This story attempts to expose the maladies of feudal patriarchy and the feudal code ethics. A Madman's Diary, a short story published in New Youth(a progressive journal of that time) in May 1918, had epochal significance, marking the beginning of a brand new literary era. Lu Xun was a great pioneer in this reform. The literary style of modern Chinese fiction was formed based on foreign fiction and the reformed traditional Chinese storytelling scripts. He was Chinese literature instructor at National Beijing University (1920-26), and also taught at Xiamen (Amoy) University (1926) and University of Canton (1927). From 1912 to 1926 he held a post in the ministry of education in Beijing. In 1910-1911 he was a teacher in Shaoxing. He studied privately and returned in 1909 to China. In 1906 he dropped out of the school to devote himself entirely to writing. In 1902 went to Japan where he studied Japanese language and then medicine at Sendai Provincial Medical School. He received a traditional education before he attended Jiangnan Naval Academy (1898-99) and School of Railway and Mines (1899-1902) in Nanjing. Lu Xun was born in Shaoxing, in Zhejiang province, into an impoverished but educated gentry family. ![]() They begin binding their daughter's feet.Lu Xun (1881 -1936) was a great modern Chinese man of letters, thinker and revolutionary, and also the founder of modern literature in China. The Sevenpounders relax, as it seems the emperor is not coming back after all. Another neighbour remembers that Mrs Sevenpounder did not object when her husband stopped growing his queue, and an argument breaks out.Ī fortnight later, Mrs Sevenpounder notices that Mr Zhao has coiled up his queue again, and is not wearing his gown. Trusting in Zhao's scholarship, Mrs Sevenpounder gives up all hope and curses her husband for having shaven off his queue. Zhao bears Sevenpounder a grudge, and taunts him that he will now be executed. Mrs Sevenpounder notices that he is wearing his special gown which he only does when an enemy has met with misfortune. Zhao had only coiled up his queue, and has now let it down. ![]() Zhao is renowned as the greatest scholar for ten miles round, as he reads the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. ![]() He worries, as people in town had shaved off his queue during the revolution. The boatman Sevenpounder (七斤) comes back to his village one night, bringing the news to his family that "the Emperor has returned to the Dragon Throne". Given the primitive communications infrastructure in China, this news took longer to spread to rural and remote areas. In July 1917 the Qing loyalist Zhang Xun attempted to restore Puyi to the throne, but the revolt collapsed in a fortnight. ![]() After the last emperor Puyi abdicated in 1912, the Republic of China was established and the queue was widely abandoned. On the other hand, during the Taiping Rebellion, the revolutionaries would execute anyone who wore the queue as a presumed Qing loyalist. In 1644, after the conquest of China by the Manchurian Qing dynasty, Han Chinese males were forced on pain of execution to adopt the queue, a Manchurian hairstyle consisting of shaving the forehead and wearing the rest of one's hair in a long plait.
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