Shen Congwen

Shen Congwen the Chinese novelist, essayist and scholar (1902-1988) whose lyrical fiction of the Xiangxi borderlands of western Hunan stands among the finest achievements of modern Chinese literature. After the revolution he abandoned fiction for the study of material culture and became a leading authority on ancient Chinese textiles and costume.

Early Life and the Xiangxi Years

Shen Congwen was born on 28 December 1902 in Fenghuang, a garrison town on the western frontier of Hunan province, into a family with a military tradition among the Miao and Han peoples of the border region. He left school early and served for several years as a common soldier in the local militia, an experience that gave him direct knowledge of the mountains, rivers, boatmen and soldiers of his homeland. The green rivers, stone-walled towns and mixed populations of this frontier world became the enduring subject of his fiction.

He observed the lives of boat trackers, prostitutes, soldiers, merchants and country girls with a detached and affectionate eye, and he came to regard the region as a reservoir of vitality that the modern city had lost. In 1922, at the age of twenty, he left Hunan for Beijing with almost no money and no formal qualifications, determined to make himself a writer. He lived for years in poverty, teaching himself by reading in libraries and submitting stories to the new literary journals of the capital until his work began to appear.

Literary Career

Shen Congwen published prolifically from the mid-1920s onward, producing short stories, novellas, essays and memoirs at great speed. He joined the circle of writers associated with the journal Modern Criticism and became friendly with writers such as Ding Ling, with whom he worked on a literary supplement in the early 1930s. His most productive years came in the 1930s, when he taught at universities in Qingdao, Beijing and Kunming.

He edited literary pages, encouraged younger writers and wrote the works on which his reputation now rests, including Border Town and the long novel The Long River. His language, drawn from speech and folk song yet carefully shaped, was widely admired for its clarity and musicality. After the outbreak of war with Japan he moved with his university to the southwest, teaching in Kunming and continuing to write essays and fiction even as the conditions of wartime life grew hard. The political climate of the later 1940s, in which literature was increasingly judged by its political message, left him increasingly at odds with the prevailing mood.

Border Town and the Xiangxi World

Border Town, published in 1934, is his best-loved novella. It tells of an old ferryman, his granddaughter Cuicui and two brothers who love her, set in a small river town in western Hunan. The story turns on misunderstanding and fate rather than on dramatic conflict, and its gentle elegiac tone has made it a classic of modern Chinese fiction. The book is celebrated for its rendering of a lost world: the ferry across the stream, the night songs of suitors, the dragon-boat races and the rhythms of village life.

Beneath its charm lies a quiet sadness, for the community it describes was already dissolving under modern pressures, and the author knew that he was writing an elegy. In The Long River and many short stories he enlarged this picture into a broad portrait of the Xiangxi region as a whole. He refused to make his characters into political symbols, insisting instead on their particularity, and this very refusal later placed him on the wrong side of official taste.

Scholarship After 1949

After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 Shen Congwen's fiction fell out of favour, and he ceased to publish imaginative writing. He took a position at the historical museum in Beijing, where he worked quietly at cataloguing and research, and later transferred to the Institute of History of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. There he devoted himself to the study of ancient Chinese material culture, particularly textiles, embroidery, lacquer and costume.

His great scholarly work, a study of Chinese costume through the ages, was published in 1981 and remains a standard reference, remarkable for its use of archaeological and pictorial evidence to reconstruct the dress of successive dynasties. The shift from novelist to scholar was painful and partly forced, but he carried it out with patience and thoroughness. Colleagues remembered a modest and methodical man who preferred the study to public life and who gradually won the respect of the archaeological community for the exactness of his research.

Rehabilitation and Legacy

For many years after 1949 Shen Congwen was attacked or ignored as a bourgeois writer, and during the Cultural Revolution he suffered humiliation and the loss of his books and papers. From the 1980s, however, his literary reputation was restored, and he was recognised as one of the greatest stylists of twentieth-century Chinese prose. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in the years before his death, and his work was translated into many languages.

Younger writers admired the freedom of his imagination and his refusal to subordinate art to doctrine, and his essays on his native region are read as models of the personal descriptive form. Shen Congwen died in Beijing on 10 May 1988. He is remembered both as the poet of the Xiangxi borderland and as a scholar who preserved a knowledge of Chinese material culture that might otherwise have been lost, a double achievement that few writers of his generation could match.

See also

• Border Town
• Xiangxi culture
• The Long River
• Chinese costume