On November 10, 1910, Ch'ien Chung-shu, the author of Fortress Besieged, was born into a literary family in Wuhsi, Kiangsu provinceHis father Ch'ien Chi-po (1887?1957) was a renowned literary historian and university professorCh'ien was a precocious child, noted for his photographic memory and brilliance in writing Chinese verse and proseUpon graduation from grade school, he attended StJohn's University Affiliated High Schools in Soochow and WuhsiIn high school, Ch'ien excelled in EnglishWhen he sat for the matriculation examination of the prestigious Tsing-hua University, it was said that he scored very poorly in mathematics but did so well in English and Chinese composition that he passed the examination with some ~cIat At Tsing-hua, Ch'ien was known as an arrogant young man, who cut lectures and kept much to himselfAmong his few intimate friends was Achilles Fang, the "word wizard" (as Marianne Moore called him), who was then a student in the department of philosophyThere Ch'ien also met his future wife Yang ChiangAfter graduating from Tsing-hua in 1933, he accepted a teaching appointment at Kuang-hua University in Shanghai In 1935, on a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship, Ch'ien went to Exeter College, Oxford, and majored in English literatureHe read more thrillers and detective yarns than was healthy for a student devoted to serious researchHe also developed a keen interest in Hegel's philosophy and Marcel Proust's fictionPerhaps most ego deflating was his failure to pass the probationer examination in English palaeography, and he had to sit for it a second timeNonetheless, he did achieve his Bdegree from Oxford in 1937His thesis, composed of three meticulously researched chapters ("China in the English Literature of the Seventeenth Century" and "China in the English Literature of the Eighteenth Century'), was later published in the English edition of the Quarterly Bulletin of Chinese Bibliography (Tu-shu chi-k'an)Having taken his Oxford degree, he studied a year in Paris Returning to China in 1938, the second year of the second Sino-Japanese War, Ch'ien, at home in the literatures of two or three major European languages, taught at the National Southwest Associated University in Kunming; i the National Teachers College at Lan-t'ien in Pao-ching, Hunan province; Aurora Women's College of Arts and Sciences in Shanghai; and Chi-nan University in ShanghaiFrom 1946 to 1948 he was also the editor of the English language periodical Philobiblion, published by the National Central University Library in Nanking Among the small corpus of pre-Communist works by Ch'ien, the following are noteworthyAt Tsing-hua he wrote a number of short stories and vignette-type essays for Crescent Moon (Hsin yuieh) and Literary Review (Wen-hsiieh tsa-chih) magazinesIn 1941 the essays were published in Shanghai as a volume entitled Marginalia of Life (Hsieh tsai jen-sheng pien shang)Some of the short stories were anthologized in his 1946 publication entitled Men, Beasts, and Ghosts (Jen, Shou, Kuei)In 1948 he published On the Art of Poetry (T'an yi in), composed in an elegant wen-y en, or classical, style After the Communist victory in 1949, he returned to Peking to teach at Tsing-hua UniversityWhile still in Shanghai, Ch'ien had become dissatisfied with Fortress Besieged, and thought he could do betterHe began to write another novel to be called "Heart of the Artichoke" (Pai-ho hsin), after Baudelaire's phrase "Le coeur d'artichaut He had written some 3,000 to 4,000 words, but unfortunately the manuscript was lost in the mail when the Ch'iens moved from Shanghai to PekingHe has not worked on the novel since then In Peking Ch'ien first worked as a researcher in the Foreign Literature Institute of the Academy of Sciences; then he transferred to the Chinese Literature Institute of the same academySince the foundation of the Institute of Literature in the Academy of Social Sciences in 1952, he has been one of its two senior fellows, the other being Yu Ping-Po, well-known for his studies on the Dream of the Red Chamber (Hung-lou meng)Ch'ien's wife Yang Chiang is a researcher in the institute Ch'ien seems to have abandoned the writing of his earlier vitriolic works and restricted himself to literary scholarshipHis most significant post-1949 work has been Annotated Selection of Sung Poetry (Sung-shib hsiian-chu), which was published in 1958Later he headed a team of scholars responsible for the writing of the T'ang and Sung sections of a history of Chinese literatureIn 1974 it was widely rumored that he had diedHsia to write a memorial essay, "In Memory of MrCh'ien Chung-shu" (Chui-nien Ch'ien Chung-shu hsien-sheng) ~6 Ch'ien, how ever, is alive and well and has been "resurrected" after the fall of the Gang of shop Four

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