Lu Xun's Former Residence

Lu Xun's Former Residence, on Lu Xun Road in Shaoxing's Yuecheng District, preserves the Zhou family compound where the writer Lu Xun (born Zhou Shuren) was born in 1881 and lived until his family's decline forced a move in the 1890s. The compound follows a traditional Jiangnan courtyard layout, with the family's living quarters, a kitchen, and a rear garden known as Baicao Yuan, or the Hundred Plants Garden, which Lu Xun later described in his memoir essays as a childhood playground of vegetable beds and low walls. Adjacent to the residence stands the Sanwei Study, the private school where the young Lu Xun studied classical texts under a strict local tutor, an experience he also wrote about directly. The buildings retain original Qing-dynasty wooden structural elements, and the furnishings displayed inside are a mix of family originals and period-accurate reproductions based on the writer's own descriptions. The wider historic district around the residence includes several other Zhou family properties and neighboring merchant houses, giving visitors a sense of the middle-class Shaoxing environment that shaped Lu Xun's early writing before he left to study medicine in Japan and later became one of modern China's most influential authors. A separate museum building nearby, outside this scenic pass, houses manuscripts and biographical exhibits.