"To live or to perish, that's the question." This sentence of Hamlet left a deep impression on me. When I was less than 16 years old, I moved from Beijing to a small village in northern Shaanxi, China, where I worked as a farmer, where I spent seven years of my youth. At that time, I tried to find Shakespeare's works, and read plays such as A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, etc. I was deeply fascinated by Shakespeare's ups and downs, vivid characters, and weeping emotions. When I was young, in the barren loess of northern Shaanxi, I kept thinking about the question of "survival or destruction", and finally I made up my faith in dedicating myself to the motherland and the people. I believe that everyone who has read Shakespeare's works will not only be able to feel his extraordinary talent, but also be deeply inspired by his life.

Tang Xianzu, a playwright of the Ming Dynasty in China, is known as the "Shakespeare of the East", and his plays such as "The Peony Pavilion", "The Story of the Purple Hairpin", "The Story of Nanke" and "The Story of Handan" are world-renowned. Tang Xianzu and Shakespeare were contemporaries, both of whom died in 1616. Next year marks the 400th anniversary of their death. China and the UK can jointly commemorate these two literary giants, so as to promote exchanges and deepen mutual understanding between the two peoples.

-- "Jointly Promoting Openness, Inclusiveness, and Promoting Peaceful Development: Speech at the City of London Mayor's Dinner" (October 21, 2015)

Further reading:

Tang Xianzu and Shakespeare were two contemporaries of Eastern and Western drama masters, both of whom died in 1616 and were listed as one of the world's 100 historical and cultural celebrities by UNESCO in 2000.

As the most important English writer of the European Renaissance, Shakespeare wrote many plays and sonnets, and is known as the "Zeus on the Olympus of Anthropology". His works not only show the subtle art of language, but also intriguing ideas and themes. In his writings, the melancholy prince Hamlet, the evil and ruthless conspirator Macbeth, the stubborn general Othello, and the deaf and tyrannical King Lear, etc., are unforgettable; Love and forgiveness, revenge and betrayal, death and destruction, "the sorrow of man and the brilliance of life", the themes of the works are magnificent and profound. The Argentine writer Jorge Borges once lamented: "Every river of consciousness leads to Shakespeare, and day and night lead to Shakespeare in a circuitous and uninterrupted way." Shakespeare's best friend, the poet Ben Jonsson, asserted: "He does not belong to one era, but to all centuries!" In addition to the four major tragedies "Hamlet", "Othello", "King Lear" and "Macbeth", his masterpieces also include "Romeo and Juliet", "A Midsummer Night's Dream", "The Merchant of Venice", "Twelfth Night", "All Rejoice" and other classics.

Tang Xianzu is a Chinese opera and literary scholar of the Ming Dynasty, and he wrote a lot in his life, including his drama works "The Peony Pavilion" (also known as "The Soul Return"), "The Purple Hairpin", "The Story of Nanke" and "The Story of Handan", collectively known as the "Four Dreams of Linchuan". Like Shakespeare's magnum opus, these works offer a rich and expansive picture of life, and many of these famous lines and images have long been household names and have been passed down through the ages. Du Liniang, who "doesn't know what to do, goes deep", Lu Sheng, a scholar who dreams of honor and disgrace, and Chun Yudi, a ranger who dreams of Huai Anguo of ants and is the Taishou of Nanke County...... Tang Xianzu writes life with dreams and reality with illusion, and his romantic literary imagination, beautiful artistic writing, and profound humanistic spirit are superb in the theater world at that time. Wang Jide, a contemporaneous composer of Tang Xianzu, praised his plays as "graceful and bewitching, and his speech is piercing".

Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu are both "giants of the times" of the "Age of Giants", and with their eulogies of human dignity, value and strength, they have become the "soul of the times" of the Western Renaissance and the Eastern humanistic enlightenment, and the charm of art makes them belong not only to one country, but also to the whole world.

After Xi Jinping's visit to the UK, China's city of Fuzhou presented a bronze statue of Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu to the Shakespeare Birthplace Foundation. Today, the statue is housed in Shakespeare's house, while another statue is stored at the Tang Xianzu Memorial Hall in Fuzhou City, as a testament to the cultural exchange between China and the UK.

On October 21, 2015, in his speech at the mayor's dinner of the City of London, Xi Jinping vividly illustrated one of his judgments with his dialogue with Shakespeare across time and space, and the same frequency resonance between Shakespeare and Tang Xianzu: our world, "openness, inclusiveness, diversity and mutual learning are the main keynotes". He used storytelling to express his hope that through people-to-people exchanges, the "cultural distance" between China and the United Kingdom would be narrowed, so that "the essence of Chinese and British cultures" could "have a wonderful "chemical reaction" on the way of thinking and lifestyle of the people of the two countries.