Shen Congwen's Former Residence

Shen Congwen's former residence in the old town is a traditional Qing dynasty courtyard house where the writer was born in 1902 and spent his early childhood. The house contains original furniture, family photographs, manuscript reproductions, and a small museum documenting Shen's life and work. The rooms are modest by any standard — a working-family dwelling of the Miao and Han borderland — and the modesty suits the writer, whose fiction consistently found beauty and tragedy in ordinary lives.

Shen's novels and stories set in western Hunan — "The Border Town" being the most celebrated — brought the Miao and Tujia cultures of Xiangxi into the Chinese literary mainstream and remain the best literary introduction to this landscape. His grave is accessible on a hillside path fifteen to twenty minutes' walk from the old town, marked by a rough stone bearing an inscription he wrote for himself: "Not sad, not rejoicing, understanding, acknowledging the love that lies behind all things." Entry to the residence costs ¥10 (separate from the town ticket in some configurations).

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A story
Shen Congwen was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature — in 1987 and 1988 — and is widely considered the finest Chinese prose writer of the twentieth century by readers outside China. Inside China his reputation was suppressed for decades because he wrote about ordinary life rather than political struggle. After 1949 he stopped writing fiction entirely, turning instead to the study of Chinese costume and silk, in which he became a world authority. He is buried on a hillside outside Fenghuang, under a rough stone inscribed with his own words.