‘Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone’ planned for Nobel laureate's hometown

A Chinese city hopes to cash in on the success of its most famous resident, Nobel Literature Prize winner Mo Yan, by investing millions in a tourist zone dedicated to the writer, Chinese media said on Thursday.

Gaomi, a city in eastern China’s Shandong province, will invest US$107 million in projects to honour Mo Yan, who has set most of his gritty stories of Chinese peasant life in the area, the Beijing News reported.

The city will build a “Mo Yan Culture Experience Zone”, and plant 650 hectares of red sorghum, a type of grain.

is the title of the author’s best-known work, a 1987 novella set amid the brutal violence that plagued the eastern Chinese countryside.

Local farmers once relied on sorghum but stopped growing it in the 1980s as it was unprofitable, the paper said.

The report did not indicate whether the Nobel laureate has approved the projects.