Zeng Pu
1872–1935
Biography
Zeng Pu (曾樸, 1872–1935) was a novelist from Changshu, in Jiangsu province on the Yangtze delta. He published a scholarly study of the later Han dynasty in 1895, then went to Beijing to study French at the College of Foreign Languages, and he became a Francophile. After returning to Jiangsu in 1898 he founded a school, and in 1903 he tried his hand at business in Shanghai. The venture failed, and he went back to writing. One of his pen names was 東亞病夫, The Sick Man of East Asia.
His fame rests on A Flower in a Sinful Sea (孽海花, Nie hai hua), a long novel about the last decades of the Qing dynasty. Its central figure is a courtesan, and through her and the men who move in her circle the book takes in the politics and literary life of the time, with many of its characters drawn from real people under thinly disguised names. Like Wu Jianren's novel, it belongs to the group of four great late Qing novels of exposure, and it shares that group's satire of officials and the educated elite. Zeng kept revising the book over many years, and it exists in more than one edition.
On this site the novel appears under its Chinese title, 孽海花, with the English title A Flower in a Sinful Sea. His name appears in both traditional (曾樸) and simplified (曾朴) characters across the catalogue, so readers may find him under either form. The two Wikipedia articles listed below are a good place to check the details.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
孽海花
by Zeng Pu
A top examination graduate takes a young courtesan as his concubine and, as envoy to Europe, brings her to Berlin and St Petersburg, where she makes her own way. Around them the novel paints the scholars, officials and reformers of late Qing China in the decades before 1900.…
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.