Qian Zhongshu (Ch'ien Chung-shu, 1910-1998) was born into a literary family in Wuxi, Jiangsu province. Possibly the last in a line of Chinese thinkers that began with Confucius, he spent two years at Oxford, majoring in English and learning Latin and modern European languages. During the Cultural Revolution he was sent to a re-education camp with his wife, Yang Jiang. By 1974 he was presumed dead, but he later reappeared at a sinological conference in Italy. Qian wrote some of the most important texts on classical Chinese poetry and literature, essays, short stories, a second incomplete novel that was lost in the mail, and edited various groundbreaking anthologies.