dead and Its Precursors",
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    {
      "title": "王本朝：《补天》的文本迁移及意义阐释",
      "url": "https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2018/0601/c404030-30027006.html"
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    {
      "title": "铸剑",
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      "title": "Jottings under Lamplight",
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      "title": "新青年/第06卷",
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    {
      "title": "我们现在怎样做父亲",
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      "title": "娜拉走后怎样",
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      "title": "Language Log » Kong Yiji (\"Confucius ABC\"), another self-deprecating meme for young Chinese",
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      "title": "What's modern in Chinese translation theory? Lu Xun and the debates on literalism and foreignization in the May Fourth period",
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      "title": "A Madman's Diary",
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      "title": "Lu Xun, Jameson, and Multiple Polysemy",
      "url": "https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/crcl/index.php/crcl/article/download/10638/8195/27589"
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    {
      "title": "Asian and African Studies, 1997, Number 1",
      "url": "https://orient.sav.sk/wp-content/uploads/aas/1997-1.pdf"
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    {
      "title": "Sun Zhouxing: Nietzsche in China",
      "url": "https://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/v/dchan/nietzsche/abstracts/zhouxing_1b.html"
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    {
      "title": "在科学与文学之间——关于鲁迅早期译作《月界旅行》与《地底旅行》",
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    {
      "title": "译文序跋集·《域外小说集》",
      "url": "https://www.xuges.com/xdmj/luxun/ywx/002.htm"
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    {
      "title": "域外小说集/新序",
      "url": "https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/%E5%9F%9F%E5%A4%96%E5%B0%8F%E8%AA%AA%E9%9B%86/%E6%96%B0%E5%BA%8F"
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    {
      "title": "A Translator’s Testament: Lu Xun’s Dead Souls",
      "url": "https://metamorphosis.univie.ac.at/transit/luxun/findeisen2009f-sihunling.pdf"
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    {
      "title": "A Brief History of Chinese Fiction",
      "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Brief_History_of_Chinese_Fiction"
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    {
      "title": "鲍国华：《鲁迅全集》中的《中国小说史略》",
      "url": "https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2023/1031/c419387-40107140.html"
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      "title": "中国小说史略",
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      "title": "A Brief History of Chinese Fiction [by] Lu Hsun",
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      "title": "古小說鉤沉",
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      "title": "《嵇康集》跋",
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      "title": "中国博物馆协会",
      "url": "https://www.chinamuseum.org.cn/detail.html?contentId=846&id=14"
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      "title": "鲁迅：近代中国博物馆教育的践行者",
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      "url": "https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%9C%AA%E5%90%8D%E7%A4%BE"
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      "url": "https://asianart-gateway.jp/en/exploring/chronology/830/"
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      "title": "上海文博 ShangHaiWenBo",
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    {
      "title": "侯桂新：鲁迅与左联",
      "url": "https://www.chinawriter.com.cn/n1/2020/0313/c404064-31629923.html"
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    {
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    {
      "title": "董丽敏：文化场域、左翼政治与自由主义——重识《现代》杂志的基本立场",
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    {
      "title": "中国现代文学馆",
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    {
      "title": "〖转〗宋庆龄与统一战线 | 鲁迅葬礼",
      "url": "https://m.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_28319533"
    },
    {
      "title": "Shanghai Luxun Museum",
      "url": "https://english.shanghai.gov.cn/en-MuseumsGalleries/20240527/6d77327b5ea34c4db25c1a7370e53635.html"
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    {
      "title": "The legacy of 'the saint of modern China'",
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    {
      "title": "中共北京市纪律检查委员会 北京市监察委员会",
      "url": "https://www.bjsupervision.gov.cn/ywyl/202102/t20210224_72933.html"
    },
    {
      "title": "On New Democracy",
      "url": "https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-2/mswv2_26.htm"
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    {
      "title": "石家庄市第四十中学",
      "url": "https://www.sjz40z.cn/channel/NewsDetail.aspx?ClassID=69&ClassParent=26&NewsID=26184"
    },
    {
      "title": "Yang, Xianyi — China und der Westen",
      "url": "https://www.e-aoi.uzh.ch/apps/china-west/entities/4517"
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    {
      "title": "Lu Xun",
      "url": "https://www.cuhk.edu.hk/renditions/authors/luxun.html"
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    {
      "title": "Diary of a Madman and Other Stories",
      "url": "https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/diary-of-a-madman-and-other-stories/?attribute_pa_format=paperback"
    },
    {
      "title": "The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China",
      "url": "https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/35612/the-real-story-of-ah-q-and-other-tales-of-china-by-xun-lu/9780140455489"
    },
    {
      "title": "Eileen J. Cheng",
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    {
      "title": "Prof. Eileen Cheng Translates Literary Gems by Lu Xun",
      "url": "https://www.pomona.edu/news/2022/12/16-prof-eileen-cheng-translates-literary-gems-lu-xun"
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    {
      "title": "Lu Xun",
      "url": "https://uhpress.hawaii.edu/title/lu-xun/"
    },
    {
      "title": "The True Story of Lu Xun",
      "url": "https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1cftj8r"
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  ],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"
}