Fortress Besieged

Qian Zhongshu's great comic novel follows Fang Hongjian, home from Europe with a bought diploma, through the pretensions of 1930s Shanghai society, a farcical journey to a shabby university in the interior, and a marriage that proves the book's famous image: a besieged fortress, which those outside want to storm and those inside want to escape. The city anchors it, its returning ships, salons and matchmaking, before the long trek inland and the disillusioned return.

Fang Hongjian

Shanghai (the return)

Chapter 1

Returning with a fraudulent doctorate bought by mail, the weak, clever, self-deceiving Fang steps back into a Shanghai of anxious families, matchmakers and Western airs. The city's mix of pretension and appetite is the arena in which his aimless drift toward the wrong marriage begins.

Chapters 1-2

explicit Fang Hongjian sails home to Shanghai from Europe, and the real city, its harbour and its Westernised society, is where the novel's comedy of manners begins.

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