Modern China's literature maps a century of seismic change — from the fall of empire through revolution, famine, Cultural Revolution, and headlong modernization. To travel through China with the right books is to see through multiple time layers simultaneously.
Beijing: Lu Xun and the May Fourth Generation
Lu Xun's sharp satirical stories — The True Story of Ah Q, Diary of a Madman — diagnosed China's social diseases at the dawn of the 20th century. His Beijing is still visible in the hutongs of the old city.
Shandong Province: Mo Yan's Ancestral World
Nobel laureate Mo Yan set most of his work in the fictional Gaomi County — based on his home in Shandong. Red Sorghum turns the sorghum fields into a landscape of wartime heroism and atrocity. The novel was made into Zhang Yimou's first internationally celebrated film.
Shanghai: Wang Anyi's Labyrinth
Wang Anyi is Shanghai's great novelist — her Song of Everlasting Regret follows a Shanghai beauty through the 20th century's upheavals. The novel's shikumen lane houses are vanishing but still discoverable in Xintiandi.
Map China's literary landscape at Genesis of Literary.