Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v2.c10.s2.t4.2

v2.c10.s2.t4.2

Guo Moruo, the eighth child of his parents, was born in a landlord family living in the small town of Sha-wan (located on the Dadu river) near the prefecture level city of Le Shan of Sichuan province in November 1892. In the early phase of his life he received a traditional education of acquiring mastery over the Chinese classics under the tutelage of Guo Huanzhang, a private tutor with an aim to appear in the imperial civil service examination. However, after the educational reform in China, he was quite fortunate to avail the opportunity of going through new subjects of contemporary relevance when he went to study in the provincial capital of Cheng-du in February 1910. After about four years of stay there in Cheng-du, he went to Japan in January 1914 and after a year of preparatory course in Tokyo, he entered the sixth Higher School in Okayama. In 1918, he joined the Medical School of Kyushu Imperial University of Fukuoka. But, he was hardly interested in medicine. His real interest lay in the studies of foreign language and literature, especially, the works of Spinoza, Goethe, Walt Whitman and the Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore. In Japan, after thus being exposed to new forms of literature, he reached to the conclusion that western literature was superior to classical literature and folk tradition of China. Such conviction propelled him to translate lots of foreign literary works into Chinese, and published them in *New Journal on Current Affairs* (*Shi-shi Xinbao*), so as to acquaint his countrymen with the developing trend of the new socio-political-literary thoughts of the modern world. It is during this period of his stay in Japan, Guo Moruo brought out an anthology of his poems titled 'the Goddesses' (nu-shen女神) in 1921, that distinctly reflected his outlook of romanticism.