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Shen Congwen, a Chinese writer whose most famous books were written in the first half of the twentieth century, never travelled abroad. He did not know any foreign languages but his view of aesthetics bears a striking resemblance to European Modernism and Romanticism. With only a pen in hand, Shen sought beauty and a way to express and preserve it in words and also in all different forms of art. This paper examines Shen’s views about beauty through his writings about literature and music. ‘In literature and art there is only beauty or ugliness, nothing is true or untrue’ he writes [‘文学艺术只有美与不美,不能说真和不真’]. In less than three decades (from the mid-1920s to the end of 1940s) and in a time of war and chaos, Shen constantly tried to describe the pure beauty that inspired him in the folk music her heard in his hometown (West Hunan Province in China). He also compared it to Western classical music. At times, he admitted that human language was too limited to depict beauty. The vitality and nature of beauty seemed too divine for human language to praise. Instead, he considered the abstract notions of colourless paintings, soundless music, and wordless poetry to describe it. This paper engages in a reading of the novel Fengzi from the perspective of beauty and music. This novel was written in the middle of his career (1932-1937) and can be seen as a transitional work. By looking at this novel, one can gain a broad view of Shen’s aesthetic ideas in literature, and music.