Shen Congwen

Lore & Background

After his father fled following a failed assassination plot, the family fortunes declined, and in 1917 Shen left home to join a local reserve militia, later working as a clerk. He was a particularly apolitical writer, which made him a target of attacks from left-wing writers. After the Communist takeover of Beijing in 1949, Shen attempted suicide by drinking kerosene and cutting his throat and wrist. He never published another work of fiction. He openly wrote about his mixed ethnic background—including his mother's Tujia and paternal grandmother's Miao heritage—in autobiographical works from the 1930s onward.

Reader's Guide

Shen Congwen's significance lies in his unique position as a major Chinese writer who, after the Communist victory, completely abandoned literary fiction for the study of material culture. His advocacy of apolitical literature led to public attacks and a suicide attempt in 1949. His legacy is that of a writer who resisted political conformity and, when forced to choose, turned from creative writing to rigorous historical scholarship.

Did You Know?

• Shen Congwen was slated to win the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature but died before it could be awarded.
• He attempted suicide in 1949 by drinking kerosene and cutting his throat and wrist.
• During the Cultural Revolution, he was forced to scrub toilets at the Chinese Museum of History.
• He openly wrote about his mother's Tujia ethnicity and his paternal grandmother's Miao ethnicity in autobiographical works from the 1930s onward.

The Oral and Pre-Classical Foundations

The earliest strata of Chinese literary culture did not emerge from the written page but from the living practices of communities. Musical and ritual performances, divination rituals, astronomical observations, and exorcistic ceremonies all contributed oral material that would later crystallize into written texts. The Shijing, for instance, grew out of cult and lay musical traditions, while the Yi jing and related divination manuals like the Guicang and Lianshan carried forward the language of fortune-telling. Liu Shipei even attempted to trace the entire genealogy of Chinese literature back to religious spells and incantations, specifically the six zhu as catalogued in the Da zhu chapter of the Rites of Zhou. This suggests that what we now regard as literature was originally inseparable from practical, spiritual, and professional knowledge. The boundaries between sacred utterance, administrative record, and artistic expression were far more porous in these formative centuries than later periods would suggest, and the written word merely fixed what had already been alive in speech and ceremony.

The Philosophical Canon of the Hundred Schools

During the Eastern Zhou dynasty, spanning from 770 to 256 BC, an extraordinary flowering of thought produced what is known as the Hundred Schools of Thought. The literary output of this era was overwhelmingly philosophical and didactic rather than fictional, encompassing the foundational works of Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and Legalism alongside treatises on military strategy and history. The Confucian corpus held particular sway over Chinese civilization: in the twelfth century AD, a selection of nine texts—the Five Classics and the Four Books—was designated as the basis for the Imperial examination system, effectively making these works the backbone of educational and governmental life for centuries. The Five Classics, traditionally attributed to Confucius's editorial hand, range from the divination manual of the I Ching to the historical annals of the state of Lu. The Four Books include the pithy Analects, the political dialogues of Mencius, and the ethical treatises of the Doctrine of the Mean and Great Learning. Beyond Confucianism, the Daoist canon—comprising the Dao De Jing, the Zhuangzi, and the Liezi—offered a contrasting philosophical vision, while Legalist texts like the Hanfeizi articulated a more austere political philosophy.

The Architecture of Chinese Historiography

Chinese civilization developed an unusually rigorous tradition of record-keeping, with court archives maintained across successive dynasties. By the year 841 BC, at the onset of the Gonghe Regency under the Western Zhou, these disparate calendrical and administrative records could be cross-referenced without apparent contradiction—a remarkable feat of archival consistency. The Zuo Zhuan, compiled no later than 389 BC and attributed to the blind fifth-century historian Zuo Qiuming, stands as the earliest known narrative history of China. The Book of Documents, potentially dating to the sixth century BC, included early geographical information in its Yu Gong chapter, while the Bamboo Annals, discovered in 281 AD within the tomb of the King of Wei, offered another thread of early historical record, though their precise dating remains contested. The definitive milestone, however, was Sima Qian's Shiji, the Records of the Grand Historian, composed in the second century BC. Covering the sweep from the mythical Xia dynasty to the reign of Emperor Wu of Han, Sima Qian established a model of objective, comprehensive historiography that every subsequent dynastic history would follow, earning him frequent comparison with the Greek historian Herodotus in both scope and method.

From Classical to Vernacular: The Evolution of Literary Form

The trajectory of Chinese literary expression reveals a slow but decisive shift from the elevated register of Literary Chinese, modeled on the language of the ancient classics, toward the written vernacular that made literature accessible to a broader readership. This evolution culminated during the Ming and Qing dynasties, when mature novels were composed in colloquial Chinese, marking a fundamental break from the classical tradition. The material infrastructure of this transformation was equally significant: the widespread adoption of woodblock printing during the Tang dynasty and Bi Sheng's invention of movable type during the Song dynasty (990–1051) dramatically accelerated the dissemination of written knowledge across the empire. The Han and Tang periods had been celebrated as golden ages of poetry, while the Song and Yuan contributed their distinctive forms of ci lyrics, essays, and dramatic works. By the turn of the twentieth century, figures like Lu Xun (1881–1936) had become defining voices of vernacular Chinese literature, anchoring a tradition that stretched back through millennia of continuous literary development. The interplay between formal innovation, technological change, and shifting social audiences thus shaped a literary culture of extraordinary depth and longevity.