Description
The power, anger and fluency of Liang Qichao’s writings make him one of the towering figures in modern Chinese literature. He saw his great, almost unmanageable task as an attempt to write China into the new era – to provide an ancient country, devastated by civil war and foreign predators, with the intellectual equipment to renew itself. Liang said that he wrote from an ‘ice-drinker’s studio’, implying that underneath his dispassionate, disabused and rational tone lay an ardour and passion which only ice could cool. This selection of pieces shows Liang’s extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission which drove him on, attempting to galvanize and refresh an entire nation.
