Yang Jiang, Life Companion of Qian Zhongshu, Passes Away at 105

Mr. Yang Jiang, the wife of Mr. Qian Zhongshu, has passed away at the age of 105.

A woman of both brilliant talent and gentle temperament, who was willing to live in poverty and solitude her whole life, has finally left this Saha world, becoming an extinct resonance in Chinese cultural circles. The love between Yang Jiang and Qian Zhongshu was ordinary yet great. Two quiet-loving people spent their whole lives together—reading, writing, translating, teaching—mutually appreciating and admiring each other, supporting each other through thick and thin.

Qian Zhongshu was extraordinarily gifted. His works *Fortress Besieged* and *Guan Zhui Bian* (Pipe-Awl Chapters) have become two towering peaks in literature and academia respectively. But by today's standards, Qian Zhongshu was a bookish man utterly impractical in worldly affairs—clumsy, unable to handle basic household chores, and never wealthy. In the small family formed by Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang, Yang Jiang managed everything inside and out. The outgoing Yang Jiang handled all worldly matters for him, allowing Qian Zhongshu to devote himself fully to his writing and scholarly research.

The lives of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang were both poor and rich. Only in their later years did they acquire an apartment of their own, yet Yang Jiang was perfectly at ease with such a life. All their lifetime earnings from book royalties were eventually donated to the "Love of Reading" foundation at Tsinghua University to support impoverished students.

Such a couple of cultural figures, indifferent to fame and wealth, are extremely rare—not only in the restless secular world, but even within academia. Qian Zhongshu's assessment of Yang Jiang in his lifetime was: "The most virtuous wife, the most talented woman." For a man like Qian Zhongshu to marry Yang Jiang was truly, as his mother had said, "a fool's blessed fortune."

A single Qian Zhongshu is already rare; to add a Yang Jiang, one of a kind in the world—such a marriage makes countless people envy them. They were truly an immortal couple. Who knows how many loving couples in this world, through the friction of daily life, are eventually worn down to exhaustion by worldly existence, both husband and wife utterly drained. But Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang were unaffected by their poor and difficult life, remaining as loving as ever throughout their lives, genuinely appreciating each other from the heart. Each cultivated the field of their own interest for a lifetime, achieved their own results, and left their words to the world—they can be said not to have come to this world in vain.

One can dwell in the human world yet live as if isolated from it. The lives of Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang were exactly that. Everything in the secular world had no effect on them; they lived only in their own world. This kind of composure and ease is the dignified grandeur that emerges only when, through cultural cultivation, the human spirit has risen to an extremely pure state.

Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang, as husband and wife, shared the same ideals and were each other's soulmates—both life partners and lifelong lovers. Such a perfect marriage between two cultural figures is rare in the entire history of Chinese culture. Even Sima Xiangru and Zhuo Junwen could not compare.

Mr. Yang Jiang, indifferent to fame and wealth and at peace with the world, finally attained the life outcome described as "the virtuous are long-lived." Though she has returned to the great beyond today, the spirit she embodied will remain in the world forever.

Other people's lives cannot be replicated. Couples in this world need not all live as transcendently and elegantly as Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang. But if partners can appreciate and cherish each other, and never forget the original intention that drew them together in love, perhaps they can also live much happier lives. External possessions, beyond what suffices for food and warmth, are all burdens. If one keeps compulsively pursuing material comfort, spiritual joy will forever remain out of reach. Then would this life not have been lived in vain?