Guo Moruo

Guo Moruo is a widely acclaimed author, playwright, poet, historian and archaeologist of the 20th century. He is well known for his vernacular Chinese poets, novels and dramas.

Born in 1892 into a landlord merchant’s family in Leshan, Sichuan Province, Guo was first tutored privately when he was a child. In 1906, he entered a primary school at Jiading, and in 1910 he studied in a high school in Chengdu. Under the influence of the Revolution in 1911, Guo became a zealous activist for democratic cause. Also in the same year, Guo’s family announced an arranged marriage for him. He tied the knot with the unseen bride in 1912, but immediately regretted the marriage and went back to Chengdu. During Guo’s whole life, he never formally divorced Zhang Qionghua, his first wife, yet neither lived with her.

In 1914, he went to Tokyo No.1 High School in Japan. After that, he entered Sixth Higher School in Okayama. He met his second wife—Sato Tomiko at St. Luke’s Hospital in Tokyo. The couple stayed together for 20 years until the outbreak of the anti-Japanese Aggression War (1937-1945). They had five children.

When finished his study at the Sixth Higher School, Guo was later admitted to the Imperial University in Kyushu, where he majored in medicine. But as a big fan of literature, he read a lot of the works of Tagore, Goethe, Shakespeare and Whitman. In 1918 he wrote his first poet A Shepherd’s Sorrow-- a patriotic piece appeared on the monthly New China. Soon he published many poems and collected them in Goddesses. In 1921, he co-founded the Creation Society with Cheng Fangwu and Yu Dafu, and published Creation Quarterly. He returned to China in 1923 after his graduation from the Imperial University in Kyushu. And then he edited Creation Weekly and Day of Creation.

In 1925, he moved to Guangzhou to teach at Guangdong University as dean of the School of Arts. When the North Expedition began in 1926, he became secretary general of the expedition army’s political department. He joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) in the following year when Nanchang Uprising took place. His historical plays, such as Wang Zhaojun, Zhuo Wenjun and Nie Ying, were clearly written with anti-feudalist themes, which labeled his works with revolutionary literature.

In 1928 when the Nanchang Uprising failed, he fled to Japan under the pursuit of Kuomintang police. In 1930 he joined in the Tokyo branch of the Chinese League of Left-Wing writers. During that time, he focused on translating foreign literature and studying Chinese history and paleography. When the anti-Japanese Aggression War broke out, he returned to China and took charge of Salvation Daily. He also joined the All-China Resist-the-Enemy Federation of Writers and Artists. A year later, he remarried Yu Liqun, a Shanghai actress. During the war, his historical play Qu Yuan, which focused on a patriotic poet in Warring States Period (475-221BC), was staged nationwide. When the war ended in 1945, he began to write memoirs, literary criticism, and political essays. Sato was trying to reunite with Guo after the war, but only to find he formed another family.

After the liberation, Guo became a government official and a prolific writer. He was the first president of Chinese Academy of Sciences and the first president of University of Science and Technology of China. His later works include the poetic collections Ode to New China, The East Wind, the plays Cai Wenji and Wu Zetian and thesis Li Bai and Du Fu. Guo died in 1978 at age of 86.