Wu Jianren
1866–1910
Biography
Wu Jianren, who also wrote his name 吳趼人 and went by Wu Woyao, was a novelist and magazine editor of the late Qing period. He was born in 1866 in Fatshan, a town in Guangdong province in southern China, into a family that had served the imperial government. His father's death left the household poor, and at eighteen he moved to Shanghai and took clerical and editorial work there. In 1906 he became chief editor of a fiction magazine. He died in 1910, about a year before the revolution that ended the Qing dynasty.
His best-known novel is Strange Events Witnessed over Twenty Years (二十年目睹之怪現狀). It is a long, episodic satire in which the narrator meets one figure after another, and through them shows officials, merchants and families cheating and ruining one another. The book is counted among the four great novels of exposure of late Qing China, works that attacked the abuses of their age head on. Wu also took part in the debate that Liang Qichao set off in 1902, about what fiction could do for the nation, and he is often counted among the pioneers of the modern Chinese novel.
Two of his novels are on this site. Strange Events Witnessed over Twenty Years is the longer and more famous of them. The other, A Strange Case of Nine Murders (九命奇冤), carries his name in traditional characters, 吳趼人. For anyone who wants to check the details of his life, the English and Chinese Wikipedia articles listed below are the places to start.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
九命奇冤
by 吳趼人
A feud over a family's graves and a villain's greed lead to nine deaths in Guangdong, and a long fight through the courts to reach justice. Wu Jianren's mystery is told with unusual order and was an early Chinese detective novel.
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.二十年目睹之怪現狀
by Wu Jianren
A young man who calls himself Nine Deaths travels among the officials, merchants and swindlers of the late Qing for twenty years and writes down every fraud he sees. A sprawling satirical novel of a society where nothing is what it pretends to be. This book uses the racial and…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.