Shaw and Lu Xun's Eight Hours in 1933 Still Echo in Shanghai

Curt Evans mixed Irish whiskey coffee with Chinese yellow wine on Sunday and poured it for scholars and diplomats gathered inside a century-old Bund building in Shanghai for a symposium featuring Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and Chinese literary icon Lu Xun.

"I think it's a really brilliant idea. It mirrors the meeting that happened in 1933 between the two famous writers," said Evans, an Irishman who owns Yeats Irish Bistro on Yanping Road in downtown Jing'an District.

The drink paired Ireland's national spirit with a rice wine usually served warm in Jiangnan (regions to the south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River) teahouses.

It closed out a symposium in Hongkou District that drew nearly 100 Chinese and international guests from various sectors to mark 170 years since Shaw's birth and 90 years since the death of Lu Xun, the forefather of China's modern literature.

The event, held at the China Securities Museum, once known as the Astor House Hotel, also revived a brief but famous meeting between the two writers. Shaw spent eight hours in Shanghai in February 1933. He never came back.

Eight hours in 1933

Shaw arrived at the mouth of the Huangpu River before dawn on February 17, 1933, aboard the liner Empress of Britain. He was 77 years old and midway through a trip around the world.

Soong Ching Ling, the widow of revolutionary founder Sun Yat-sen, met him at the dock. The two talked for four hours before Shaw agreed to come ashore.

Shaw went on to meet educator Cai Yuanpei, then joined Lu Xun for a Chinese vegetarian lunch at Soong's home. The meal lasted about an hour. Lu Xun and Shaw barely spoke to each other; writer Lin Yutang, fluent in English, dominated the table. Afterward, the group stepped into the garden for a photograph.

Still, the two men traded a few lines that outlived the afternoon. Shaw called Lu Xun "the Gorky of China," then added he was better looking than the Soviet writer Maxim Gorky. Lu Xun answered that he would look even better once he grew old.

Sunday's event opened with a 15-minute reenactment of that lunch, staged by professional actors playing Soong, Shaw, Lu Xun and Cai. The scene included Shaw's first, fumbling attempt at using chopsticks – a detail organizers pulled from historical accounts of the visit.

The venue mattered as much as the script. Shaw first stepped ashore in Hongkou District in 1933, and Lu Xun lived out his final decade in the same district. A new literature museum is set to open in Hongkou next month, and the district will host China's Lu Xun Literary Prize for the first time.

Lu did not let the afternoon disappear. He asked fellow writer Qu Qiubai to help him collect every newspaper clipping about Shaw's visit, flattering or not.

Working under a desk lamp in Hongkou, the two men cut, pasted and edited the clippings by hand. Their wives combed newsstands for more copy. A 134-page book, "Shaw in Shanghai," came out within about five weeks.

"Shaw was in Shanghai less than a full day, and yet the story turned out to be this rich," Lu Xun wrote in the book's preface. "This is no small matter."

Hu Weifen, deputy director of the Shanghai Public Relations Association's international exchange center, told Sunday's audience the book still sits in Shanghai Library.

She held up a second notebook, a commemorative booklet the association produced for Shaw's anniversary, and called the two publications, separated by 93 years, an unlikely meeting of their own.

Foreign scholars find the same thread

Kwinten Van De Walle, who teaches European literature and culture at Shanghai International Studies University (SISU), said he arrived on Sunday knowing only that Shaw's stop had been brief.

"What has surprised me... is how much they had in common," he said, calling it proof of "the universality of literature".

Tomasz Ewertowski, a lecturer from Poland at the same university, said both writers treated literature as more than art.

"They shared the vision of literature as an important intervention in social life," he observed. "They believed it mattered not only as art, but as a social phenomenon."

Felix Goodbody, another SISU lecturer, said the bond is not really about geography. Lu Xun and Shaw, he added, "are separated by thousands of miles between Ireland and China" but shared a fight against colonialism and a push for a peaceful future in both countries.

Sha Hailin, president of the Shanghai Public Relations Association, said he once lived in Ireland for 40 months as China's ambassador there. He said both writers used their pens as spears and humor as blades to take on injustice in their own countries.

"True cultural dialogue is never one-way," Sha noted. "It is a two-way gaze and response."

The friendship between the two nations runs well past the page. China is now Ireland's sixth-largest trading partner, and two-way trade in goods and services has topped 20 billion euros (US$22.7 billion), according to Zhao Xiyuan, China's ambassador to Ireland.

Shanghai and Cork City have kept a formal sister-city relationship since 2005.

"Over the past two decades, that relationship has been strengthened through cooperation and exchanges in the areas of education, culture, business and tourism," Cork Lord Mayor Damian Boylan said in his own video address.

For Evans, the symposium carried a more personal echo. A direct flight between Shanghai and Dublin was launched on July 20, cutting a journey that once required multiple stops down to a single leg home.

"Next week I will be on that flight," he said. "I get to see my family. I get to spend time with my mom."

Evans suggested that the new route should also bring down seafood costs at his restaurant, with fresher oysters arriving from Ireland faster than before.