Cao Yu

Cao Yu (Chinese: 曹禺; Wade–Giles: Tsʻao Yü, September 24, 1910—December 13, 1996) was a Chinese playwright, often regarded as China's most important of the 20th century. His best-known works are Thunderstorm (1933), Sunrise (1936) and Peking Man (1940). It is largely through the efforts of Cao Yu that the modern Chinese "spoken theater" took root in 20th-century Chinese literature. The pen name “曹禺 (Cao Yu)” was originated from his surname "萬 (wan)." He dismantled the character down to Chinese radical "艹 (cao, 'grass')" and "禺 (yu)." Since the character "艹" could not be used as a surname, he chose the homophonic character "曹 (cao)" as the substitution and combined the two character to form the pen name "曹禺." Cao Yu was the president of China's Premier Modern Drama Theatre, the chairman of the Chinese Association of Theatre Artists and established the Beijing People's Art Theatre in 1952. Cao Yu is regarded as the paramount playwright of modern Chinese drama, "enthroned as China's Shakespeare" according to The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Drama.

Cao Yu was born as Wan Jiabao (Chinese: 万家宝) in an upper-class family in Qianjiang in the province of Hubei. When he was still an infant, his family's business interests necessitated a move to Tianjin where his father worked for a time as secretary to China's President, Li Yuanhong. Tianjin was a cosmopolitan city with a strong western influence, and during his childhood, Yu's mother would often take him to see western style plays, which were gaining in popularity at the time, as well as to productions of Chinese traditional opera. Such western style theater ("huàjù" 話劇 in Chinese) made inroads in China under the influence of noted intellectuals such as Chen Duxiu and Hu Shih, who were proponents of a wider cultural renewal campaign of the era, marked by anti-imperialism, and a re-evaluation of Chinese cultural institutions, such as Confucianism. The enterprise crystallized in 1919, in the so-called May Fourth Movement.