Shao Xunmei, poet, essayist, publisher and printer, played a signi¬ficant role in the publication and dissemination of journals and pictorial magazines in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Shao’s poetry has been translated by several prominent scholars through the years, but remarkably few of his essays have received the same attention, and this is the first collection of his prose writings to have been published in English. Shao has been described by a phalanx of scholars as the most seriously underestimated modern cultural Chinese fi¬gure. This collection of his writings joins several recent publications that aim to raise Shao’s literary and historical profile. It will appeal to a broad swathe of readers interested in the transnational and transcultural dimensions of twentieth-century experience that have become so important for contemporary scholarship.

Paul Bevan is a freelance Sinologist, researcher, translator and lecturer. From 2020‒2023 he was Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford and Retained Lecturer in Chinese at Wadham College. From 2018 to 2020 he worked as Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. He is now an Associate Member of the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford.

Susan Daruvala works in modern Chinese literature and film. She is a Fellow of Trinity College, University of Cambridge although now retired from her teaching post in the Department of East Asian Studies. She is the author of Zhou Zuoren and an Alternative Chinese response to Modernity.