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'''Lao She''' the Chinese novelist, playwright and essayist (1899-1966), master of a colloquial Beijing style that brought the rhythms of ordinary speech into modern Chinese prose. He is best known for Camel Xiangzi, a novel of a rickshaw puller in the old capital, and for the play Teahouse, and he stands among the most beloved writers of the twentieth century.

== Early Life and London Years ==
Lao She was born Shu Qingchun on 3 February 1899 in Beijing, into a poor Manchu family of the Bordered Red Banner. His father, a guard in the imperial city, was killed during the Boxer uprising in 1900, and his mother supported the family by washing and sewing. The poverty and warmth of a Beijing courtyard household gave him the setting and much of the material of his later fiction. He trained as a teacher and after graduating worked as a schoolmaster and administrator.

In 1924 he went to London to teach Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies, and there he read widely in English literature, especially Dickens, and began to write his own fiction in his spare time. His first novels, written in London, were comic and satirical, drawing on his observations of Chinese students abroad and on his memories of Beijing. When he returned to China in 1930 he was already an established author, and he taught literature at universities in Shandong while continuing to write steadily.

== The Great Novels ==
Lao She's reputation rests above all on Camel Xiangzi, published in 1937, which traces the decline of an honest rickshaw puller in Beijing. Xiangzi dreams of owning his own rickshaw, but betrayal, misfortune and the cruelty of the city grind down his decency until he becomes cynical and lost. It is one of the bleakest and most controlled novels of modern China. The book is remarkable for its inwardness and for the vividness of its city.

Rickshaw pullers, concubines, detectives and servants move through streets and alleys that the reader can almost smell, and the author's sympathy never turns into sentimentality. Translated into English as Rickshaw Boy, it became the most widely known Chinese novel in the West. Among his other works are the philosophical fable Cat Country, the satirical novel Divorce, and numerous short stories and essays. He excelled at humour and pathos at once, and his eye for the small vanities of ordinary people gave his fiction a tolerant and humane comedy that few of his contemporaries could equal.

== Drama and the War Years ==
During the war against Japan Lao She moved first to the interior and then to the wartime capital, where he threw himself into patriotic writing for the stage and into the work of writers' organisations. He produced plays, ballads and popular pieces designed to lift morale, and he began to master the dramatic form that would occupy his last years. In 1946 he travelled to the United States on a cultural mission and spent several years there, teaching, writing and completing work that had been impossible in wartime.

He returned to the new People's Republic in 1949 and was given a prominent place in the literary establishment of Beijing. In the 1950s he wrote a series of plays of which Teahouse, produced in 1957, is the acknowledged masterpiece. Set in a Beijing teahouse across three historical periods, it compresses half a century of social change into a single setting and a large cast of proprietors, idlers, Manchu nobles and petty crooks, and it is still performed around the world.

== Language and Craft ==
Lao She wrote in the colloquial speech of Beijing with a precision that made it a literary language. He was a careful craftsman who revised relentlessly, and he believed that a sentence should be as clear and natural as speech while remaining exact and musical. His dialogue in particular is admired for its economy and its truth to character. He drew on the storyteller's art and on folk forms while shaping them to modern purposes, and he moved with ease between comedy and tragedy.

His finest work combines an amused tolerance for human weakness with a clear-sighted knowledge of how circumstance can destroy a person, a balance that gives his fiction its lasting power. Beyond fiction and drama he wrote essays, children's pieces and translations, and he served as a model of the professional writer who lived by his pen. Generations of Chinese students have learned style from his sentences, and his Beijing novels are read as a portrait of a vanished city.

== Last Years and Legacy ==
Lao She's position darkened with the political campaigns of the 1960s. During the Cultural Revolution he was denounced and publicly humiliated, and in August 1966, after being beaten by Red Guards, he drowned himself in a lake near Beijing. He was sixty-seven years old, and for years his death was passed over in silence. His reputation was fully restored after 1978, and today he is regarded as one of the greatest of modern Chinese writers.

Camel Xiangzi and Teahouse are staples of school and stage, and his Beijing home has been preserved as a memorial museum visited by readers from across the country. Lao She remains the supreme painter of the old capital and of the ordinary people who lived in it. By making the language of the streets into great literature, he gave Chinese fiction a voice that was at once profoundly local and universally understood, and his work has never fallen out of print.

== See also ==
* Camel Xiangzi
* Teahouse
* Beijing dialect literature
* Rickshaw Boy

== References ==

<ref name="r1">Lao She, Camel Xiangzi, Renjian Shuwu, 1937.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Lao She, Teahouse, Chinese Theatre Press, 1957.</ref>
<ref name="r3">Ranbir Vohra, Lao She and the Chinese Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1974.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Gao Shuxian, A Biography of Lao She, Beijing October Arts Press, 1996.</ref>

<references />

[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Novels]]
[[Category:Contemporary China]]

Lao She - Revision history

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