culture
Best known for 《人间词话》 ('Poetic Remarks on the Human Condition'), which proposed the famous 三种境界 ('three stages') of pursuing any great endeavor - quoted constantly today in speeches about study, career, and love.
history
He drowned himself in Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace in 1927; the reasons remain debated - loyalty to the fallen Qing, despair over modernity, or personal grief - and his death became an emblem of the cultural upheaval of the era.