Lao She

Born She Qingchun to a poor Manchu family in Beijing, he lost his father as an infant (killed defending the city against foreign troops during the Boxer Rebellion) and grew up in near-poverty before training as a teacher. Posted to London to teach Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies in the 1920s, he read Dickens voraciously and began writing novels partly to fend off homesickness.

Rickshaw Boy, following an honest Beijing laborer ground down by poverty into ruin, became an international success, translated without his permission into a bestselling American edition during World War II. After 1949 he returned to China and became a prominent, officially celebrated writer of the new Communist state, chronicling ordinary Beijing life in fiction and plays.

That standing did not protect him: in August 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards publicly beat and humiliated him. He drowned himself in Beijing's Taiping Lake the next day.