Thoughts From the Ice-drinker's Studio

The power, anger and fluency of Liang Qichao's writings make him one of the towering figures in modern Chinese literature. He saw his great, almost unmanageable task as an attempt to write China into the new era - to provide an ancient country, devastated by civil war and foreign predators, with the intellectual equipment to renew itself.

This selection of pieces shows Liang's extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission which drove him on, attempting to galvanize and refresh an entire nation. Blending together Confucianism, Buddhism and the Western Enlightenment, Liang's ideas about nation, democracy, and morality had a profound impact on Chinese visions of the political order, though the China that eventually emerged from the further disasters of the 1930s and 1940s would be a very different one.