Literary legacy of Suzhou’s Pan family unveiled in city
Print Edition
A NEW window into Jiangnan’s literary soul has opened at Shanghai Library East, where “Legacy on Pages: Documents & Collections from the Pan Family of Suzhou” invites visitors into the world of one of China’s most storied scholarly lineages.
Featuring over 150 groups of rare objects — many made public for the first time — the exhibition traces six generations of the Pan family of Suzhou, revered as the “first household of Wu.”
Family members like Pan Shi’en and Pan Zuyin served as high-ranking officials in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and were both dedicated to collecting Chinese classic texts, shaping a family tradition of “reading, amassing, authoring and printing books.”
From Song- and Yuan-period (960-1368) masterpieces to family manuscripts, letters, paintings and rubbings, the show reveals how this merchant-scholar clan shaped, safeguarded and passed down the cultural DNA of the Jiangnan, regions to the south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze River.
Rather than simply presenting precious artefacts, the exhibition constructs a vivid intellectual map: friendships between literati emerge through elegant letters and poetry; family history unfolds in hand-copied genealogies and diaries; and the very act of collecting becomes a form of cultural devotion.
Date: Through February 28, 2026
Venue: Shanghai Library East Branch
Address: 300 Hehuan Rd
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