Annotation

The four issues of Shuangsheng now in the Hong Kong University and Chinese University collections are drawn from two years. It is not known when this periodical ceased appearing. Most of its contents are non-serialised short romances, portraits and landscape paintings, translations and filler pieces. Many contributors were well-known novelists from Shanghai, perhaps due to the personal connections of Huang Tianshi (the editor). Both classical and vernacular Chinese were used in Shuangsheng’s creative works. Huang’s fiction piece ‘A shattered bud’ (‘Suirui’), for example, was written in vernacular Chinese; cluncky as it may have seemed, it is the evidence of the author as well as Hong Kong’s literary circles having switched from the classical Chinese to vernacular Chinese for their writing.