Chinese Literature and Film for Travellers

The art and architecture pillar covers how to look at things. This one covers what to read and watch first, and — more usefully — where the good ones are set, so that a book can attach itself to a place you are actually going.

Two honest warnings before the list. Reading lists for China are usually assembled from reputation, which is why so many people arrive having bounced off a famous novel and concluded the whole literature is impenetrable. And a great deal of Chinese fiction is either untranslated or in translations that go out of print quickly, so availability matters as much as quality.

If you are taking one thing on the flight#

**An abridged Journey to the West (西游记).** It is a sixteenth-century picaresque about a monk, a shape-shifting monkey, a pig and a river demon travelling to India for scriptures, and it is genuinely funny. Arthur Waley's abridgement, published as Monkey, is short, fast and the version most people should start with. Anthony C. Yu's complete translation for Chicago — first published in 1983, revised in 2012 — is the scholarly one and runs to four volumes; take it if you want all of it.

Its value on a trip is high, because the story is everywhere: temple carvings, opera, television, statuary and merchandising all assume you know who the Monkey King is.

The four classical novels, honestly#

Dream of the Red Chamber is the one people feel obliged to attempt. It deserves its standing — it is the great Chinese novel of interior life, family and decline — but it opens slowly, carries hundreds of named characters, and asks a lot of a reader with no grounding. David Hawkes's translation, The Story of the Stone, completed by John Minford, is superb English prose and the version to read if you read it. Do not make it your first Chinese book on a two-week trip.

Romance of the Three Kingdoms is the opposite problem: a fast, plot-heavy war epic that is hard to follow without a grasp of who is fighting whom. Moss Roberts's 1991 translation is the standard scholarly one and comes heavily annotated; there is also an abridgement. If Three Kingdoms sites are on your route — and they are all over the Yangtze and Sichuan — read a summary of the period in the history pillar first and the novel will open up.

Books mapped to places#

This is the part worth planning around: reading something set where you are going changes the place.

Lu Xun and Shaoxing. Lu Xun is the foundational figure of modern Chinese literature, and his stories — A Madman's Diary, The True Story of Ah Q, Kong Yiji — are short, sharp and available in good English translation. They are set in a thinly disguised version of his home town, Shaoxing in Zhejiang, and the town has preserved the whole quarter as a heritage district.

Mo Yan and Shandong. China's Nobel laureate in literature writes about a fictionalised version of his own home county, Gaomi in Shandong, which first appeared in his work in 1985 and which he has built into a complete imaginary territory across many novels — the comparison usually made is with Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha. Red Sorghum is the entry point.

Wang Anyi, Eileen Chang and Shanghai. The Song of Everlasting Sorrow follows one woman through Shanghai from the 1940s to the 1990s and is often called the modern epic of the city; it won the Mao Dun Literature Prize. Critics generally read Wang Anyi as working in the line of Eileen Chang (张爱玲), whose Shanghai stories of the 1940s are the other essential city text. Read either before Shanghai and the former concession streets stop being merely photogenic.

Yu Hua, anywhere rural. To Live is the most widely recommended modern Chinese novel for outsiders and deserves it: a plain, devastating account of one family through the middle of the twentieth century. It is not tied to a named province, which is part of its point.

Films, and where they were shot#

Chinese cinema became internationally visible through the Fifth Generation — the directors who graduated from the Beijing Film Academy in the early 1980s — and then through the Sixth Generation, who worked smaller, rougher and often outside the state system.

Farewell My Concubine (霸王别姬, 1993), directed by Chen Kaige and starring Leslie Cheung, Gong Li and Zhang Fengyi, is the single best introduction. It follows two Peking opera performers across fifty years of upheaval in Beijing, and it shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993 — the first Chinese-language film to win it.

Raise the Red Lantern (大红灯笼高高挂, 1991), Zhang Yimou with Gong Li, was shot at the Qiao Family Compound (乔家大院) at Qiaojiabao village in Qixian, Shanxi — a merchant mansion begun in 1756 that the film turned into the emblematic Shanxi courtyard house. It won the Silver Lion for direction at Venice and was nominated for the Academy Award for best foreign film. If you go to the compound, you are walking the set.

Red Sorghum (红高粱, 1988) was Zhang Yimou's first feature, adapted from Mo Yan, and won the Golden Bear at Berlin. It is the film that introduced both men and Gong Li to the world.

Jia Zhangke and Fenyang. The leading Sixth Generation director grew up in Fenyang, a small city in Shanxi, and filmed there repeatedly — Xiao Wu in the old town, Platform following a troupe of performers from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. His films are the best available record of what ordinary provincial Chinese towns looked and felt like during the transition, which is exactly the texture most travel writing misses.

Poetry, which is the most place-attached of all#

If you want literature that maps onto physical sites more tightly than anything else, it is Tang poetry — and it is the body of writing Chinese visitors actually carry in their heads.

The mechanism is worth understanding before you meet it. Famous poems are attached to specific buildings and views, learned in school, and quoted on the signage at the site itself. A Chinese visitor arriving at a well-known tower or pass is frequently completing a text they have known since childhood, which is why a viewpoint that looks unremarkable to you can be crowded with people who are moved.

The clearest example is the Yellow Crane Tower in Wuhan. Cui Hao's poem about it is one of the most admired in the language — Li Bai is said to have declined to write his own on seeing it, remarking that there was a view before him he could not put into words because Cui Hao's poem was already up there. Li Bai then wrote a different and equally famous poem sending a friend off from the same tower. Critics have argued for centuries about whether Cui Hao's is the finest regulated verse in Chinese or whether Du Fu's Climbing High takes it, which tells you how seriously this is taken.

You do not need to read the poems in Chinese to benefit. Knowing that a site carries a text, and that the people around you know it, changes what the crowd at a railing means.

Documentary and television#

A Bite of China (舌尖上的中国) is the food documentary series that changed how Chinese audiences talk about their own regional cooking, and it is genuinely good preparation — it is about production, seasons and families rather than restaurants. Watch an episode before reading the food pillar and the regional map will stick.

Beyond that, museum and heritage documentaries produced by Chinese state broadcasters are often excellent on objects and architecture, and are worth more than most foreign travel programming about China.

Places you can actually stand in#

Two literary sites are straightforward to visit and worth the detour.

Lu Xun's Shaoxing is preserved as a heritage quarter on Lu Xun Middle Road in Yuecheng district, taking in the family's old and new compounds, the schoolroom of From the Hundred Plant Garden to the Three Flavour Study, and a museum. It was designated a national protected site in 1988. Sources give different street numbers for the different buildings within the quarter, so navigate to the district rather than to a number.

The Qiao Family Compound at Qiaojiabao village, Qixian, Shanxi, is the Raise the Red Lantern house and a serious piece of Qing merchant architecture in its own right — the art and architecture pillar covers how to read courtyard buildings like it.

Frequently asked questions#

What should I read before travelling to China?#

For one book on a flight, an abridged Journey to the West — Arthur Waley's Monkey is short and genuinely entertaining, and the story is referenced everywhere you will travel. For modern China, Yu Hua's To Live. If you are going to Shanghai, Wang Anyi or Eileen Chang.

Is Dream of the Red Chamber worth reading?#

It is the most admired Chinese novel and a demanding first encounter — slow to open, with hundreds of characters. David Hawkes's translation, The Story of the Stone, completed by John Minford, is excellent. It is a better second or third Chinese book than a first.

Which translation of Journey to the West is best?#

Anthony C. Yu's complete translation, published by Chicago in 1983 and revised in 2012, is the scholarly standard and runs to four volumes. Arthur Waley's Monkey is an abridgement, much shorter, and the better introduction for most readers.

What Chinese film should I watch before visiting?#

Farewell My Concubine (1993), Chen Kaige's film about two Peking opera performers across fifty years, which shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes and remains the strongest single introduction to twentieth-century China on screen.

Where was Raise the Red Lantern filmed?#

At the Qiao Family Compound in Qiaojiabao village, Qixian, Shanxi — a merchant house begun in 1756 and now a museum. The film made it the best-known Shanxi courtyard mansion, and it can be visited.

Can I visit places from Chinese novels?#

Yes, in some cases directly. Lu Xun's Shaoxing is preserved as a heritage quarter and is the closest thing to walking into the stories. Mo Yan's Gaomi in Shandong exists, though the territory in the books is a fictionalised version of it.