Literature & Ideas
Distinguished
Qian Zhongshu
1910 β 1998
Novelist of Fortress Besieged and one of China's great scholars
Distinguished is level 3 of 4 in the China Hall of Fame: sustained excellence over a career, widely honoured at home. See how the levels work.
Why they are here
A scholar of encyclopaedic learning whose satirical novel Fortress Besieged is one of the best-loved Chinese novels of the twentieth century.
Qian Zhongshu studied at Oxford and in Paris before returning to China. Fortress Besieged, published in 1947, follows a young man with a fake foreign degree through a series of comic misadventures; its line that marriage is like a besieged fortress has become proverbial.
He later devoted himself to scholarship, and his Limited Views is regarded as a monument of learning in Chinese and Western literature.
He later devoted himself to scholarship, and his Limited Views is regarded as a monument of learning in Chinese and Western literature.
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