Wives and Concubines

Raise the Red Lantern (Chinese: 大紅燈籠高高掛), originally known as Wives and Concubines (Chinese: 妻妾成群; pinyin: Qīqiè Chéngqún), is a 1990 novella by Su Tong, published by Yuan-Liou Publishing Co. (遠流出版公司), that describes a female former university student whose mind is broken by the concubine system in 1930s China. It was adapted into the 1991 film, Raise the Red Lantern, by Zhang Yimou. Gary Krist of The New York Times wrote that the novel is "a subtle, profoundly feminist tale that nonetheless has all the gamy melodrama of pulp entertainment".