Karl Marx loved Shakespeare; his writings are peppered with quotations, analogies, and references to the Bard’s work. But Communist China did not. Shakespeare made his way to China first in the early years of the 1900s as Tales from Shakespeare, which the book author styled as stories of “gods and spirits,” and which enjoyed a fair amount of popularity with the cultural elite. That all changed with coming to power of Chairman Mao and the simultaneous beginning of the “Cultural Revolution”: his wife, the unofficial cultural secretary began a swift campaign of excising any work of art that did not meet ideological standards. The ban lasted ten years.

On this day, May 25, in 1977, with the Cultural Revolution over, Chinese leadership declared Shakespeare was once again acceptable to read.

The un-banning of Shakespeare was likely an overture to the West, another gesture of a desire for rapprochement as China was finding itself facing a hostile Russia to its north. Shakespeare became more popular than ever after the ban was lifted, hailed once more a “realistic dramatist” and a “Renaissance giant.”