Zhu Ziqing

Zhu Ziqing a Chinese essayist and poet of the early twentieth century (1898-1948) whose lyrical prose essays are among the most widely read in modern Chinese literature. A scholar of classical letters and a professor of literature, he wrote with clarity and restraint about nature, memory, family and the passing of time, and he exercised a lasting influence on the practice of modern Chinese prose.

Early Life and Education

Zhu Ziqing was born in 1898 in Shaoxing, in Zhejiang province, and spent part of his childhood in nearby Yangzhou, the city with which he is most often associated. His family belonged to the modest literate class, and his father took great care with his early education, instructing him in the classics and in composition.

He entered Peking University and studied philosophy, graduating in the early 1920s. He was a member of the generation of students who came of age around the May Fourth movement, the intellectual and cultural upheaval that sought to replace the classical written language with a modern vernacular and to remake Chinese culture in the light of science and democracy.

He began to write during his student years, publishing poetry and essays in the new literary journals. He was one of the founders of a literary society that grouped together young writers in the early 1920s, and his early work, in both poetry and prose, showed the influence of the new vernacular but also a rare delicacy of feeling and rhythm.

The Art of the Essay

Zhu Ziqing's reputation rests above all on his prose essays, which combine the descriptive refinement of the classical tradition with the freedom and directness of the modern vernacular. He wrote about scenes and seasons, about journeys and small incidents, and about the people and places he loved with an attentiveness that made ordinary experience luminous.

His most celebrated piece is a meditation on a moonlit lotus pond near his home in Beijing, in which a walk along the water becomes the occasion for reflection on the mind's own quiet and its passing moods. The essay is prized for its musical prose and its delicate balance of observation and reverie, and it is among the most frequently studied works in modern Chinese literature.

Another of his best-known essays describes the figure of his father, weighed down by the burdens of age and family, and a small act of caring during a parting at a railway station. Told without sentimentality, it has become the classic expression of filial affection in modern Chinese writing and is familiar to generations of school students.

Poetry and Literary Criticism

Before and alongside his essays Zhu Ziqing wrote lyric poetry, some of which is included among the early landmarks of the new vernacular verse. His poems are generally brief and contemplative, concerned with love, solitude and the passing of time, and they were praised for their sincerity and their quiet music.

He also worked as a critic and editor, and he wrote on the theory and appreciation of literature. He studied the classical tradition closely and wrote scholarly essays on traditional poetry and prose, seeking to make the heritage of the past available to modern readers without surrendering to mere antiquarianism.

His concern for language was meticulous. He argued that the new vernacular prose must be disciplined and crafted, that it needed rhythm and precision as much as the classical language had, and his own essays served as models of what an elegant modern Chinese prose might be. He was both a practitioner and a teacher of the writer's craft.

Academic Career and Wartime Years

Zhu Ziqing taught at several universities, including a long period at the Qinghua University in Beijing, where he was a professor of Chinese literature. He was a dedicated and conscientious teacher, respected for his learning and for the care he took with his students, and he published scholarly studies of classical poetry and of the history of Chinese literature.

The war with Japan forced the universities to relocate to the interior, and Zhu Ziqing made the difficult journey to the southwest, where he continued to teach and write under conditions of great hardship. The displacement and the poverty of the wartime years left a deep mark on him and on his writing.

With the end of the war he returned to Beijing, but his health had been undermined by years of privation and exertion. He lived in reduced circumstances and continued to work despite failing strength, maintaining the independence and integrity that characterised his whole career.

Death, Reputation and Legacy

Zhu Ziqing died in 1948 in Beijing, at the age of fifty, after an illness aggravated by poverty and the strain of the postwar years. His death was widely mourned, and his example was taken up by those who honoured a scholar who had refused to compromise his principles in difficult times.

His essays were collected and reprinted many times and became standard reading in Chinese schools, where his clarity and his humane feeling made him a model for the teaching of composition. Several of his pieces are so familiar that their phrases have entered the general stock of Chinese literary memory.

He is regarded as one of the finest stylists of modern Chinese prose and as the successor, in the essay form, of the great descriptive writers of the classical tradition. Born in 1898 and dead in 1948, he belongs to the founding generation of modern Chinese literature, and his quiet, exact and deeply felt writing continues to be read for both its craft and its humanity.

See also

• May Fourth movement
• Vernacular Chinese literature
• Peking University
• Chinese lyric essay