26 London Road, Sawston

Home of Xu Zhimo

The Chinese poet Xu Zhimo ‘徐志摩’ was born in 1897 and studied law at Peking University. He went to the USA in 1918 to study history and economics and then, in 1921, to King’s College Cambridge where he became fond of the Romantic poetry of Shelley and Keats. He made friends among the Bloomsbury group and in especially Roger Fry.

He set up home in Sawston when his wife, Zhang Youyi, by an arranged marriage, came over from China to join him. She does not seem to have been happy in England, especially as her husband had a number of girlfriends both in the USA and in England.

In 2008 a memorial to Xu Zhimo was set up in the gardens of King’s College.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xu_Zhimo