Shaoxing 绍兴市 - Lu Xun Former Residence 鲁迅故居

This is an ordinary house, the former residence of Lu Xun. He was born in 1881 and lived in this house until 1899. BETWEEN 1910 AND 1912 Lu Xun returned home and taught in Shaoxing High School and Shanhu Normal School. Many of the exhibits are originals. Hundred Grass Garden is in the rear of the house, where Lu Xun spent his childhood. Located east of this former residene is called Sanweishuwu三味书屋 where he studied

Lu Xun (1881-1936) was a great modern Chinese writer, thinker, and revolutionary. The late Chairman Mao Zedong paid Lu Xun this tribute: “the chief commander of China’s cultural revolution, he was not only a great man of letters, but a great thinker, and revolutionary.” Born in Zhejiang Province in 1881, he went to Japan in 1902 to study medicine but eager to change the spirit of the Chinese people until 1909, he decided to become a writer. He tried to arouse his fellow-countrymen to make China strong. Literature was to be his means. Suring the polemics for 1905 to 1907 between the revolutionaries headed by Dr Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) and reformers led by Kang Youwei (1858-1927) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929), Lu Xun supported firmly Dr Sun Yat-sen. Lu Xun returned to China in 1909 and started teaching first in Hangzhou and then in Shaoxing. Soon the bourgeois revolution of 1911, led by Dr Sun Yat-sen, broke out. He welcomed the new republic with great hope and in 1912 he assumed a post in the Ministry of Education under the provisional government in Nanjing. In May that year he moved with the rest of the Ministry to Beijing, where he lived for 14 yeas. Here he witnessed the failure of the 1911 Revolution, and his bitter disappointment led to frustration and dejection. Between 1907 and 1936, he finished three collections of short stories. Two of the stories there in, “A Madman’s Diary” and “The True Story of Ah Q,” stand as the epitome of his work. And his 16 collections of essays made him one of the most significant essayists of 20th century China. In his introduction to “The true Story of Ah Q” one of his immortal works, he declared that he wanted to portray the “silent soul of the people” which for thousands of years, “grew, faded and withered quietly like grass under a great rock.” Ah Q is the leading character in The True Story of Ah Q, the famous novel by the great Chinese writer Lu Xun, Ah Q typifies all those who compensate themselves for their failures and setbacks in real life by regarding them as moral or spiritual victories. “Fierce-browed, I coldly defy a thousand pointing fingers; head-bowed, like a willing ox I serve the children横眉冷对千夫指，俯首干为孺子牛。”Many who see in it the epitome of the character of Chinese people cherishes this couplet, taken from a poem by Lu Xun: Righteousness, honesty, and respect for humanity. As a youth he lived in a gloomy, failure-ridden atmosphere. Among his family, who lived in a typical courtyard home, were several unsuccessful uncles who were addicted to opium. The imprisonment of his grandfather, a government official, together with the sickness and death of his father, exhausted the family’s wealth. In spite of the family shame, he worked hard and in 1902 won a government scholarship to study in Japan. He later returned to China to devote his life and writing to the nation’s new cultural movement. In the May 4th Movement in 1919, he worked together with Li Dazhao (1889-1927), one of the earliest Communists in China, for a progressive Journal The New Youth. From 1930 on, he joined the League of Left-Wing Writers and the China League for Civil Rights, and was active in revolutionary political and cultural activities. During his lifetime, he translated more than 200 works by over 90 writers from 14 countries, totaling 2.5 million characters and making up nearly half of the 20 volumes of his Complete Works. The play “Kong Yiji” is about the life story of “Kong Yiji”, the hero is one of the short stories of the late literary colossus Lu Xun. The play tries to show the cruelty and degeneration of the imperial examination system and the entire feudal system. Lu Xun devoted all his life to the cause of Chinese culture. He died of tuberculosis in Shanghai on October 19, 1936.

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