Hawkes succeeded Dubs as Oxford's chair of Chinese in 1959, and much of his tenure focused on altering the Chinese curriculum to include modern Chinese literature, which it had not previously covered. By the end of the 1950s, the curriculum covered not only the Chinese Classics, but also the premodern Four Great Novels and the short stories of Lu Xun. Hawkes' lectures were noted as being "scholarly but entertaining" to the point of being suggestive of his "early love of the theatre".