Memorial to an author whose genius drove Red Guard to label him dunce

Walk about 100 metres from Beijing's main shopping street, Wangfujing, and the view changes from swank department stores to a one-storey, grey-brick, courtyard house with wooden beams painted purple and grey-tiled roof.

The Memorial Hall of Lao She opened in February on the 100th anniversary of one of this century's most famous Chinese authors.

Inside is described the genius and tragedy of a man who wrote 42 novels - many translated into major foreign languages - and who drowned himself in a nearby lake on August 24, 1966, to escape Red Guard persecution.

The house speaks much of the genius but little of the tragedy, a sign of how far the communists have come to recognise his talent, yet not far enough to acknowledge that it was the late Chairman Mao Zedong who nurtured and inspired the radical youth movement which killed him.

Shu Qingchun, who used the pen name Lao She, was born in Beijing in 1899, the son of a Manchu soldier who died the following year fighting the Western army that invaded the city in the anti-foreign Boxer rebellion. He grew up in a poor family in west Beijing and trained as a teacher.

To learn English, he joined the London Club at Beijing University and then went to the London School of Oriental Studies in 1924. On the wall of the museum is a photograph of its library, where he wrote the three comic novels he completed during his five years in London.