Lao She

Lao She: The Novelist Who Wrote Beijing's Voice, and Died by Its Lake

On the morning of August 24, 1966, a sixty-seven-year-old novelist walked to Taiping Lake in Beijing, filled his pockets with stones, and waded into the water. The night before, Red Guards — many of them teenage girls — had beaten him for three hours at the Confucius Temple alongside twenty other writers, accused him of being a foreign agent, and forced a placard around his neck. When his body was recovered the next day, several handwritten copies of Mao's own poems lay beside his clothes on the shore. Lao She had spent four decades giving literary voice to Beijing's rickshaw pullers and courtyard families; the revolution he had returned home in 1949 to help build ended his life in the lake he could see from his own front door.

A Manchu Boy Raised by a Widow

Born Shu Qingchun on February 3, 1899, in Beijing, Lao She belonged to the Manchu ethnic minority whose Qing dynasty had ruled China for two and a half centuries before its collapse in 1911 — a background that left him, by his own account, feeling something of an outsider in the Han-majority Republic that followed. His father, a palace guardsman, died during the fighting of the Boxer Rebellion in 1900, leaving his mother to raise him largely alone. He rose quickly through China's educational bureaucracy, becoming principal of an elementary school at just seventeen and later a district education supervisor, before an opportunity to teach Mandarin took him to England in 1924.

Five Years Near Bloomsbury

Living in London from 1924 to 1929, close to the Bloomsbury literary scene, Lao She read Conrad and Joyce, spent years translating a Ming-dynasty novel, and — inspired above all by Charles Dickens — wrote his first novel, *Lao Zhang di zhexue*, serialized starting in 1926. The London years also produced *Mr. Ma and Son*, a semi-autobiographical novel confronting the anti-Chinese prejudice he encountered in 1920s Britain. He returned east, spent time on Manhattan's Upper West Side, and by the early 1930s had shifted his literary philosophy: where his earliest fiction celebrated individual willpower overcoming adversity, his mature work turned toward how social environment crushes individual agency — a shift crystallized in his 1932 dystopian satire *Cat Country*, which imagined a decadent, self-destructive Chinese civilization on Mars and which the Chinese Communist Party still treats as an uncomfortable, near-prophetic text.

Rickshaw Boy

Lao She's masterpiece, *Luotuo Xiangzi* — known in English as *Rickshaw Boy* — appeared in 1936 and told the story of a rickshaw puller in Beijing whose every attempt at honest self-improvement is ground down by poverty, exploitation, and bad luck. Written in the authentic vernacular Beijing dialect that became Lao She's signature, the novel became one of modern China's most beloved works of realist fiction, popular enough decades later to inspire a bronze statue of its protagonist in a Beijing business district. During the Sino-Japanese War that followed, Lao She led the All-China Anti-Japanese Writers Federation, turning his fiction and drama toward openly patriotic wartime literature.

Return to a New China

Persuaded by Premier Zhou Enlai to return from the United States after the Communist takeover, Lao She settled back in Beijing in 1949 and spent the following seventeen years, from 1950 to 1966, living in a traditional courtyard house near the Temple of Confucius with his wife Hu Jieqing and their four children. It was among the most productive stretches of his career: he wrote 24 plays and two novels in that period, including *Dragon Beard Ditch* (1951) and, in 1957, the drama that would become his second landmark work, *Teahouse* — a play tracing a Beijing teahouse and its patrons across three turbulent historical eras, staged more than 700 times by the Beijing People's Art Theatre and now considered a cornerstone of modern Chinese theater.

The Struggle Session

That productive settlement ended within the opening days of the Cultural Revolution. On August 23, 1966, Red Guards summoned Lao She and roughly twenty other writers to the Confucius Temple, where some 150 young attackers beat them with bamboo sticks and studded belts for three hours in what the movement called a struggle session, accusing Lao She specifically of being an American agent because of his years abroad. He returned home to find his house ransacked and his manuscripts burned. The next morning he walked to Taiping Lake and drowned himself. Authorities at the time declared that he had isolated himself from the people and denied him a proper burial; his family was permitted only to bury his eyeglasses and pen.

Why Lao She Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a specific literary achievement: Lao She did more than any other twentieth-century Chinese novelist to prove that Beijing's own spoken dialect — the language of rickshaw pullers, teahouse keepers, and courtyard families, not the classical or Europeanized prose favored by many of his contemporaries — could carry the full weight of serious literature, and *Rickshaw Boy* and *Teahouse* remain touchstones of that argument nearly a century later. His son Shu Yi later placed his father's suicide inside a specific Chinese literary tradition of protest by self-destruction dating back to the poet Qu Yuan in the third century BC, arguing that such an act was itself a final act of struggle, a way of telling others what the truth really was. The complicating truth is that Lao She was not simply an apolitical craftsman destroyed by circumstance: he had actively supported the Communist Party's cultural program for seventeen years before it turned on him, and *Cat Country*, his most searingly prescient book, was largely suppressed and unread by the very movement it seemed to predict until decades after his death — a genius whose clearest warning about ideological self-destruction went unheeded by the country, and the political system, that produced him.

Legacy

Lao She was posthumously rehabilitated after Mao's death in 1976, and his Beijing courtyard home reopened as a memorial hall in 1998, displaying his manuscripts and possessions. *Teahouse* remains in the Beijing People's Art Theatre's active repertory, and *Rickshaw Boy* continues to be read as the definitive portrait of ordinary life in early twentieth-century Beijing — a legacy the Cultural Revolution tried, and failed, to drown along with the man who wrote it.