Chinese · 1899–1966
Shu Qingchun was born into a poor Manchu family in Beijing; his father, a palace guard, was killed when the Eight-Nation Alliance took the city in 1900. He trained as a teacher, converted to Christianity, and went to London in 1924 to teach Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies, where he read Dickens and started writing novels. He came home in 1930, wrote Rickshaw Boy in 1936, and spent the war years running the writers' resistance association in Chongqing. After a stay in the United States he returned in 1949 and was made a cultural official, wrote Teahouse in 1957, and was named a People's Artist. In August 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards beat him for hours at the Confucius Temple in Beijing. His body was found the next day in Taiping Lake. The verdict of suicide has never been fully accepted by his family. He wrote the funniest and the bleakest Chinese prose of his century, often in the same book.