top of page
Wang Tao was a pioneering thinker in the late Qing. His three classical tales "Biography of Mary" 媚梨小傳, "Travel Overseas" 海外壯遊, and "Wonderland under the Sea" 海底奇境, were written in the 1880s. They reveal signs of disillusionment with traditional Chinese culture surfacing as early as the 1880s, a time when most reformers were advocating solely for technological and institutional changes. Even
more interesting, modern sentiments are expressed in classical Chinese. Wang Tao utilized the traditional narrative form of the classical tale to lament the degeneration of the very civilization in which it had flourished. My article "Disillusionment with Chinese Culture in the 1880s: Wang Tao’s Three Classical Tales" is here, published in Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese.
bottom of page