Yan Wenjing, beloved writer of fairy tales, died in Beijing at the age of 90, on July 21.

Many middle-aged Chinese still remember Yan's invented characters, including Tang Xiaoxi, a naughty boy featured in "Tang Xiaoxi at the Next Time Boarding Harbor," who always put off his lessons until "the next time." The naughty boy inspired millions of young students to put off their lessons.

Yan started to write stories in his childhood. He began writing fairy tales when the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out in 1937.

"I believed everything would get better and that unexpected miracles would be accomplished, so I thought of fairy tales and decided to record my imagination, affection and hatred in them," he recalled in his later years.

At the Chinese revolutionary base in Yan'an, he wrote nine fairy tales and fables in a row, which later were collected into his first fairy tale book "Nan Nan and Beard Uncle." His works have been translated into several languages, including English, Russian, Japanese, Czech and Korean.

Qi Gong, a descendant of China's last imperial family, was a top Chinese calligrapher, painter, scholar and art connoisseur. He created calligraphy of seemingly effortless elegance through the skillful interplay between the proportions of his characters.

Qi Gong was born in Beijing the year after the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) collapsed. His parents died when he was still a child, and he was unable to complete middle school education. Self-taught, he became one of the most famous scholars in China. He died June 30.

Though he never finished school, Qi Gong became a professor of Beijing University and taught Chinese classics and literature, and the study of traditional Chinese antiques at the university. He tutored masters and doctoral students until only a few years ago.

A renowned artist, Qi Gong served as vice chairman and later chairman of the Chinese Calligraphers' Association. An outstanding connoisseur of Chinese calligraphy and painting, he also worked as director of the National Relics Evaluation Committee.

Despite his fame and achievements, Qi Gong was never arrogant. "He is always kind, tolerant, and friendly," said his friend Liu Haoran. He also liked to make jokes, and in almost all of his photos, he is smiling.

When Ba Jin passed away Oct. 17, crowds went to his funeral home to pay their last tributes to him. Many kneeled down when Ba Jin's body was driven out of the funeral home.

"We have lost one of the most sensitive hearts of our time and one of the most important and widely read Chinese writers of the 20th century," Chen Sihe, professor and dean of the Chinese Language and Literature Department of Fudan University, said upon Ba's death.

Ba Jin is best-known for his trilogy "Family," "Spring" and "Autumn," a saga of family decline and of the struggles and tragedies of the young generation in the 1930s. The trilogy was enormously popular with Chinese youth throughout the century. He also wrote many other novels, short stories and essays.

His most-talked-about book in later years was "Random Thoughts," a long memoir published in the 1980s that reflected on China's chaotic turmoil of the "cultural revolution." In the memoir, he calls for human dignity and human rights and for self-examination. He asserts that "thinking independently" and "daring to speak out the truth" are needed to avoid another "cultural revolution."

Ba Jin was born into an official's family in Sichuan Province on Nov. 25, 1904 and received a good education. Yet he was a high-spirited youth who rebelled against the bondage of feudal family life. The May Fourth Movement - a political and cultural movement against imperialism and feudalism that broke out in Beijing in 1919 - inspired him with democratic ideas.

Professor Fei Xiaotong, who died at the age of 94 on April 24, was one of China's best anthropologists.

His book "Peasant Life in China" (1939) brought him recognition in the English-speaking world. But he is remembered in China for his role in advising the economic reformers in the reform and opening-up era in the 1980s and 1990s when the policy of rural industrialization, which he had advocated since the late 1930s, flourished.

Professor Fei was born into a gentry family of Suzhou City in the Yangtze River Delta. He received his training in sociology at Yenching University and Tsinghua University, and furthered his studies in England, receiving a PhD from the University of London.

He then returned home and devoted himself to teaching and research on sociology and anthropology in China for almost six decades. His works on these subjects were instrumental in laying a solid foundation for the development of sociological and anthropological studies in China.

Chen Yifei, one of the best-known oil painters in China, whose works were among the earliest of their type to be exhibited and sold in Western countries, was born in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province.

Chen, also a well-known film director and fashion designer, passed away April 10, at the age of 59, in Shanghai, after years of suffering from cirrhosis of the liver. Before his final hospitalization, he had been busy shooting his film "The Barber."

A work of the painter-turned-film-director once held the record for the highest auction price for a contemporary Chinese painting. One of Chen's scenic masterpieces from East China's Jiangxi Province was sold for more than HK$1.3 million (US$162,000) at a Hong Kong auction in 1991.

THIS has been a sad year in the Chinese literary and art arena. At least a dozen literary masters and artists, old and young, left us. We dedicate this page to them, whether or not their names are listed.

Editor: Wing