Who are considered the best Chinese authors of all time?

Chinese canon1669 words

The six names, and why lists stop there

Ask a Chinese reader for the best authors in the tradition and you get a short list that barely varies: Du Fu, Li Bai, Cao Xueqin, Luo Guanzhong, Lu Xun, Mo Yan. Add Jin Yong for readership, add Sima Qian for prose, and you have the whole field. eight names, and roughly 2,200 years between the oldest and the newest.

What makes the list stable is that it covers separate centuries and separate forms. Nobody on it competes with anyone else on the same terms, which is why it survives contact with argument.

The exact numbers are the argument in miniature. Du Fu and Li Bai were born 11 years apart and died eight years apart, which means the tradition's 2 greatest poets were contemporaries who could have met. They met once, in 744, and the meeting survives in two poems. Chinese criticism has spent 1,200 years deciding which of them to put first anyway.

Du Fu, or why poetry outranks everything

The single most useful thing to understand about Chinese literary judgement is that poetry is the top of the hierarchy, and has been for two thousand years. The novel, however popular, arrived late and was for centuries regarded as entertainment for people who could not manage the classics.

Inside that hierarchy, Du Fu is usually first. The case against him is thin and the case for him is not: he wrote through the An Lushan rebellion of 755, lost a child to starvation, spent years displaced, and left roughly 1,400 poems. Li Bai left about 1,000. The man with fewer poems has the higher reputation, and that is the whole critical position in 1 fact.

He produced poems that hold the collapse of a state and the details of a family in the same line without either 1 swamping the other.

Li Bai is the opposite kind of greatness. Where Du Fu is effort you can hear, Li Bai is ease — a voice that seems to take no work. Readers love him more. Critics rank him just below. That gap between popular and critical standing is itself a Chinese literary fact worth knowing.

Cao Xueqin, the novel's one indisputable genius

Cao's single finished novel, Dream of the Red Chamber, sits at the top of Chinese fiction and the argument for it belongs on everyone's list. It runs 120 chapters, the first 80 of which are his. He died around 1763 with the rest in draft, and the last 40 are a reconstruction by someone else that readers have been arguing about ever since.

It is the first Chinese novel to treat domestic life as sufficient subject matter, the first to write women as intelligent people rather than as lessons, and the first to refuse a moral at the end.

The reason he belongs on an authors list rather than a books list is prose. Cao writes dialogue at a level nobody in the tradition matches: three cousins in a room, and you can tell who is speaking from the sentence rhythm before you reach the name. Translations lose a great deal of this, and it survives anyway.

Luo Guanzhong, and the case built on influence

Luo Guanzhong's Romance of the Three Kingdoms is not the best-written book in the canon. It runs 120 chapters across roughly 1,000 named characters, is compiled from earlier sources and chronicles, its structure is sprawling, and its most famous scenes are invented history.

It is on the list because it changed the language. A startling number of everyday Chinese expressions, from the empty-fort stratagem to the phrase for becoming Sworn Brothers, come from it. No other Chinese novel has that grip on speech, and a canon list that left it out would be measuring craft only.

Lu Xun, who founded the modern thing

Lu Xun wrote almost no long fiction. His reputation rests on 2 short collections and a body of essays, and it is secure. Diary of a Madman came out in 1918, in his late 30s, and he had fewer than 20 working years left after it.

The reason: he is the point where Chinese literature stops writing in classical forms and starts writing in the vernacular about ordinary people with ordinary damage. Diary of a Madman and The True Story of Ah Q are short enough to read in an afternoon and were written as deliberate demolition of everything before them.

He is also the tradition's best essayist, which matters more in Chinese than in English. The essays are still quoted in arguments about almost anything, and they are still sharp. They also set the tone for a century of Chinese writers who learned to argue in public by imitating a man with a Cultivation Technique for making enemies in one sentence.

Mo Yan, and what the Nobel settled

Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2012. Born in 1955, he was 57 when it came. He is the first mainland Chinese citizen to win while writing in Chinese, and the prize answered a question Chinese writers had been asking for decades: whether the work would ever be read as literature rather than as evidence about a country. Gao Xingjian had won in 2000 as a French citizen, which is a different sentence and the reason the wording matters.

The prize is not a ranking. It is, however, a fact about reception, and it moved Mo Yan permanently onto lists where he was previously debatable. His best books earn the place without the prize: Red Sorghum for its velocity, Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out for its structural nerve.

Jin Yong, the asterisk

Any list of the best Chinese authors of all time has a problem with Jin Yong, and the honest thing is to name it rather than resolve it.

By readers, he is first. Nobody else in twentieth-century Chinese-language fiction comes close; his 15 wuxia novels, written between 1955 and 1972, have been adapted into television series, films and games continuously for 50 years, and their characters are common knowledge across the Chinese-speaking world. Jin Yong himself lived from 1924 to 2018, which means he was 94 and had been a national figure for 60 of those years.

By critics, he spent decades filed as genre. That has largely changed — the discipline now treats the wuxia novel as serious fiction, and Jin Yong's plotting is taught. What has not changed is that he is discussed as a great popular novelist rather than as the tradition's best writer.

For the purposes of this site, there is a further fact. The wuxia he reinvented is the direct ancestor of the web novel: the Martial World, the technique manual, the sect structure with its internal hierarchy, the tournament arc. When a modern reader picks up a serial, they are reading a descendant of Jin Yong's books, often at several removes. The Chinese web novel industry that runs on that inheritance did not exist until the 2000s, roughly three decades after he stopped writing.

How to use this list

Two honest routes.

If you want to read the tradition's best writing, start with Dream of the Red Chamber in the Hawkes translation, then Lu Xun's short stories. Those 2 will tell you whether Chinese literature as literature is for you. Call to Arms is the shorter of Lu Xun's collections and the place to begin; Diary of a Madman is its 1st story and runs about 13 pages.

If you want the thing that will change how you read the genre you already read, start with Jin Yong. The Legend of the Condor Heroes is the standard entry point, and its structure — a young man, a manual, a war, a set of sworn brothers — is the skeleton of nearly every serial on this site.

Three objections, answered

Because he did the hardest thing in the tradition. Li Bai writes from a height — genius, wine, the moon — and is loved for it. Du Fu writes from inside a collapsing country, watching his own family starve, and still controls every syllable. Chinese criticism has generally treated the second as the greater achievement.

High on readership, lower on critical lists, and rising. He is the most-read Chinese-language novelist of the twentieth century by a wide margin, and the wuxia genre he reinvented is the direct ancestor of the web novel. Serious criticism took decades to accept him, and now largely has.

The Nobel is a prize for a body of work, not a ranking, and Mo Yan would be the first to say so. What the prize did settle is that Chinese-language fiction could win on its own terms rather than as regional colour. His best books, Red Sorghum and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, hold up independently of the prize.

Sources & References

• Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (Norton, 1996) — the standard English gateway to the poetry, with Du Fu and Li Bai in quantity.
• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Du Fu and Li Bai — the biographical record, and the critical standing of each.
• Lu Xun, Call to Arms and Wandering, trans. Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang (Foreign Languages Press) — the two collections the modern canon rests on.
• Nobel Prize Outreach, Mo Yan, Nobel Prize in Literature 2012 — the citation, which is more specific than the prize's reputation suggests.
• John Christopher Hamm, Paper Swordsmen: Jin Yong and the Modern Chinese Martial Arts Novel (University of Hawai'i Press, 2005) — the study that moved wuxia into academic criticism.