"No city in China can claim to be the hometown of as many nationally known personalities as Shaoxing"

Lu Xun

On 208 Lu Xun Lu is the Former Home of Lu Xun (lu xùn gùjū 鲁迅故居), China's most influential modern writer and essayist. Born in 1881 in Shaoxing, Lu Xun went to Japan to study medicine. His life changed when one night he and other Chinese students were ordered to watch a slideshow of Chinese prisoners being executed by Japanese soldiers. His indignation and feeling of helplessness compelled him to become a writer in order to examine why China was so weak and to build a national consciousness. He felt that as a doctor, he could only help one person at a time, but as a writer, he could reach the whole nation. To this end, he became a leader of the New Culture Movement, a drive at cultural modernization. In 1918, he wrote the Diary of a Madman, a moral allegory condemning China's oppressive Confucian past. His most famous short story is the Story of Ah Q. It's set in Shaoxing and is a morality tale about the shallowness of society.

The Lu Xun Memorial Hall (lǔ xùn jìniàn guǎn 鲁迅纪念馆) is across the street from his former home and is a great place to learn about Shaoxing's most famous son. Inside the bright museum are large exhibitions with photographs of Lu Xun, early editions of his works and some of his old possessions.

Lu Xun's family home is a large series of dark buildings grouped around courtyards characteristic of grander buildings of the region. Behind is a vegetable garden that he used as his playground when young. Nearby is Lu Xun's old school. Built in the manner of a typical private school of the period, it's reminiscent of the old one-room schools of the West.

A short walk north on Laodong Lu from the home of one of China's foremost writers is the ancestral home of one of China's greatest leaders, Zhou Enlai. A veteran revolutionary and a refined statesman, Zhou Enlai rose to become premier of the Chinese government. Because of his reputation for uprightness, he was China's most beloved politician when he passed away in 1976. Despite never living in Shaoxing himself, it's considered his ancestral home because it was where his grandfather lived. Inside his ancestral home is an exhibition of his life.

Other famed Shaoxing residents include Xi Shi, a famed beauty of the Warring States period (475-221BC), Song Dynasty (960-1279) poet Lu You, revolutionary martyr Qiu Jin who was executed in 1907 for conspiring to topple the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), and Cai Yuanpei, dean of the prestigious Peking University during the New Culture Movement.