The Lu Xun heritage area in the heart of the old city preserves the block where China's greatest modern writer was born, grew up, and set many of his most celebrated stories. The complex includes Lu Xun's birthplace and childhood home, the house of his maternal grandmother (setting for his famous essay about childhood holidays in the country), the Three Flavours Studio where he studied as a boy, and a small museum documenting his life and work. The whole district has been carefully restored in the Shaoxing style — whitewashed walls, black roof tiles, stone-flagged alleys, wooden screen doors — and gives a genuine sense of the late-Qing provincial town life that shaped his writing.
Lu Xun (1881–1936) wrote A Madman's Diary, The True Story of Ah Q, and hundreds of essays that defined the literary vernacular of modern Chinese. For Chinese visitors this is a literary pilgrimage site of national importance; for international visitors unfamiliar with the writing, the preserved domestic architecture and the canal-side setting have independent interest. The nearby New-Century Square has a large bronze statue of Lu Xun, and the surrounding district contains several good traditional restaurants serving Shaoxing dishes he wrote about.