Qian Zhongshu (November 21, 1910 – December 19, 1998), also transliterated as Ch'ien Chung-shu[1] or Dzien Tsoong-su,[2] was a renowned 20th century Chinese literary scholar and writer, known for his wit and erudition.

His works of nonfiction are characterized by large amount of quotations in both Chinese and Western languages such as English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin.

There, Qian was left alone to read storybooks on folklore and historical events, which he would repeat to his cousins upon returning home.

At the age of 6, Qian went to Qinshi primary school and stayed home for less than half a year due to illness.

[10] Qian also frequently cut classes, though he more than made up for this in Tsinghua's large library, which he boasted of having "read through.

"[10] It was probably in his college days that Qian began his lifelong habit of collecting quotations and taking reading notes.

At Tsinghua, Qian studied with professors, such as Wu Mi, George T. Yeh, Wen Yuan-ning, and others.

[15] Shortly after his daughter Qian Yuan (錢瑗) was born in England in 1937, he studied for one more year in the University of Paris in France.

In 1939, after Qian returned to Shanghai to visit his relatives, he directly went to Hunan to take care of his sick father and temporarily left Southwestern United University.

After Japan's defeat, in the late 1940s, he worked in the National Central Library in Nanjing, editing its English-language publication, Philobiblon.

In 1949, Qian was ranked on the list of National First-class Professors (國家一級教授) and commenced his academic work in his alma mater.

Four years later, an administrative adjustment saw Tsinghua changed into a science and technology-based institution, with its Arts departments merged into Peking University.

Qian was relieved of teaching duties and worked entirely in the Institute of Literary Studies (文學硏究所) under PKU.

Qian, his wife, along with their daughter survived the hardships of Cultural Revolution, but their son-in-law, a history teacher, was driven to suicide.

Qian's fame rose to its height when the novel was adapted into a TV serial in 1990 which was acted by some famous Chinese actors, such as Daoming Chen and Da Ying.

Readers kept visiting the secluded scholar, and an anecdote goes that Qian when approached by a British admirer, remarked: "Is it necessary for one to know the hen if one loves the eggs it lays?"

In 1926 his uncle Qian Sunqin built five buildings and several auxiliary rooms on the west side of the back of the house, covering an area of 667.6 square meters.

Despite Qian's quoting the chairman, and his selecting a considerable number of poems that reflect class struggle, the work was criticized for not being Marxist enough.

In a new preface for the anthology written in 1988, Qian said that the work was an embarrassing compromise between his personal taste and the prevailing academic atmosphere.

Begun in the 1980s and published in its current form in the mid-1990s, it is an extensive collection of notes and short essays on poetics, semiotics, literary history and related topics written in classical Chinese.

Qian's command of the cultural traditions of classical and modern Chinese, ancient Greek (in translations), Latin, English, German, French, Italian, and Spanish allowed him to construct a towering structure of polyglot and cross-cultural allusions.

He took a range of Chinese classical texts as the basis of this work, including the I-Ching, Classic of Poetry, Verses of Chu, The Commentary of Tso, Records of the Grand Historian, Tao Te Ching, Lieh-tzu, Jiaoshi Yilin, Extensive Records of the T'ai-p'ing Era and the Complete Prose of the Pre-Tang Dynasties (全上古三代秦漢三國六朝文).

In the following ten years, Qian invested a lot of energy to make extensive and in-depth Supplements to and Revisions of Songshi Jishi.

The facsimiles of parts of Qian's notebooks appeared in 2004, and have similarly drawn criticism on account of blatant inadvertency.

[31] The Commercial Press has, per an agreement with Yang Jiang, begun publishing photoreproductions of Qian Zhongshu's reading notes, totaling several score volumes in both Chinese and foreign languages.