Qu Yuan
Qu Yuan began to be treated in a nationalist way as "China's first patriotic poet" during World War II. Wen Yiduo—a socialist poet and scholar later executed by the KMT—wrote in his "Mythology &amp; Poetry" that, "although Qu Yuan did not write about the life of the people or voice their sufferings, he may truthfully be said to have acted as the leader of a people's revolution and to have struck a blow to avenge them. Qu Yuan is the only person in the whole of Chinese history who is fully entitled to be called 'the people's poet'." Guo Moruo's 1942 play "Qu Yuan" gave him similar treatment, drawing parallels to "Hamlet" and "King Lear". Their view of Qu's social idealism and unbending patriotism became canonical under the People's Republic of China after the 1949 Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. For example, one high-school Chinese textbook from 1957 began with the sentence "Qu Yuan was the first great patriotic poet in the history of our country's literature". This cult status increased Qu Yuan's position within China's literary canon, seeing him placed on postage stamps and the Dragon Boat Festival elevated to a national holiday in 2005. It has, however, come at the expense of more the critical scholarly appraisals of Qu Yuan's historicity and alleged body of work that had developed during the late Qing and early Republic.