Zhou Ruchang
| Zhou Ruchang | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
April 14, 1918 Tianjin |
| Died |
May 31, 2012 (aged 94) Beijing |
| Occupation | Writer, noted redologist |
Zhou Ruchang (Chinese: 周汝昌; Wade–Giles: Chou Ju-ch'ang; April 14, 1918 – May 31, 2012), was a Chinese writer who is renowned for his extensive scholarship on the novel Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. He is regarded as among the most renowned and influential redologists of the 20th century. In addition, Zhou was also an accomplished calligrapher and expert on traditional Chinese poetry and fiction.
He was born in Tianjin, China on April 14, 1918, the youngest of five brothers. His father was a scholar and a government official. His first exposure to Honglou meng was through his mother, who he said read it to him when he was a child. Later an uncle gave him a copy of the novel. He received an excellent early education in the Chinese classics, and then studied English in the Department of Western Languages and Literature at Yenching University in Beijing. There he impressed his foreign teachers with his impressive English ability, wrote poetry, and translated British poetry into Chinese. His translations of the Romantic age poet Percy Bysshe Shelley greatly impressed the noted scholar and novelist 钱钟书 Qian Zhongshu. The renowned scholar, philosopher, and redologist Hu Shih 胡 适, who called Zhou his best student, was so taken by Zhou’s ability that he loaned him his prized 1754 manuscript copy of Honglou Meng for study. After graduation, Zhou taught English at Sichuan University for a short time before returning to Beijing where he worked at the People’s Publishing House researching classical Chinese literature.
In 1953, Zhou published his first and most famous work Honglou Meng Xinzheng 红楼梦新证 (New Evidence on Dream of the Red Chamber), a comprehensive 400,000 word study of the life of Cao Xueqin and his unique family. Zhou later stated that he read 1,000 books for this study and conducted research in government archives and the Forbidden City. This book had a major influence upon the study of Honglou Meng (Redology) and established Zhou’s reputation as one of its foremost scholars. The famous Yale University sinologist Jonathan Spence has called this book “a work of such subtlety and meticulous scholarship that it is hard to fault… His book is a brilliant work of research on the Ts’ao [Cao] family background, as well as being a mine of information.” Wu Shih Ch’ang, the author of On the Red Dream: A Critical Study of Two Annotated Manuscripts of the 18th Century, the first book to appear on Honglou Meng in English, wrote that Zhou’s study “dwarfed all the previous works on this subject. That a bulky academic work of such serious nature should have sold three impressions amounting to 17,000 copies within four months (Sept. - Dec. 1953) is itself a fair comment on the merit of Zhou’s book. The present author is indebted to Mr. Chou for his painstaking collection of invaluable materials from sources normally inaccessible to the public.” In the book, Zhou advanced the thesis that Honglou Meng was largely autobiographical and reflected Cao Xueqin’s own tragic family history as Han bondservants who were attached to a Manchu Banner group.
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