Barbarians at the Gate

What can a grief memoir about a beloved wife tell us about love, life, and society in 18th-century China?

Shen Fu’s Six Records of a Life Adrift (浮生六記 / fúshēng liù jì) offers a bottom-up look at Qing dynasty elites. Shen Fu experiences love, financial trouble, pain, beauty, sadness, and joy, never passing up a chance for a drink and making questionable career choices at a time in Chinese history when the life options for a slacker scholar were increasingly limited. His life with his devoted wife, Chen Yun, has made Six Records of a Life Adrift one of China’s great romances.

At its heart is Yun, whose resourcefulness makes you wonder what she sees in Shen Fu, especially when her eye seems to wander toward the beautiful young courtesan Hanyuan.

Alexander Boyd, Associate Editor of China Books Review, joins Jeremiah again to discuss a memoir by an author with a true gift for finding beauty in everyday life, if not always for paying the rent on time. We talk about why the imperial exams in Shen Fu’s time were becoming even more difficult to pass, what that meant for talented scholars like Shen Fu who fell by the wayside, and why overeducated and underemployed readers, from China’s Lying Flat Gen Z to students in PhD programs in Chinese history, might find Shen Fu’s story startlingly – if uncomfortably – familiar.

Reading and episode links
Jeremiah’s China Books Review column
“Shen Fu: Floating Life in a Fallen Realm” (September 29, 2026)

Lin Yutang translation
Shen Fu, Six Chapters of a Floating Life

Leonard Pratt and Chiang Su-hui translation
Shen Fu, Six Records of a Floating Life (Penguin Classics)

Graham Sanders translation
Shen Fu, Six Records of a Life Adrift (Hackett, 2011)

John Minford’s new anthology
Ch’ing, a Chinese Book of Love: From Early Times to the Modern Age (Reaktion Books, 2026)
(The anthology Alexander mentions, which includes selections from Shen Fu.)

David and Jeremiah are back together again in Beijing. Recording from Palace Moser, the two get weirdly nostalgic and compare notes on what has changed in the 20+ years (Jeremiah) and 40+ years (David) since they first moved to China’s capital. They ask whether students coming to China today are getting the same experience as previous generations of study-abroad students or if it’s the curse of the sinologist that every newcomer since Marco Polo has had to listen to some old-timer expat talk about how it was so much better before.

Longtime China hand? Join us for a stroll down memory lane in Beijing. New to China or Sino-curious? Hear about why the best China might always be the China you meet first.

Two older gentlemen with expanding waistlines, staggering daddy issues, and a shared love of firing military brass meet in DC this week. And right on cue, the pundits leap forward to pontificate on the most important issues facing Sino-US relations today: What is Xi Jinping’s title in English?
Many bytes and keystrokes are spent in social media wars between those who insist that Xi Jinping be called General Secretary and those who feel that such pedantry is ideologically loaded panda poop.

David is a linguist. Jeremiah is a historian. They put their heads together to discuss why people care so much about this issue (and the related kerfuffle over whether China is led by the CCP or the CPC) and to give their take on the meeting, the view from Beijing, and to wonder whether Xi Jinping — whatever his title — is smart to play the waiting game.

Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976. Fifty years later, Jeremiah and David compare notes on a mostly quiet anniversary. Jeremiah reports that there were enough tributes to beat the over/under, but David argues that the Party would still prefer to keep things as ritualistic as possible. Mao is still dead. We will all bow. And moving on.

David recalls how Mao was remembered in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping's (reputed) formula that the chairman's policies were two-thirds correct, one-third incorrect was treated as the last word, even as xiangsheng artists could still mock the Cultural Revolution so long as the punchlines landed squarely on the Gang of Four. Jeremiah discusses how and why Mao nostalgia never goes out of fashion, morphing with the times and the exigencies of the era.

The two also catch up on their summer vacations. David is back in Beijing, his broken leg mended with the help of a dominant physical therapist. Jeremiah reports in from a 27th-floor balcony overlooking a container port in Shenzhen.

China’s last emperor (Puyi), his empress (Wanrong), and concubine (Wenxiu) spent two years sequestered in the Forbidden City before their expulsion in 1924. Around them were holdover dowagers, scheming eunuchs, corrupt officials, and two foreign teachers of English. Many people know Puyi’s tutor, Reginald Johnston, either from Johnston’s memoir, Twilight in the Forbidden City, or from Peter O’Toole’s portrayal in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Puyi biopic, The Last Emperor. But it is Wanrong’s tutor, the young American Isabel Ingram, and her letters that are at the heart of our guest’s new book about these pivotal two years in Chinese history.

Author Paul French has made a career of evocative stories of old China, including the New York Times bestseller Midnight in Peking and City of Devils: A Shanghai Noir. The Economist has called him “a champion storyteller.”

His new book, The Last Emperor of China: Twilight of the Forbidden City (out today in the UK), is built around the unpublished letters of Ingram and Johnston. They describe the trials and tribulations (but also the small pleasures and moments of joy) shared by three remarkable young people: Puyi, Wanrong, and Wenxiu. They longed to escape, but when they were finally expelled from the courtyards of Beijing’s imperial palace, they found only despair and tragedy.

Paul joins Jeremiah to discuss the origins of this book, his use of previously unpublished sources, including memoirs, diaries, and letters, and whether the more lurid rumors of the relationship between Puyi and his empress have any basis in fact.