River

Author: Shen Congwen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2002-04-01
Features: The Long River, a novel. The manuscript was held up for a long time during the review process and was published only after extensive cuts. Most of the first part of the manuscript was serialized in the Xingdao Daily (constellation column) from August to November 1938 in Hong Kong. Some chapters were published in other publications. The second part was never completed. In January 1945, the author added a significant amount of non-plot content to the published chapters, increasing the word count from over 60,000 during the serialization in the Xingdao Daily to over 100,000. Titles were proposed for each chapter, and the standalone book was published by the Kunming Wenju Publishing House. It was later published by the Kaiping Bookstore in August 1948.
Content: In the winter of the 23rd year of the Republic of China, I returned to Western Hunan from Beijing for a matter and took a boat up the Yuan River, turning to my hometown of Fenghuang County. It had been eighteen years since I left the village, and as soon as I entered the Chen River basin, everything was different. On the surface, it seemed that everything had made great progress, but upon closer attention, one could see a trend of decline in the changes. It is evident that the simple and honest humanistic beauty preserved in the rural society is almost disappearing, replaced by a pragmatic and vulgar life philosophy cultivated by the real society in the past two decades. While the superstition of revering gods and fearing fate has been destroyed by common sense, the moral and ethical distinctions between right and wrong, as well as the choice between profit and righteousness, have also vanished.