Lu Xun

Lu Xun, born Zhou Shuren in 1881 into a declining scholar-official family in Shaoxing, Zhejiang, knew early the coldness of the world: his grandfather was imprisoned in an examination scandal and his father died after a long illness. In 1902 he went to Japan to study and trained as a doctor in Sendai, but in a lecture hall he saw a lantern slide of Chinese crowds watching a fellow countryman being executed, and concluded that medicine was not what mattered most; to change the spirit of his people, literature came first. He gave up medicine for writing. In 1918, under the pen name Lu Xun, he published 'A Madman's Diary', the first modern Chinese short story in the vernacular. He went on to write a great body of stories, essays and polemics, as well as a pioneering history of Chinese fiction, and is recognised as the founder of modern Chinese literature.