Born as Stephanie Rosenthal in Poland in 1883 to a Jewish family, she moved to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne University, where she graduated in botany. She met her future Chinese husband, Hua Nangui, in Paris and they moved to China in 1910. Hua Nangui worked for the Beijing-Hankou railway until 1913 and published the first Chinese Railway engineering textbook in 1916.

Rosen-Hua’s first novel was published in Chinese by Shanghai-based Commercial Press in 1915. It told the tale of the reintegration to China of a female doctor who was educated in France and returned to China. The topic was widely echoed a century later in the 2000s, when numerous Chinese students started returning from studies abroad and had to adapt back to China.

Her best-known book was “Love and Duty” which was first published in Chinese in 1923, and then in English in 1926. With its modernity theme focusing on the opposition between traditional and modern values, in particular about arranged marriage and women’s education, it clearly resonated with the popular Chinese literature movement at the time. Again it foreshadowed the modernity dilemmas of the 2000s in China. The book was made into the movie “Love and Duty”, featuring Chinese superstar Ran Lingyu.

Hugues tells how these books were published against background of the old China of the 1920s, which was far from politically stable, with the Beiyang government being weak and the country being mostly controlled by warlords, fighting against each other for territorial control.

Hugues Martin is from Burgandy in France and moved to Shanghai in 2004. He is a financial adviser for French expats in Asia. He has been writing the Shanghailander blog since its start in 2006, which he wrote initially from the former Shanghai French Concession, before moving to Hong Qiao area.