Beijing's voice on the page ended in Taiping Lake
Lao She (Shu Qingchun, 1899–1966) made the capital's dialect sing in Rickshaw Boy and Teahouse. A Manchu orphan who taught in London, he popularized modern humor—then died during Cultural Revolution persecution, officially by drowning, possibly murder.
Born to a poor Plain Red Banner Manchu family in Beijing, Shu Qingchun lost his guard-soldier father in 1901 street fighting with Eight-Nation Alliance forces during the Boxer crisis. His mother's stories of foreign brutality, he later said, outdid any ogre tale. After normal-school training he taught in Beijing and Tianjin, crediting the 1919 May Fourth Movement with giving him a new spirit and literary language. From 1924 to 1929 he lectured at London's School of Oriental Studies in Notting Hill, devouring Dickens and drafting fiction; Old Zhang's Philosophy first carried the pen name Lao She.
Returning via Singapore, he taught at Cheeloo and Shandong universities and became a major humorist through novels, Analects Fortnightly essays, plays, and xiangsheng. Cat Country (1932) satirized China as a stagnant Martian cat civilization after Japan's Manchuria and Shanghai attacks—though Lao She later called it an artistic failure. Rickshaw Boy (1936) follows peasant-turned-puller Xiangzi through urban tragedy and became a modern classic; a 1945 U.S. translation added an unauthorized happy ending. Teahouse (1957) stages Yu Tai teahouse from 1898 to the eve of 1949. As resistance-association leader from 1938 he pushed accessible baihua over classical prose.
State Department grant travel kept him in the United States from 1946 to December 1949; Pearl S. Buck sponsored him and had earlier translated Rickshaw Boy, but he rejected her advice to stay after the People's Republic formed. Married to Hu Jieqing in 1931, he had four children. In August 1966 Red Guards denounced him as a counterrevolutionary and beat him at Beijing's Temple of Confucius. Official records say he drowned himself in Taiping Lake on 24 August; Leo Ou-fan Lee raised murder as a possibility never firmly proven. Relatives hid manuscripts in coal and chimneys. Posthumous rehabilitation came in 1978; his Fengfu Lane courtyard museum opened in 1999.
Source: Lao She
