Su Tong

Su Tong (born 1963) is one of the most important Chinese novelists of the post-Mao era — a writer whose lush, violent, erotically charged fiction about Chinese history has reached international audiences partly through Zhang Yimou’s celebrated film adaptation of his novella “Wives and Concubines” (Raise the Red Lantern, 1991). Su Tong belongs to the “avant-garde” generation of Chinese writers who emerged in the late 1980s, and his work combines the narrative ambition of the nineteenth-century European novel with a distinctly Chinese sensibility for ritual, hierarchy, and the body.

Life and Career

Su Tong was born Tong Zhonggui in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, and grew up along the Yangtze River — a landscape that appears throughout his fiction as a site of beauty, decay, and violence. He studied Chinese literature at the Beijing Normal University and began publishing fiction in the late 1980s, part of a generation (alongside Yu Hua, Mo Yan, Ge Fei, and Can Xue) that challenged the conventions of socialist realism with formally experimental, historically revisionist fiction.

“Wives and Concubines” (Qiqie chengqun, 1990) was his international breakthrough — a novella about a young woman who becomes the fourth concubine of a wealthy man in 1920s China and discovers the lethal power struggles among the wives. Zhang Yimou’s film adaptation, Raise the Red Lantern (1991), starring Gong Li, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and brought Su Tong’s name to global audiences.

Rice (Mi, 1991) was a darker, more ambitious novel — the story of a refugee from famine who rises to power in a rice shop through violence, sexual domination, and moral degradation. The novel is a sustained meditation on hunger — physical, sexual, political — and on the way power corrupts absolutely in a society without institutional restraint.

Later Works

My Life as Emperor (Wo de diwang shengya, 1992) imagined the inner life of a child emperor in an unnamed Chinese dynasty. Binu and the Great Wall (Biyanü, 2006) retold the ancient Chinese legend of Meng Jiangnu, a woman whose tears dissolve the Great Wall. The Boat to Redemption (Heshang de muqin, 2009) won the Man Asian Literary Prize — a novel about a father and son living on a barge, exploring the legacy of the Cultural Revolution through a story of exile and shame.

Su Tong’s fiction is marked by its attention to sensory detail — textures of silk, smells of cooking, the physical reality of desire and violence — and by its treatment of women, who are simultaneously victims of patriarchal systems and agents of their own complex, sometimes destructive power.

Key Works

• “Wives and Concubines” / Raise the Red Lantern (1990)
• Rice (1991)
• My Life as Emperor (1992)
• The Boat to Redemption (2009)

Collecting Su Tong

Chinese first editions (People’s Literature Publishing House, Jiangsu Literature and Art) are the primary collectibles but require specialist knowledge. English translations are more accessible: Raise the Red Lantern: Three Novellas (Morrow, 1993) first edition brings $30–$75. Rice (Morrow, 1995) and My Life as Emperor (Hyperion East, 2005) are modestly priced. Signed copies in English are uncommon; Su Tong signs at Chinese literary events and occasionally at international festivals. His international reputation is buoyed by the enduring popularity of Zhang Yimou’s film. The English-language collecting market for contemporary Chinese literature is still developing.