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Category
Disciplines in Literature & Letters
Novelists, poets, philosophers, theologians, New Thought authors, historians and the students of language itself.
Era
Countries (85)
8 figures
Sun Tzu
544 BCE – 496 BCEThe Art of War is still on military and business curricula worldwide.
Zhang Heng
78 – 139Built the first seismoscope and mapped 2,500 stars.
Li Bai
701 – 762Tang poetry's exuberant genius, memorised across East Asia.
Du Fu
712 – 770The 'poet-historian' whose verse recorded a dynasty's collapse.
Shen Kuo
1031 – 1095Described the magnetic compass and deduced geological deep time.
Cao Xueqin
1715 – 1763Dream of the Red Chamber, China's supreme novel, spawned its own academic field.
Lu Xun
1881 – 1936Founded modern Chinese literature and diagnosed a nation in vernacular prose.
Mo Yan
b. 1955Hallucinatory realism of rural Shandong across China's violent century.