author
Bangqing Han
1856–1894
A late-Qing writer who turned Shanghai’s pleasure quarters into sharp, vivid fiction, he is best remembered for The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai. His work helped bring everyday speech and urban life into Chinese literature in a fresh, modern way.
1 Audiobook
海上花列傳
by Bangqing Han
About the author
Born in 1856 in Songjiang, in what is now part of Shanghai, Han Bangqing was a Chinese writer of the late Qing period. Sources describe him as the son of an official, and note that he spent part of his youth in Beijing before returning to Shanghai. He repeatedly tried the civil service examinations but did not succeed, and he eventually turned instead to literary and journalistic work.
He is best known for The Sing-song Girls of Shanghai (also translated under other titles), a novel first published in serialized form in the 1890s. The book is known for its detailed portrait of courtesan life in Shanghai and for its use of lively spoken language, qualities that later readers and critics have seen as important in the development of modern Chinese fiction.
Han Bangqing died in 1894, still relatively young, but his reputation lasted well beyond his lifetime. Today he is remembered as a keen observer of city life whose writing captured a changing Shanghai with unusual realism and emotional nuance.