Wumingshi 無名氏 is an unusual author on the Chinese literary scene of the 1940s. Spanning a range of styles, he combined modernist explorations of death and dreams with popular romantic melodrama, and at the same time he vividly portrayed the horrors of war and the errors of ideological conviction. Hoping to create a new platform for peace and human unity, he wrote soaring religious treatises advocating a new perspective on life, love, sex and ideology. Throughout these diverse writings, he frequently employed an ebullient, gushing narrative style laden with metaphor – a characteristic that became the hallmark of his creative writings.

Wumingshi was always somewhat isolated from the public literary sphere. Going against the currents of the time in his writings, he remained mostly separate from the groupings and associations that characterised contemporary literary life. His major work was written in hiding and this is symptomatic of his creative career: as a thinker and writer, he remained an outsider.

His isolation was partly of his own choosing. His nom de plume, ‘Wumingshi’, would translate as ‘Nameless’ or ‘Anonymous’. It is hardly a name in any traditional sense and reads more like a commercial brand. He used it to that effect when he opened his own publishing outlet, The Nameless Studio (Wuming shuwu 無名書屋), which distributed his works. It was also used in the title of his multi-volume work The Nameless Book (Wumingshu 無名書). But while promoting this public brand, he nevertheless kept his private persona one step removed. He did not encourage publicity about himself and remained mostly a recluse from the literary scene.

His original name was Bu Baonan卜寶南. Later he used several other names, most frequently Bu Ning 卜寧 and Bu Naifu 卜乃夫, but Wumingshi was the name under which he became best known. It was first adopted when he wrote the novel North Pole Landscape Painting (Beiji fengqing hua 北極風情畫), serialised in 1943. It was hardly a distinguishing trait at the time. The ‘wumingshi’ label was frequently used to indicate that the author was unknown or wished to remain anonymous.