Among them there are Ba Jin (real name Li Yaotang), who had his 99th birthday on November 25, and the late Shen Congwen.

When Shen Congwen died on May 10, 1988, Ba Jin was saddened to think that his dear friend's passing went relatively unnoticed by the world.

Over a decade on things have changed dramatically when it comes to recognizing worth, as it was when the 100th anniversary of Shen's birth arrived on Saturday. In the past few years, Shen has won arguably the largest group of contemporary readers of the genre of modern Chinese writers. And in honour of this venerable scribe, Chinese academic circles have organized a series of activities to celebrate his life and contribution to literature.

One such event was the International Forum on Shen Congwen held in mid-September in his hometown of Fenghuang, in Central China's Hunan Province.

As part of the programme of the one-week Congwen Festival, the forum attracted about 200 scholars from home and abroad.

Another was a symposium sponsored by the Chinese Museum of History held last Wednesday, and an on-going exhibition about Shen's life and writing, co-hosted by the Chinese Writers' Association and National Museum of Modern Literature which will last until January 28.

At the same time, the long-waited complete collection of writings of Shen Congwen has rolled off the presses. The corpus includes 32 volumes, more than half of which are published for the first time.

Countryman among literati

Born in a remote and legendary area of Central China, Shen's homeland of Xiangxi (western Hunan) has been his unfailing spiritual home and was an inexhaustible literary resource throughout his life.

His eclogue-like stories have attracted tens of thousands of visitors to the tiny inland town of Fenghuang (Phoenix), one of the most beautiful and distinctive small towns in China, every year since the 1990s.

In his veins flowed the blood of three ethnic groups: Han, Miao and Tujia, all no doubt contributed towards the creation of Shen's unique personality, colorful imagination and deep empathetic feelings for ethnic people and the lower social classes of western Hunan.

Before he was four Shen had easily learnt to write several hundred Chinese characters from his mother. But he was an incorrigible truant in primary school, the artist in him drawn irresistibly out of the confines of the classroom to the wonders to be found outside in nature and the kaleidoscopic street-life of his hometown.

In the acclaimed "Congwen Autobiography" Shen recalled: "Twenty years later, I find I cannot concentrate satisfactorily on the job in hand, but am always distracted by the spectacle of the broad world; suspicious of any precedent and entrenched idea, but always gaze upon the far prospect of life. Such a character develops from the truant habits of my childhood."

At the age of 14, Shen went soldiering, in line with the local convention. For about six years, he "seldom slept on the same bed for several consecutive nights," roaming ceaselessly, either as a militiaman or living like a tramp at other times.

At the same time, the teenager witnessed extremes of brutality and heroism that occurred around him during those turbulent times. He was later to base many of his stories on the experiences of this period.

However, just as Wu Fuhui, now the vice-curator of the National Museum of Modern Literature, in "The 30 Years of Chinese Modern Literature" comments: "The precocious familiarity to brutality, precluded any possibility for Shen to pen them as exotic things to flaunt, but rather, helped shape in him a personality that always pursued beautiful life and virtue."

In 1923, in the wake of the May 4th Movement, young Shen decided he should go to Beijing, "to enter a school whose semester will never end, and learn the lesson of life that will never be exhausted."

In a wretched city room he called his "Narrow and Mouldy Cabin," the young countryman, who hardly knew punctuation in the beginning, and "owned nothing except faith," fervently devoted himself to studying and writing.

It was his lifetime habit to call his works "writing exercises." In 1924 he got the first one of these "exercises" published, and from that first success he maintained the momentum of writing and publishing until 1948.

While writing, he took up various jobs to support himself, and later, his family. Written in snatched periods, most of his more than 200 short stories and 10 novels demonstrate how Shen nonetheless painstakingly weighed every word and sentence. Some of the works were rewritten dozens of times.

Wang Zengqi (1920-97), Shen's principal student and a famous writer, revealed in a tribute to the maestro that one of Shen's idiosyncratic idioms was naifan (to bear boredom patiently). "I am not a genius, I just could 'naifan'," Shen was oft to say.

Literary pursuit

The foremost literary contribution of Shen is the unique "Xiangxi world" he illuminated.

Ling Yu, a leading scholar of Shen Congwen on the Chinese mainland, said: "Thanks to him, the mysterious land of 'Xiangxi' emerges in front of the people of the world as a most pristine, free, and vigorous realm. He is both the painter of Xiangxi's people and the very embodiment of Xiangxi's soul."

Wu Fuhui comments in his book: "The healthy and integrated humanity that 'Xiangxi' represents, and 'a kind of living pattern which is beautiful, healthy, natural, and not in conflict with humanity,' is the whole content his writing means to convey."

One of Shen's literary confessions, often cited by researchers is: "I just want to build a small Greek temple; what is worshipped in the temple is humanity."

Under his lyrical narrative of pastoral innocence is often hidden a stream of profound social and historical contemplations, a relatively unexamined field that today's researchers are showing great interest in exploring.

Silent plowman

Never has another man of letters in China divided his career into two distinct phases so abruptly as Shen.

In the second half of his life, he devoted all his energy and time to being a researcher of ancient Chinese cultural relics.

The memorial "The Union," written by his younger son Shen Huchu, most movingly records the silent spiritual storm he went through at that time.

Shen was severely criticized by the writers of the Leftist League in the late 1940s for his indulgence of the emotions of the petty bourgeoisie at a time when the Chinese people were facing life-and-death struggles. In the face of these criticisms, Shen suspected that he might have strayed out of the age and was unqualified to write any more.

Before long he was lost in the magnificent realm of artefacts in the Chinese Museum of History, of which he had long been an enthusiastic admirer.

During the winter, Shen, wrapped in a cotton-padded overcoat, would carry on working in the big dusty artefact storehouse for 14 hours a day, oblivious to coldness for lack of central heating.

"Now he poured on these artefacts the same enormous passion just as before on his Xiangxi earth. For they both represent a beauty that is crystallized by the profound history and culture of a nation," Wang Zengqi said in one of his several tributes to his mentor.

Shen worked right up until the last days of his life. In 40 years he examined millions of ancient artefacts, and wrote historic monographs on an unbelievably wide scope of ancient Chinese artefacts, including silk, furniture, painting, porcelain, fans, lamps, stone, and all the time with dozens of research projects on the waiting list.

His most important work, "Ancient Chinese Costume," is a monumental tome in its field.

According to his friends and family, the beauty of classical music often moved Shen to tears, and he could be quite entranced when talking with anybody about the beauty of ancient Chinese art. "Life is so beautiful," Shen used to say in his stories and in all the photographs taken of him he is seen smiling.

In contrast to his zeal for the beauty of art, his friends were often impressed, sometimes shocked, by his extreme indifference to personal, material concerns.

As a life-long lover of antiques, he could not resist buying that which caught his eye and captivated his heart using all the money his wife saved from household expenses to do so. Having bought them home, however, he would happily see to it that they were given to friends or donated to museums.

Late discovery

After being forgotten for almost four decades, the literary works of Shen were rediscovered and since the late 1970s have won an increasing level of acclaim.

By 2002, 123 pieces of his works had been translated into 13 languages and published in 15 countries. In China alone, up to 60 different publications of his writings have been printed in the past two decades.

Shen's name also looms large on the Western academic horizon. Many Sinologists devote considerable effort to researching or translating his works. Among them there are leaders in the field such as Goran Malmqvist, a life member of the Swedish Academy of the Nobel Foundation, Xia Zhiqing (C. T. Hsia), the Emeritus Professor of Chinese in Columbia University, and Jeffrey C. Kinkley, Professor of History at St John's University.

Shen's increasing fame and popularity is well-deserved. But never vainglorious, Shen himself, if he were alive, would probably shun his lionization by literary society.

(China Daily December 31, 2002)