Han Bangqing
1856–1894
Biography
Han Bangqing (1856–1894) was a late Qing writer from Lou County in Songjiang Prefecture, a place that is now part of the Songjiang district of Shanghai. His name is written 韓邦慶 in traditional characters and 韩邦庆 in simplified ones. He failed the civil service examinations several times, and so he turned to journalism, writing for the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao.
In 1892 he launched a fiction magazine, Haishang qishu (Strange Books of Shanghai), and serialised his novel Haishang hua liezhuan in it. He died not long after the novel was published, at the age of thirty-eight. The English title most often used is Flowers of Shanghai. The book follows courtesans and their clients in the pleasure quarters of late nineteenth-century Shanghai, and much of its dialogue is written in the local Shanghai dialect. Its frank, observant portrait of city life is one reason it is counted among the important early realistic novels in Chinese.
The site holds the novel itself, Haishang hua liezhuan, which is his best-known work. It offers a long and detailed view of Shanghai life from the inside, and the reader can hear how people spoke in the city in the early 1890s.
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Books
海上花列傳
by Han Bangqing
In the courtesan houses of 1890s Shanghai, clients, sing-song girls and their madams bargain over money, love and position. Its dialogue is written in Wu dialect, and its many interwoven stories are told with cool, unsentimental realism. This book contains scenes of violence as…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.