Young readers explore authors' real worlds

The footsteps of writers

Winding through Shanghai's plane treelined downtown streets, visitors can follow in the footsteps of some of modern China's most celebrated writers.

A resident surnamed Xiong is an avid reader of Lu Xun, a leading figure in modern Chinese literature whose enlightening novels and essays even feature prominently in Chinese textbooks.

A few years ago, she first followed the bronze-colored "Lu Xun Trail" markers embedded in the pavement, passing the former site of Uchiyama Bookstore, frequented by the writer in his later years, and the memorial hall of a writers' league Lu Xun helped found in 1930, before arriving at the writer's former residence.

"The history feels tangible this way," she says.

Since that first visit, Xiong has become a regular on the Lu Xun Trail in Shanghai's Hongkou district. Her favorite stop is a memorial cultural venue repurposed from the former Uchiyama Bookstore. "My friends and I come here to catch up, read, and share what we've been reading lately," she says, adding that the place serves as a literary social space just like it once was in Lu Xun's time.

Like the Lu Xun Trail, which was launched in 2019 alongside online versions in English and Japanese, similar "citywalk" routes in Shanghai following in the footsteps of household-name writers have gained popularity in recent years.

Young readers today are no longer content with merely reading books, but are eager to step into the worlds they have encountered to relive the characters' joys and sorrows, and to reconnect literature with the real world with which it is associated, according to Huo Yan, a researcher at the Institute of Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Such enthusiasm extends beyond Chinese borders. One of the best-known examples is Cambridge in the United Kingdom, where the picturesque riverside setting was immortalized in the celebrated poem On Leaving Cambridge, about bidding farewell to the city, by modern Chinese poet Xu Zhimo. For generations of Chinese readers, the poem has made Cambridge a place of literary significance. So many Chinese visitors now flock to the city that some punters on the River Cam have learned to recite lines from Xu's poem to their Chinese passengers.