Lao She

Lao She (1899–1966) — pen name of Shu Qingchun — was one of the greatest Chinese writers of the twentieth century and the supreme literary chronicler of Beijing. His novels and plays capture the rhythms, dialects, and social textures of Beijing street life with a specificity and warmth that no other Chinese writer has matched. Luòtuo Xiángzi (Rickshaw Boy, 1936) is one of the most widely translated Chinese novels and remains a touchstone of modern Chinese literature.

Life and Career

Lao She was born on 3 February 1899 in Beijing to a poor Manchu family. His father, a Manchu Banner guardsman, was killed during the Boxer Rebellion when Lao She was an infant. He grew up in poverty in Beijing’s hutong neighborhoods, an experience that formed the foundation of his fiction’s intimacy with the lives of ordinary Beijingers.

He studied at Peking Normal University and taught in Beijing schools before traveling to England in 1924, where he taught Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London for five years. In England he read Dickens intensively — an influence evident in his social panoramas and his gift for comic characterization — and began writing fiction.

Mao Cheng Ji (Cat Country, 1932) — a satirical science fiction novel about a Chinese traveler who lands on Mars and discovers a civilization of cat-people — is his most experimental work, a bitter allegory of Chinese society. Luòtuo Xiángzi (Rickshaw Boy, alternatively translated as Camel Xiangzi, 1936) is his masterpiece: the story of Xiangzi, a young rickshaw puller in 1920s Beijing who works desperately to buy his own rickshaw and achieve independence, only to be defeated by a series of disasters — theft, extortion, forced marriage — that strip away his hope piece by piece. The novel is a tragedy of individual aspiration crushed by social forces, told in a Beijing vernacular that was revolutionary for Chinese fiction.

After the Communist revolution of 1949, Lao She was honored as a “People’s Artist.” He wrote plays, including Chá Guǎn (Teahouse, 1957), considered the greatest Chinese play of the twentieth century. During the Cultural Revolution, he was publicly humiliated by Red Guards. He died on 24 August 1966 — officially a suicide by drowning in Taiping Lake, though the circumstances remain disputed.

Key Works

• Rickshaw Boy (Camel Xiangzi, 1936)
• Cat Country (1932)
• Teahouse (1957)

Collecting Lao She

Chinese first editions from the 1930s are extremely rare and valuable museum-grade items. English translations — by Evan King (the controversial 1945 edition with altered ending), by Jean M. James, and most recently by Howard Goldblatt — are the accessible collected form. The Evan King translation (Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945) — which gave the novel a happy ending Lao She never wrote — is collected as a historical curiosity. The Goldblatt translation (HarperCollins, 2010) is the standard modern English edition.