Ba Jin, one of China's most acclaimed novelists of the past century, died yesterday evening in a Shanghai hospital aged 101.

"We have lost one of the most sensitive hearts of our time and one of the most important and widely read Chinese writers of the 20th century," said Chen Sihe, professor and dean of the Chinese Language and Literature Department of Fudan University.

"He was a scholar in every meaning of the word, with a noble character and a love for all," Li Xiaotang, son of Ba and his late wife Xiao Shan, told China Daily.

Born into a wealthy family in Chengdu, capital of southwest China's Sichuan Province, in 1904, the writer, who preferred his pen name Ba Jin to his given names of Li Yaotang or Li Feigan, received a broad education in his hometown and Shanghai, and traveled to France from 1927 to 1928.

It was in France that Ba started his literary career. His first novel, Miewang (destruction), was a tale of romance and revolution.

He was best known for his trilogy Jiliu (torrent), which was written between 1931 and 1940, and comprised three semi-autobiographical novels.

The three - Family, Spring and Autumn - were enormously popular with Chinese young people at the time and later. They attacked traditional Chinese family structures and depicted the struggles and tragedies, love and hatred of the younger generation in a saga of family decline.

Some of his strongest writings were created during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (1937-45), including the short novels A Garden of Repose (1944), Ward No.4 (1946) and Cold Nights (1947), according to Chen, who has researched the writer and his works for two decades.

(China Daily October 18, 2005)