Chinese literature is not a dusty museum, but a still flowing river. Direct to the curiosity of countless foreign readers: if I want to understand China, which book, which poem and which story should I start with? In other words, Chinese literature is the most economical “port of entry” for air tickets. The following text gives you a road map that you can see while walking.
Classical: Why Does Chinese Literature Start From The Book of Songs?
There are 305 pieces in the The Book of Songs, which can be recited by semi-mathematical children.
It compressed the voice of folk picking, sacrifice and love into four character sentences, like the early micro-blog. The key point is: Chinese characters monosyllable + rhyme, so that the poem is very easy to sing.
In 2019, according to the statistics in the early China Journal, the book contains 143 kinds of plants and 98 kinds of animals. Foreign netizens directly use it as the “ancient Chinese animal and plant map” (Cook & Li, 2,019).
Tang Poetry and Song Poetry: The Golden Two of Chinese Literature
In the 289 years of the Tang Dynasty, there were more than 5 poems left; In 319 of the Song Dynasty, there were more than 2 million CI. The data seems hard, but tourists are more concerned about the “cool point”:
- 5 minutes to learn to level, the total number of 3 popular teaching videos on YouTube was more than 6 million, and the common comment area is “original Chinese tone = rhythm.”.
- the four-character sign “broken bridge and snow” in the West Lake of Hangzhou, which comes from the Southern Song Dynasty poet Zhou Mi; in 2023, Tripadvisor listed the experience among “China’s top 10 literary landmarks.”
It means that you recite the sentence “to compare the West Lake with the west” and take photos with your own filter. At the moment, Chinese literature has become a cultural capital that can be consumed and punched.
Four Famous Works: Read the “Chinese Society Manual” at One Stroke
A lot of people are worried about it being too long. Cut 120 “Three Kingdoms” into short videos of “workplace 36”, with a single maximum of 14 million (Bilibili 2,024 ‐ 04 data). This shows that: as long as you find the right incision, the voluminous volume can also become light. There are three speed reading routes for foreign readers to ensure no pitfalls:
- want to be promoted → read the Three Kingdoms
- want to start a business
- want to fall in love
Each route is equipped with key chapters, the reading time is controlled at 3 hours, and the “Chinese literature introduction KPI” is easily completed.
Modern Transformation: How to Write “City and Machine” in Chinese Literature?
In 1917, Hu Shi published “On the Improvement of Literature”, classical Chinese exited, and vernacular appeared.
The key word in the modern stage is “urbanization”. Lu Xun wrote about the Shaoxing guild hall, Eileen Chang wrote about the Shanghai apartment, and Luyao wrote about the Northern Shaanxi mine. Urban experience replaced pastoral as a new narrative vein.
In 2022, Shanghai Translation Publishing House made statistics on Amazon’s Chinese stores, and the annual sales of Lu Xun’s English version of “Scream” maintained a 25% increase for 5 consecutive years (Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2,022). reason? The short stories are easy to read, and the social media “golden sentence screenshot” brings two times of dissemination.
Contemporary: Internet and Science Fiction Make Chinese Literature “Out of the Circle”
By the end of 2023, the company’s overseas portal Webnovel had published 2,300 online texts and registered 110 million non-Chinese users.
Liu Cixin’s “Three Body” has sold more than 30 million copies, and has been translated into 30 languages. According to Google’s Keyword Planner, “Three-Body Problem” is searched 110,000 times a month around the world. Science fiction has become the new “universal currency” of Chinese literature, because it provides a human level motif: universe, destruction, redemption, without having to recite 3,000 Chinese characters first, you can empathize.
Learn 5 Key Words, Understand Chinese Literature Review Circle in Seconds
- character: literati
- Bixing: first talk about other things to arouse the chant
- expressive: to write people, you need to write eyes
- blank: don’t tell
- artistic conception: picture + emotional combination
Write the above 5 words into the travel diary. The Douban group “ChineseLit101” immediately praised it. The local book friends will also send you a private letter “do you want to go to Liulichang old bookstall?”.
Travel Grafting: Follow the Literature Map, Deeper Than the Strategy
How do I do the immersion experience?
- Beijing: Jingshan Hill – the Imperial Palace – Beihai, a “Jia Fu personnel line” after the forty rounds of the red chamber;
- Suzhou: read six chapters of Floating Life at night in Humble Administrator’s Garden to see the bonsai written by Shen Fu;
- Changsha: Taiping old street + Jia Yi’s former residence, reading the “hanging Quyuan Fu”;
- Dunhuang: on the back of Yumen pass, “Yellow River is far above the white clouds”, the wind and sand are together, and the poem is automatically read.
According to the research of Ctrip in 2023, the free online order of “literature card” increased by 46% over the same period of the previous year, of which 63% of tourists will download the relevant e-books in advance (Ctrip Research Institute, 2,023).
New Ways to Learn Chinese: Using Chinese Literature as a Teaching Material
Traditional textbooks: teach “hello” first. New way to play: read Yu Guangzhong’s nostalgia in Chinese and English, split 7 words per line, and remember the high-frequency words “stamp” and “ticket” by the way. In the Duolingo Chinese course, the sentence card of nostalgia has been introduced, and the completion rate has increased by 18% (Duolingo Language Report, 2,022)).
Literary text = context, which can trigger long-term memory more than isolated words. Chinese Literature = A Fast Track to China. From the four words of The Book of Songs to the universe of science fiction, there is no gate in this river, only a dock.
To understand her, you don’t need to be a Sinologist first; To recite a poem, share a TikTok, and copy an original passage in the journey to put it into the circle of friends is the “entry chapter” in the sense of soft power. The key lies in: treat literature as a living map, not a dead textbook. Only in this way can Chinese literature truly become a “cultural port” that will never close.
Reference
Cook, C., & Li, Y. (2019). Flora and Fauna in the Shijing. Early China, vol. 42, pp. 1-26. https://doi.org/10.1017/eac.2019.1
Shanghai Translation Publishing House. (2022). Annual Export Report of Chinese Literary Translations. https://www.stph.com.cn/report2022.pdf
