Qian Zhongshu (November 21, 1910 – December 19, 1998) was a Chinese literary scholar, writer and polyglot, famous for his burning wit and formidable erudition.

Among the general readers, he is best known for his satiric novel Fortress Besieged (TC:《圍城》). His works of non-fiction are characterised by the unusually large amount of quotations: in his magnum opus Guan Zhui Bian (TC:《管錐篇》), more than 2,000 Chinese and Western works are cited.

Familiar with the whole Western history of ideas, Qian shed new lights on the Chinese classical texts by comparing them with Western works, showing their likeness, or more often their apparent likeness and essential differences.

Beside being one of the few acknowledged master of vernacular Chinese in the 20th century, Qian was also the last person to produce substantial works in classical Chinese. Some regard his choice of writing Guan Zhui Bian in classical Chinese as a challenge to the assertion that classical Chinese is incompatible with modern and Western ideas, an assertion often heard during the May Fourth Movement.

Life
Born in Wuxi, Qian Zhongshu was the son of Qian Jibo (TC:錢基博), a conservative Confucian scholar. Qian Zhongzhu grew up under the care of his eldest uncle, who did not have a son. Qian was initially named Yangzhi (TC:仰之). When he was one year old, according to a tradition practised in many parts of China, he was given a few objects laid out in front of him for his "grabbing". He grabbed a book. His uncle then renamed him Zhongshu, literally meaning "being fond of books". His father later also changed his zi to Mocun, literally meaning "to keep silent", in the hope that he would be less talkative.

Although he never did shake his chatty nature, Qian was indeed very fond of books. When he was young, his uncle often brought him along to tea houses at night. There Qian was left alone to read storybooks on folklore and historical events, which he would repeat to his cousins upon returning home.

When Qian was ten, his uncle died. He continued living with his widowed aunt, even though their living conditions worsened drastically due to their reduced income. Under the severe teaching of his father, Qian mastered classical Chinese. At the age of fourteen, Qian left home to attend a western-style, English-speaking school in Suzhou.

Despite failing in Mathematics, Qian was accepted into the Department of Foreign Languages under Tsinghua University in 1929 because of his excellent performance in Chinese and English languages. In Tsinghua he met his future wife Yang Jiang, who was to become a successful playwright and translator, and married her in 1935. It was probably also in his college days that he began his lifelong habit of collecting quotations and writing reading notes.

In the same year, Qian received government sponsorship to further his studies abroad. Together with his wife, Qian headed for the University of Oxford in Britain. After spending two years at Exeter College, he received a Baccalaureus Litterarum (Bachelor of Literature). Shortly after his daughter Qian Yuan (TC:錢瑗) was born, he studied for one more year in the University of Paris in France, before returning to China in 1938.

Due to the unstable situation during the Second Sino-Japanese War, Qian did not hold any long-term jobs until the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. However, he wrote extensively during the decade of chaos and uncertainty.

 

The old gate of Tsinghua University, where Qian Zhongshu studied and taught

In 1949, Qian was appointed a professor in his alma mater. Four years later, an administrative adjustment saw the change of Tsinghua into a science and technology-based institute, with its Arts branches merged into Peking University (PKU). Qian was relieved of teaching duties and worked entirely in the Institute of Literary Studies (TC:文學研究所) under PKU.

During the Cultural Revolution, like many other prominent intellectuals of the time, Qian suffered persecution. Appointed to be a janitor, he was stripped of his favorite pastime - reading. However, he saw it through and continued to write.

From 1978 to 1980, he visited several universities in Italy, the United States and Japan, impressing his audience with his great wit and improbable erudition. In 1982, he was instated as the deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He then began working on Guan Zhui Bian, which occupied the next decade of his life.

Fortress Besieged was reprinted in 1980, and became a best-seller. Many illegal reproductions and "continuations" followed. Qian's fame rose to its height when the novel was adapted into a TV serial in 1990. Readers kept visiting the secluded scholar, and the famous anecdote goes that Qian replied to an old lady, who loved the novel and came to visit the author, that "is it necessary for one to visit the hen if one loves the eggs it lays?"

Qian entered hospital in 1994, and never came out. On December 19 1998, he died in Beijing. The Xinhua News Agency, the official press agency of the PRC government, labelled him "an immortal" - a term usually reserved for revolutionary martyrs.

Works

Qian dwelled in Shanghai from 1941 to 1945, which was then under Japanese occupation. Many of his works were written or published during this chaotic period of time. A collection of short essays, Marginalias of Life (TC:《寫在人生邊上》), a show of his unusual wit and erudition, was published in 1941. Men, Beasts and Ghosts (TC:《人獸鬼》), a collection of short stories, most of them satiric, was published in 1946. His most celebrated work Fortress Besieged appeared in 1947. On the Art of Poetry (TC:《談藝錄》), written in classical Chinese, was published in 1948.

Beside rendering Mao Zedong's selected works into English, Qian was appointed to produce an anthology of poetry of the Song Dynasty when he was working in the Institute of Literary Studies. The anthology (TC:《宋詩選注》) was published in 1958. Despite Qian's quoting the Chairman, and his selecting a considerable number of poems that reflect class struggle, the work was criticized for not being Marxist enough. The work was praised highly by the overseas critics, though, especially for its introduction and footnotes. In a new preface for the anthology written in 1988, the scholar in his usual quasi-humble tone said that the work was an embarrassing compromise of his personal taste and the then prevailing academic atmosphere.

Seven Pieces Patched Together (TC:《七綴集》), a collection of seven pieces of literary criticism written (and revised) over years in vernacular Chinese, was published in 1984. This collection includes the famous essay "Lin Shu's Translation" (TC:〈林紓的翻譯〉).

Qian's magnum opus is the five-volume Guan Zhui Bian, literally the Pipe-Awl Collection, translated into English as Limited Views. Begun in the 1980s and published in its current form in the mid-1990s, it is an extensive collection of short essays on poetics, semiotics, literary history and related topics written in classical Chinese. Qian's command of the cultural traditions of Classical and Modern Chinese, ancient Greek (in translations), Latin, English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish allowed him to construct a towering structure of polyglot and cross-cultural allusions. He took as the basis of this work a range of Chinese classical texts, including I-Ching, Classic of Poetry, Chuci, Zuozhuan, Shiji, Tao Te Ching, Liezi, Jiaoshi Yilin, Taiping Guangji and the Complete Prose of the Pre-Tang dynasties. From neglected details in these works, he found points of connection with works from other literatures.

Qian Zhongshu was one of the best-known Chinese authors to the Western world. Fortress Besieged has been translated into English, French, German, Russian, Japanese and Spanish.

Posthumous publications
The posthumous publication of Qian's works has drawn considerable criticism.

A 13-volume edition of Works of Qian Zhongshu (TC:《錢鍾書集》) was published in 2001 by the Joint Publishing. For one thing, the edition is a hard-covered deluxe one, whereas all of Qian's works published during his lifetime are cheap paperbacks. Although the publisher claimed that the edition had been proofread by many experts [1], obvious errors are not uncommmon. The most valuable part of the edition, titled Marginalias on the Marginalias of Life (TC:《寫在人生邊上的邊上》), is a collection of Qian's writings previously scattered in periodicals, magazines and other books. The writings collected there are, however, arranged without any visible order.

The 10-volume Expansions and Revisions of Songshi Jishi (TC:《宋詩紀事補正》), a purely scholarly work, published in 2003, was also condemned by some as a shoddy publication. [2]

The facsimiles of parts of Qian's notebooks have appeared in 2004, and has similarly drawn some criticism. [3]

• Fortress Besieged （钱钟书） - - 08/132006