The “Approaching Lord Tang” lecture series has been warmly received at Tsinghua University.

This website reports, by Liang Jiatian: On the evening of October 17, Room 106 in Tsinghua University’s Fourth Teaching Building was packed to capacity. Wu Fengchu, former deputy director of the Standing Committee of the Fuzhou Municipal People’s Congress, a renowned scholar of Tang Xianzu, and director of the Fuzhou Tang Xianzu International Research Center, delivered a special lecture titled “Approaching Master Tang.” Throughout the two-hour session, the audience remained fully engaged from beginning to end, savoring a truly enriching intellectual experience.

During the lecture, Wu Fengchu provided a detailed yet accessible overview of Tang Xianzu’s life, focusing on four key aspects: his personal biography, the historical context of his era, his philosophical thought, and his dramatic works. He examined five pivotal episodes in Tang’s career—his conflict with high-ranking officials in Beijing, his memorial to the imperial court in Nanjing, his tenure as a local magistrate in Xuwen, his virtuous administration in Suichang, and the creation of the “Four Dreams of Linchuan.” By vividly portraying the turbulent Jiajing–Longqing–Wanli period in which Tang lived, he elucidated the causal relationship between the poet’s character and the times that shaped his destiny, concluding that “character determines one’s fate, while the era molds great figures.” He then explored the process by which Tang composed his celebrated “Four Dreams of Linchuan”—including “The Purple Hairpin,” “The Peony Pavilion,” “The South Chamber,” and “The Handan Dream”—and their profound global impact. The entire lecture left the Tsinghua faculty and students thoroughly engaged, with warm applause breaking out at various points.

The engaging lecture also drew frequent questions from the students, and what was originally scheduled to last an hour and a half ultimately ran for two and a half hours. After attending the talk, Professor Chen Weipeng of Tsinghua University’s School of Humanities proactively engaged in a conversation with Wu Fengchu and posed for a photo together. Nie Feng, a 2013 graduate of Tsinghua University’s Department of Life Sciences from Yichun, Jiangxi, diligently took notes throughout the lecture. He remarked that, following the event, he now has a much clearer appreciation for the enduring appeal of Tang Xianzu.