MCLC: Lu Xun letter sold for more than 1 million

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: Lu Xun letter sold for more than 1 million
***********************************************************

Source: Sinosphere Blog, NYT (11/21/13):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/lu-xun-letter-sold-for-a-mil
lion-dollars

Lu Xun Letter Sold for More Than $1 Million
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

China is flush with cash, but even so, some Chinese are marveling at the
price of a letter auctioned in Beijing this week at the China Guardian
fall auctions: a 220-character missive by Lu Xun, one of the country’s
most venerated writers.

The letter, dated June 8, 1934 and on the subject of learning Japanese,
was written to Tao Kangde, a magazine publisher who, like Lu Xun, was part
of a vibrant intellectual scene in pre-Communist, Republican China that
included the scholar Lin Yutang and many others.

Lot 2257 was written on a single piece of paper and sold on Monday for
more than 6.5 million renminbi
<http://www.cguardian.com/tabid/77/Default.aspx?oid=539859>, or over $1
million, about three times its asking price.

“Can you believe that each character by the modern Chinese writer Lu Xun
could fetch almost 30,000 renminbi
<http://news.sina.com.cn/c/p/2013-11-21/065628768357.shtml>?” or $4,907,
the Chengdu Commercial News marveled on Wednesday.

Lu Xun, of course, was not just any writer. The author of modern classics
that examined China’s soul, such as “Diary of a Madman” and “The True
Story of Ah Q,” he came from an educated family and was a liberal leftist
who had a complicated relationship with the Communist Party. He spoke
Japanese and German, and studied medicine in Japan in 1904. He later
switched to writing, saying he wanted to help cure China’s soul, which he
saw as beset with self-defeating traditions.

“It was a reasonable price,” Song Hao, a senior manager in the rare books
department of China Guardian, said in a telephone interview. The letter
had been acquired — with difficulty, she said — from a private collector
in China whom she declined to name. The auction house sold another item
written by Lu Xun’s last spring, also fetching over 6 million renminbi,
she said, but artifacts related to Lu Xun are rare.

“There is very little of Lu Xun’s circulating in the market,” said Ms.
Song, explaining the price.

And its provenance is solid. “Add on to that the fact that this letter is
in his published collections, so it is very reliable,” she said. “And its
contents are good. His advice on learning Japanese is of use today for
people learning foreign languages.”

In the letter, Lu Xun is responding to Mr. Tao, who had asked him if he
should study Japanese. Lu Xun advises him to learn a European language
instead, saying there were more important literary works there than in
Japan.

The full text, in translation, reads:

“Mr. Kangde,

About long-term study at a Japanese language school, I don’t know. My
suggestion is, it’s all right if your Japanese is good enough to read
scholarly treatises, since these can be picked up quickly. However, when
it comes to reading literature, the loss outweighs the gain. New words and
dialect frequently show up in novels, but there is no comprehensive
dictionary. You have to ask the Japanese. That’s a lot of trouble. And
then there are no great works to make the labor of foreign readers
worthwhile.

The time and effort needed to learn Japanese to the point that you can
read a novel — and not just half-understand it –would be no less, I think,
than to master a European language. And there are great European works.
Why don’t you, sir, use the energy that would be spent learning Japanese
to learn a Western language instead?

As for the submissions for publication under various pen names, if I
resend them, please use them as you see fit, sir. This person doesn’t care
about payment.

Let this be the reply,

Best wishes for your writing,

Xun,
I bow to you,

June 8

Over all, the item that went for the highest price at the auction, which
China Guardian said netted total sales of 2.35 billion renminbi, or $384
million, was “Tajik Bride
<http://english.cguardian.com/mediaC/2013-11-17/310.html>,” an oil
painting by Jin Shangyi that sold for more than 85 million renminbi,
nearly $14 million, against a presale estimate of 16 million renminbi.

The painting, which depicts a young Tajik woman, dates from 1983, a few
years after China began to shed its isolation under Mao Zedong, and
“shocked” the art community, China Guardian wrote, for its use of “Western
classicism techniques to depict a beautiful and elegant bride.”