Zhou Enlai read Journey to the West at six, taught by his adoptive mother
Zhou Enlai served as the People's Republic of China's first premier for over 26 years and helped arrange Richard Nixon's 1972 visit. His lifelong love of Chinese literature and opera came from the widow who raised him after an unusual adoption, and he claimed to have read the classic novel Journey to the West at six.
Zhou was born in 1898 in Huai'an, Jiangsu, into a family from Shaoxing whose men had served for generations as government clerks. A severe late nineteenth century recession wrecked the family's finances, and his father, kindly but aimless, drifted from job to job across China and rarely supported his children. Soon after birth Zhou was adopted by his father's youngest brother, who was dying of tuberculosis and had no heir. The uncle died shortly afterwards, and his widow, surnamed Chen, raised the boy.
Madame Chen, herself from a scholarly family, taught him to read and write very young. By eight he was reading Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. His birth mother died in 1907 and Madame Chen a year later, leaving the ten-year-old and his younger brothers with another uncle in Huai'an. In 1910 an older uncle working in a government office took him to Fengtian, now Shenyang, in Manchuria.
There, at a modern school, he met English and science for the first time and read reformist and radical writers. At 14 he declared he was studying to become a great man able to shoulder the country's burdens. In 1913 his uncle's transfer brought him to Tianjin and the well-known Nankai Middle School.
Zhou became one of the Chinese Communist Party's earliest leaders, though he deferred to Mao Zedong from the mid-1930s. After 1949 he was premier until his death and also foreign minister until 1958, promoting peaceful coexistence and attending the Geneva Conference of 1954 and the Bandung Conference of 1955. During the Cultural Revolution he kept the government and economy running and tried to shield some people from persecution while remaining loyal to Mao. He withdrew from public life for medical treatment in 1975 and died in January 1976, prompting an enormous public outpouring of grief.
Source: Zhou Enlai
