Su Man-shu (28 September 1884-2 May 1918), poet, translator, journalist, and anti-Manchu revolutionary whose fragments of autobiographical fiction created a legend which captivated a whole generation of Chinese readers. The son of Su Chieh-sheng, a Cantonese agent of the Wan-lung Tea Company, Su Man-shu was born in Yokohama. His mother was a Japanese called O-sen, and the boy grew up speaking both Chinese and Japanese. In 1894, because of the Sino-Japanese war, Su Chieh-sheng took his son and O-sen to China and settled in Hsiangshan, Kwangtung, where the Su clan had lived for several generations. The sudden appearance in Hsiangshan of a foreign wife and a child of mixed parentage caused consternation, the more so because Su Chieh-sheng's lawful Chinese wife had continued to make her home there during her husband's absence overseas. The next three years were difficult ones for Su Man-shu and his mother, relieved only by the kindness of a serving woman in the Su household who grew attached to the "lady in the old-fashioned dress," as she called Su's mother because of her Japanese attire.

In 1897 Su Man-shu and his mother were sent back to Yokohama, where Su entered the newly established Yokohama Chinese School. He did very badly in classical Chinese, and he suffered from racial snubs administered by members of the school's Chinese staff who objected to teaching Sino-Japanese "half-breeds." In 1899 Su was transferred to the school's English section, where he surprised everyone by making rapid progress. As a result, he was permitted to leave the Yokohama Chinese School in 1900 to enter the high school attached to Waseda University in Tokyo. Little is known about Su's years as a student in Tokyo except that in the autumn of 1902 he joined the Waseda Young Men's Society, a new organized group of revolutionminded young Chinese which supported the radical aims of Sun Yat-sen rather than the reformist policies of K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao. Su soon rose to prominence in this group because of his knowledge of English and his abilities as a painter in the Chinese style.

Su's activities with the Waseda group resulted in his return to China in 1903. The Shanghai Su-pao had been shut down for making anti- Manchu attacks, and a new paper, the National Daily (to be of British registry), was contemplated as a successor. Su was appointed a translator on the National Daily. He made his way to Shanghai in the autumn of 1903, and he worked for the paper until it was suppressed late in 1904. During this time, Su collaborated with Ch'en Tu-hsiu (q.v.) on a translation of Les Miserables and wrote a number of essays and editorials. Su was sharply critical of the role played by Cantonese in the recent history of China and predicted that if China were ever enslaved the ultimate fault would lie with the Cantonese merchants, whose Chinese qualities had rubbed off by long contact with Westerners and who cared only for profit and nothing for China. Su also wrote approvingly of anarchy and of such proponents of anarchism as Emma Goldman.

By the time the National Daily was curtailed, Su had discovered that he liked to write and that he was good at it. He had no difficulty in finding a job with the China Daily of Hong Kong. He devoted his entire energies to his new duties to the point of sleeping in the newspaper office, and he soon earned a reputation in Hong Kong that matched the one he had acquired at Shanghai. At the same time, he remained a strong partisan of Sun Yat-sen, and he associated with a number of leading Hong Kong revolutionaries.

Su's success, however, soon bore strange fruit and led to one of the few romantic incidents of his life that can be reasonably verified. Su Chieh-sheng, apparently having been alerted to his son's success, made his way from Hsiangshan to Hong Kong to discuss the important matter of Su's arranged marriage to a girl from his native district. Su learned of his father's plan before he arrived. He consulted his radical cronies about a course of action; to a man they advised him to obey his father and to accept the bride. This solution clearly was not to Su's liking, for he fled the China Daily office and refused to meet with Su Chieh-sheng. After several days of moving from place to place, Su disappeared from Hong Kong, leaving his father to return disappointed to Hsiangshan. Su's friends heard nothing from him, and great indeed was their consternation when he returned to Hong Kong several months later displaying the shaved skull and brown robes of a Buddhist monk. By the most reliable accounts, Su had fled Hong Kong for a monastery somewhere in Kwangtung and had taken vows. Monastic discipline apparently had not agreed with him, however, and he had returned to Hong Kong as soon as he could. After a few days in Hong Kong the robe was laid aside except for ceremonial occasions, and Su returned to his old eating and drinking habits. Nevertheless, the question of marriage had been settled once and for all. The only other reminder of Su's monkish interlude was his adoption of the religious name Man Shu, a reference to the chief bodhisattva Manjusri. Su's return to Hong Kong coincided with his father's final illness, and he made a brief trip to Hsiangshan to be with his father and to settle family business after his death.

During 1905 Su seems to have been relatively independent, possibly as the result of a small legacy, and making an adequate living as a journalist while traveling from Shanghai to Nanking to Hangchow. In 1906 he went to Japan to visit his mother, and in 1907 he settled in Tokyo, where he remained for two years, during which time he completed translations of Byron's works which were collected and published in 1908 under the title Pai-lun shih-hsüan.

Su's success as a translator made him a sought-after collaborator in revolutionary circles, and he seems to have spent 1909-11 in a series of missions on Sun Yat-sen's behalf in Southeast Asia. In 1909 he accepted a position as teacher of Chinese in the Chinese community at Surabaya, Java, where he resided for two years, with time off for side trips to Singapore and Bangkok. During this period, he helped to foment anti-Manchu feeling among overseas Chinese and to collect funds for the revolutionary cause. He also had an opportunity to witness Western colonialism at first hand, and he acquired a distaste for the Dutch which, along with his impressions of the tropical beauty of Java, was to reappear frequently in his later fiction.

With the establishment of the Chinese republic, Su Man-shu left Southeast Asia for China, where he accepted an editorial post on a Shanghai newspaper. He devoted the following six years, his last, to newspaper work, the writing of poetry and fiction, and the elaboration of the legend of Su Man-shu. This legend, which was to captivate a whole generation of Chinese readers (who believed it true), was set forth in fragments of autobiographical fiction of which the best, according to many critics, was Tuan-hung ling-yen chi {The Lone Swan), which was published serially in the Shanghai Pacific Journal in May-August 1912. In his excellent biography, Su Man-shu, a Sino-Japanese Genius, Henry McAleavy says that the legend represents "a man of the purest Japanese blood, introduced from his childhood into China as a gesture of homage, only to find the confidence abused. Ordained as a monk while still a youth, he is never to know the consolations of family life, but from his solitude he can pass judgement on the society around him, and can see all the more clearly that those who insulted him and his mother are themselves unworthy to bear the name of Chinese. It is he who possesses the true Chinese spirit and who can interpret it to the world, and he is able to do this with all the more authority in that he can bring to the task a wide knowledge of foreign literatures .... But when all is said and done, what has Europe, or, for that matter, China herself, to offer that can be compared to the wisdom of India? And to this treasure-house, almost alone of his contemporaries, he has the key." It is in this role of "outsider," able at once to overcome the claims of Western materialism and traditional Chinese values, that Su made his greatest appeal to his readership, providing, vicariously, through his fictional life and adventures, a solution to the commonly felt "crisis of identity." Through the same means, Su himself seems finally to have come to terms with his own mixed heritage and with his inadequacies in leading a normal family life.

A prolific writer and a figure of some romance and mystery, Su lived out his last years elaborating his mystique. His collected letters show, for example, a note to a Senor Lopez in Madrid concerning the publication there in English of Su's translation of Sakuntala, and similar allusions are made to Sanskrit grammars produced early in his youth. No trace of any such works has ever been found. During his last years, Su acquired a gluttonous addiction to sweets, and this may have contributed in 1917 to severe intestinal complaints. When his health failed in early 1918, Chiang Kai-shek gave him a room in his Shanghai house. In April, Su's condition worsened, and he was transferred to a hospital in the French concession, where he died on 2 May 1918. He was interred in a cemetery near the West Lake at Hangchow, in a plot paid for by Wang Chingwei. Su's works have been collected and republished at frequent intervals since his death, and his life and works continue to interest critics. In 1927 Liu Wu-chi edited Alanshu i-chu [posthumous works of Su Man-shu] and the year following collaborated with his father, Liu Ya-tzu (q.v.), on Su Alanshu nien-p'u chi ch'i-t'a [chronological biography of Su Man-shu]. The latter work is based on a close reading of Su's writings, and it accepts all aspects of the legend as true. In 1931 the writer Shih Hsi-sheng produced four volumes: Alanshu pi-chi [Su Man-shu's notebooks], Alanshu shih-wen [prose and poetry of Su Man-shu], Alanshu shou-cha [holograph letters of Su Man-shu], and Alanshu hsiaoshuo [the fiction of Su Man-shu]. Between 1930 and 1931 there appeared Su's collected works, which were edited by Liu Ya-tzu and punctuated by Liu Wu-chi and which bore the title Su Alanshu cKüan-chi. A second edition of this five-volume compilation appeared between 1932 and 1935. A third edition was published in Hong Kong during the 1940's, and a fourth in Taiwan in 1961 . Selections from Su's works, under various titles, have been published even more frequently over the years, testifying to a continued interest on the part of the Chinese reading public in this romantic figure.