Shanghai Bicycle

Recommended Reading

Zhang Yimou

Zhang Yimou, China’s most famous film director. See an interview and bibliography at Senses of Cinema.


  • “Ju Dou” (an arranged marriage in traditional rural China)

  • “Raise the Red Lantern” (traditional life in a wealthy land-owning household)

  • “Red Sorghum” (the 1940s anti-Japanese war in Shandong, East China)

  • “To Live!” [literally, “Survival”] (during Mao’s Cultural Revolution)

  • “The Story of Qiu Ju” (literally, Qiu Ju Goes to Court, on the new consciousness of legal rights in the 1990s)

  • “Hero” (China’s founding Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, whose tomb is in Xi’an)