Su Manshu
1884–1918
Biography
Su Manshu (1884–1918) was a Chinese writer, poet, painter and translator who lived at the end of the Qing dynasty and in the early Republic. He was born in Yokohama, Japan, to a Cantonese merchant and a Japanese woman who worked in his father's household, and the family's ancestral home was in Guangdong province. For part of his life he lived as a Buddhist monk, which earned him the name of a poet-monk, and he was also known for his support of the revolutionary cause. He died in Shanghai in 1918, at the age of thirty-four, of a stomach illness.
His reputation rests on poetry, painting, translation and fiction. Among his prose works, the novella 斷鴻零雁記 (Duanhong Lingyan Ji) is the best known. It is widely read as drawing on his own life, and its plot is a tragic love story that cannot be fulfilled. He also rendered European poems and stories into Chinese, which introduced foreign writing to readers of his time, and Chinese reference works count him among the three great poet-monks of the early Republic.
On this site, 斷鴻零雁記 is credited to him under the name above, and the simplified spelling 苏曼殊 is the other form used on books. The Chinese article lists several names he used, including his religious name Manshu, and the English article gives the outline of his life. Both are listed below for readers who want to check the details.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
斷鴻零雁記
by 蘇曼殊
A young monk of mixed Chinese and Japanese blood remembers his lost childhood in Japan and the love that cannot be fulfilled with the girl Jingzi. Su Manshu's first-person romance of 1912 is told in a lyrical literary prose. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.