page_title: Lu Xun
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Lu Xun / Biography / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Lu Xun in his youth
context_page_description: Lu Xun was the pen name of Zhou Shuren, a Chinese writer, essayist, poet, and literary critic. He was a leading figure of modern Chinese literature. Writing in Vernacular Chinese and Classical Chinese, he was a short story writer, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, poet, and designer. In the 1930s, he became the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai.
  Lu Xun was born into a family of landlords and government officials in Shaoxing, Zhejiang; the family's financial resources declined over the course of his youth. Lu aspired to take the imperial civil service exam, but due to his family's relative poverty he was forced to attend government-funded schools teaching "Western education." Upon graduation, Lu went to medical school in Japan but later dropped out. He became interested in studying literature but was eventually forced to return to China because of his family's lack of funds. After returning to China, Lu worked for several years teaching at local secondary schools and colleges before finally finding a job at the Republic of China Ministry of Education.
context_section_description: Lu Xun was born in Shaoxing, Zhejiang. As was common in pre-modern China, Lu Xun had many names. His birth name was "Zhou Zhangshou" (Chinese: 周樟壽; pinyin: Zhōu Zhāngshòu). His courtesy name was "Yushan" (Chinese: 豫山; pinyin: Yùshān), but he later changed that to "Yucai" (Chinese: 豫才; pinyin: Yùcái). In 1898, before he went to the Jiangnan Naval Academy, he took the given name "Shuren" (Chinese: 樹人; pinyin: Shùrén)—which means, figuratively, "to be an educated man". The name by which he is best known internationally, "Lu Xun", was a literary pseudonym that he chose when his fiction novel "A Madman's Diary" was first published, in 1918.
  By the time Lu Xun was born, the Zhou family had been prosperous for centuries, and had become wealthy through landowning, pawnbroking, and by having several family members promoted to government positions. His paternal grandfather, Zhou Fuqing, was appointed to the Imperial Hanlin Academy in Beijing: the highest position possible for aspiring civil servants at that time. Lu's early education was based on the Confucian classics, in which he studied poetry, history, and philosophy—subjects which, he later reflected, were neither useful nor interesting to him. Instead, he enjoyed folk stories and traditions: local operas, the mythological creatures and stories in the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and the ghost stories told to him by an illiterate servant who raised him, Ah Chang (whom he called "Mother Chang"). Zhou's mother was a member of the same landed gentry class as Lu Xun's father, from a slightly smaller town in the countryside (Anqiaotou, Zhejiang; a part of Tongxiang City). Because formal education was not considered socially appropriate for girls, she did not receive any, but she still taught herself how to read and write. The surname "Lu (魯)" in Zhou Shouren's pen name, "Lu Xun", was the same as his mother's surname, "Lu".
  By the time Lu was born, his family's prosperity had already been declining. His father, Zhou Boyi, had been successful at passing the lowest, county-level imperial examinations (the route to wealth and social success in imperial China), but was unsuccessful in writing the more competitive provincial-level examinations (the juren exam). In 1893 Zhou Boyi was discovered attempting to bribe an examination official. Lu Xun's grandfather was implicated, and was arrested and sentenced to beheading for his son's crime. The sentence was later commuted, and he was imprisoned in Hangzhou instead. After the affair, Zhou Boyi was stripped of his position in the government and forbidden to ever again write the civil service examinations. The Zhou family only prevented Lu's grandfather from being executed through regular, expensive bribes to authorities, until he was finally released in 1901.
  After the family's attempt at bribery was discovered, Zhou Boyi engaged in heavy drinking and opium use, and his health declined. Local Chinese doctors attempted to cure him through a series of expensive quack prescriptions, including monogamous crickets, sugar cane that had survived frost three times, ink, and the skin from a drum. Despite these expensive treatments, Zhou Boyi died of an asthma attack at age 35 in 1896. He might have suffered from dropsy.
caption: Lu Xun in his youth
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