Library of Chinese Classics: Six Records of a Floating Life
Author: Shen Fu
Translated into modern Chinese by Wang Yanghai
Translated into English by Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-Hui
Library binding book, dimensions 960 x 640, 1/16
Publisher: Yilin Press, 2006
ISBN: 7806579400 9787806579404
Six Records of a Floating Life is an extraordinarily frank autobiography that is totally unprecedented and un paralleled in the history of Chinese literature. It describes the life of the author and his beloved wife in extremely revealing detail. The intimacy and joy shared by the couple are as unusual by normal standards of Chinese married life as it the author's daringness in revealing them to others.
First published in 1809, Shen Fu's famous recounting of his life during the Ching dynasty in China gives a candid look at the social customs and cultural traditions of that era. It is also a tender love story.
Shen Fu was born in Soochow in the latter part of the eighteenth century, at the height of the Ching Dynasty. He was a government clerk, a painter, and occasional trader... and in his mid forties he set out his life in six moving records? that have delighted the Chinese ever since they came to light in the nineteenth century...The troubled black sheep of a declining family, Shen Fu has left us a lively portrait of his era that in places strikes chords which are remarkably resonant... While it is much more, the Six Records? is known among the Chinese as a love story...?
