SOURCE: Hegel, Robert E. “Man as Responsible Being: The Individual, Social Role, and Heaven.” In The Novel in Seventeenth-Century China,, pp 105-39. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.

[In this essay, Hegel examines the portrayal of individualism and self-indulgence in novels, including The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang and Forgotten Tales of the Sui. Hegel finds that themes of fatalism and responsibility to the larger community counter individual expression for seventeenth-century Chinese authors.]

Loyalty and integrity are lost in times of chaos; uprightness and honor become obscured. Today a subject of this contender, tomorrow following someone else. People become like sojourners, taking lodging in a variety of places. Like prostitutes, in body they serve many men in succession.

Yüan Yü-ling, c.1630¹

The first few decades of the seventeenth century, the end of the Ming, witnessed a growth of personal expression in the arts and individual self-indulgence unprecedented in China. The contradictions between obligations to the self and to society became sharper than ever before. Belief in fate and divine retribution, particularly the latter, was being preached around the country, but such ministries, idealistic rationales for suffering for the most part, appealed primarily to the working masses. Most of those who had power freely abused it in flagrant disregard of the Confucian sense of social responsibility; novelists used their writing brushes to castigate these abuses. But it would appear that among the leisured elite a new consciousness of self was growing, a sense of personal freedom that was probably a product of new economic freedom for this small minority. The development came about with the diversification of sources of income: gentry who held no degrees or who did and for one reason or another did not serve in administration still could maintain lives of affluence based on landowning, on moneylending, or financing trade and the burgeoning handicrafts industries. Leisure and wealth brought exploration of new forms of entertainment, made possible the great collections of art and books, and produced a noteworthy increase in the number of novels, plays, and poems.

Even this limited degree of emancipation from traditional roles in a society that attached such primacy to social function brought confusion and anxiety in addition to the dissolution widespread among the late Ming social elite. Explorations of a range of conflicts between the self and social obligations on the one hand and the self and fate on the other found expression in the novel, with central characters asking, directly or implicitly, three major questions: First, are conventional social obligations really relevant to me—am I not above such petty business? Second, how do I find my proper role in society—what models do I follow when no standard role seems appropriate? And finally, how responsible am I for my acts—does some higher force take a hand in human events? This last area of questioning should seem particularly familiar to Western readers accustomed to eighteenth-century discussions of free will, predestination, and the individual.

THE MERRY ADVENTURES OF EMPEROR YANG: DENIAL OF DUTY AND FATE

Emperor Yang of the Sui, as demonstrated in the previous chapter, is a ruler unworthy of his subjects' loyalty. Unconsciously or by design, he is the opposite of what Confucius prescribed; he does not “attend strictly to business,” often not wanting even to hear of it; he is anything but “economical” in his expenditures for palaces, pleasure grounds, and gaudy means of land and water transportation. Yang shows little “affection toward his subjects,” working them to death by the hundreds of thousands for his personal enjoyment, regardless of whether or not his projects require their labor during “the proper times of the year.”² But thus far our examination of The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang has not addressed the protagonist as an individual. Emperor Yang is a character of some complexity with a realistic, albeit far from admirable, world view. Significantly, the anonymous novelist is beguiled by these values as well; the attraction the writer felt prevented him from making observations all too obvious to readers detached from his ideological context, particularly in relation to fate.

Emperor Yang is presented from the outset as a man of intelligence, energy, and skill: “In his early teens he enjoyed reading the documents and tales of past and present: books about the patterns in the heavens and on the earth, even those about local medicines, artisans' crafts, and conjurors' tricks—there were none he had not mastered.” Then the novelist immediately warns: “However, by nature he was perversely anxious, sullen, vindictive, and cruel. He excelled in leading people on emotionally and enjoyed playing clever tricks. And yet in her heart the Empress Tu-ku loved him deeply, seeing only his intelligence and wisdom, his love of reading, and his tact and perspicacity.”³

Thus from the outset this future lord of the realm is a complex character, widely read in the works that should provide appropriate behavioral models, an “individualist” in his cultural context, and an accomplished manipulator of others. His display of filial concern for his parents seems partly genuine, partly designed to impress them and to win for himself the title of heir to the throne. Privately he is a man driven by lust, but he confines its satisfaction to the marital relationship until his mother lies dead and his father falls fatally ill. It is during his first attempt at seduction that Yang reveals one of his guiding principles: “Why be so serious? People are born to have pleasure—where do propriety and impropriety enter into it? … If today you don't admit your human feelings, tomorrow when you wish to do so it may be too late!” This headlong drive for sensual gratification brings Yang to curse his intended prey for her refusal on moral grounds; the narrator, too, concedes that Yang has ignored proper relations between father and son and has treated the ailing sovereign as if he were a stranger.⁴

Were this the only stance Yang takes in the novel, he would be of considerably less interest as a character. Yet during his coronation the young man collapses, weighed down by the shame he feels about the events surrounding his father's death. His wife, the new empress Hsiao, also threatens to expose his illicit affair with his father's concubine to the assembled ministers in order to let them know that he is “not a fit human being (tso-jen pu-ch'eng)!” Her motivation may be jealous panic, but she uses as her pretext the preservation of the new ruler's reputation. Thus, for a time the opinions of others do serve to restrict his behavior.⁵

The debate over proper morals for Emperor Yang has another side as well: the minister Yang Su, an old friend of Yang's father, was a key general for the Sui founder and is the man who lifts Yang to the throne. For these reasons, he is the most powerful individual in the realm. Empress Hsiao would limit Emperor Yang's private behavior; Yang Su has firm control over the monarch's public affairs. The old minister warns Emperor Yang of the expectations of others; disregarding public standards could cost him their loyalty, he declares. Thwarted at every turn, Emperor Yang wails his objections: “The highest honor in this world of men is to be Son of Heaven, the greatest wealth is to possess the empire. I am also now at my physical peak—with no beautiful women before me to enjoy to my heart's content, this wealth and this honor are just empty words!”⁶ He also complains that the realm should be his playground.⁷ But the emperor is not daunted for long. Soon he reaches an accommodation with his wife and tours the realm, an activity appropriate for a sovereign, to which Yang Su cannot object. Through his travels and contacts with foreign leaders, the monarch's personal power and influence soar; Yang Su is eclipsed.⁸ Then the ruler lays a trap for his minister. In a brief scene surprisingly realistic in its subtle psychology, Emperor Yang explains his success upon his return. Yang Su, a victim of the venery he warns his liege against, has been carousing far too much; this news angers him mightily. The minister rebukes his lord and stamps away from the court. Then, the narrator informs the reader, he is struck down by the shade of the former emperor. In a coma, Yang Su attempts to rationalize his acts to his former sovereign. He fails, and before long lies dead. In The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang his demise is retribution; were this reality, one might describe the minister, suffering from anxiety over a guilty conscience and alcoholism, as a victim of apoplexy. More significant, however, is Yang's reaction: he crows over his success and immediately seeks to outdo his dead rival in sensual pleasures. Simultaneously, he ignores the counsels of his ministers that he too may suffer retribution.⁹

Emperor Yang's education stands him in good stead—when he chooses to use it. Yang is keenly aware of the privileges historically accruing to his role in society, even though he denies its attendant responsibilities, in a manner totally opposite to Yang Su's public, Confucian, stance. Most frequently, references to role are used to justify his luxurious life style,¹⁰ but Yang, like most traditional Chinese historians, views history as the records of great acts by great men. He is the greatest of men as emperor; he is responsible for the great events of the world, “rites, music, punitive expeditions, and pacifications,” in addition to large-scale construction projects. To that end, Yang feels justified to decide on such matters and to enjoy their fruits while troubling himself not a whit about their execution.¹¹ And yet when his ministers urge conformity to historical precedents, Yang declares: “It is better to have no books at all than to trust them implicitly. They are the chatter of moldy Confucians. …”¹² Emperor Yang thus uses his station as he pleases, employing historical prerogatives to his advantage but ignoring all limitations. In a fit of megalomania, as we have seen, he even declares himself the lord of spirits as well as of men.¹³ Clearly, this fictional Yang sees himself as not to be fettered by any conventional social role, and in this sense totally free to do as he pleases.

But by traditional conceptions, man is decidedly not the highest level of power in the Chinese cosmos—not even mankind's most favored member. The extent to which Yang might be construed as a tragic hero is directly related to his headlong scramble to ignore, to delay, and only at his last moment to confront his inescapable fate. Yang's arrogance and self-esteem grow with his initial successes: over Yang Su, in building lavish palaces, in assembling crowds of beautiful women for his pleasure. Interestingly, it is Yang's satisfaction over his own artistic accomplishments that causes him to gloat that he deserves the throne.¹⁴ While his poetry may or may not be of admirable quality, Yang and the reader soon realize the workings of fate. It is during an endless round of drinking in an imperial pleasure park that Yang experiences his first dream vision. The last ruler of the fallen state of Ch'en appears to Yang, and they engage in pleasant conversation. The seventeenth-century reader would realize at once the scene's significance: the Ch'en state fell to the Sui through its ruler's dereliction of duty. He, like Yang, devoted himself to wine, sex, and verse. It is only their shared values that the dreaming emperor perceives. “Wealth and honor are matters of chance,” he remarks. “By chance you lost them and by chance we gained them.”¹⁵ Chance, Yang declares, not personal responsibility, brings position; in this he contradicts his own assertions that he deserves to rule, although at this point he is not aware of the implication of his words.

This dream vision is only the start of a long series of ominous occurrences, all of which point to the fall of the Sui. One of Yang's palace favorites has a nightmare graphically foretelling his doom; shaken, Yang can only pretend that it has auspicious meaning. In another dream a heavenly maiden warns him specifically against sexual overindulgence.¹⁶ Then when a seeress from among his harem explains directly that the fate of the realm is his personal responsibility, for one brief moment Yang accepts this proposition.¹⁷ But his admission affects his activities only to the extent that it makes Yang even more frantic in asserting his freedom to be hedonistic. When physical disability causes him to take a day away from sex to improve his health, he declares: “If I had to be so depressed and alone, though I lived for a thousand years, what would be the point of it?” Here, at least from the perspective of a detached reader, is Yang's tragedy: so totally self-centered is he that beyond mere physical gratification there is utterly nothing in life for him. Deprived of sexual gratification, he examines for the first time in years some of the court documents that pile up on his desk. Those he reads all contain news of widespread civil war and peasant rebellion. In an effort to distract himself from the reality he finds so unbearable, Yang has anal intercourse with his page, relishing the boy's pain as a cure for his own depression.¹⁸

As the rebellions spread, Yang sighs: “Best for me to enjoy myself as fast as I can. If I can have pleasure for only a day, then let me enjoy it for that one day!”¹⁹ During this final period of his reign he repeatedly refers to fate in an effort to ease his own conscience. The fall of the state is “simply the will of Heaven,” he rationalizes.²⁰ Men and spirits alike chide him for his stubbornness and irresponsibility, but it is only as assassins confront him with bared blades that Yang admits to his son and heir, weakly, that he has been “not virtuous.” The boy is cut down and Emperor Yang is hanged as Heaven relies on human hands to do its will. The regicide who pursues Yang's life of indulgence likewise comes to a swift and bloody end.²¹

The evidence as adduced in The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang is too powerfully biased to be refuted in that context: Yang stands convicted of willful, selfish disregard of role and responsibility, of arrogance in the face of Heaven, of cruelty to his subjects, and of futile self-delusion. For old China's readers, this character in itself made a compelling negative model for the prince—or for other members of the social elite. While no other individuals had the wealth of the imperial court, to the extent that they pursued lives of sensual indulgence in disregard of traditional roles and norms, the novel's lessons could be applied to them as well.

Although the fictional adventures of Emperor Yang leave no doubt that the individual is to be held culpable for cosmic order, as Confucianism traditionally taught, various editorial comments by the narrator are less unequivocal. Often these comments are in verse. Poems introducing chapters regularly condemn Yang's extravagance and lechery, and frequently appeal to a belief in divine retribution to right the wrongs of this world. Incidents in which characters return from (through dreams and dreamlike visions) or descend to (by mysterious subterranean journeys) the nether regions to punish or to warn the living are fully congruent with such sentiments.²² In addition, a few resort to a facile fatalism, probably unconscious on the part of the author, shifting responsibility for the Sui fall from human action to a sort of independent divine will. For example:

When luck leaves, the signs appear from every side,
When sorrows come, there's little use in being grieved;
All events are Heaven's will for foul or fair—
Far beyond the strengths of mortal man!(23)

Given the inexorable march of events in the narrative toward Yang's execution and the collapse of his state, these sentiments strike a discordant note. But in the context of Chinese ideology, Yang's appeal to destiny for self-justification is far from unique—even Confucius bewailed his fate as something quite undeserved. To appeal to fate, in the context of the seventeenth century, is the more conservative, conventional stance fully justified by reference to Confucius himself. An insistence on freedom from traditional role limitations and on full personal individual responsibility for one's acts is the more innovative notion; it reflects the Wang Yang-ming trend in Ming thought that, on the popular level, found expression in morality texts of the time. It may be that the narrator's references to fate are facetious. Or these contrasting world views may both represent facets of the author's own ideology, revealing his desire, shared by others of his class, for the freedom from culpability implied by a fatalistic view of life. Either way, for its condemnation of imperial irresponsibility and its opposition of self versus responsibility and self versus destiny, The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang presents contradictions that were very real for China's seventeenth-century elite.

FORGOTTEN TALES OF THE SUI: ROLE, DESTINY, AND SELF

Chin Sheng-t'an and the anonymous author of The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang were not the only seventeenth-century Chinese writers to use the novel form as vehicle for social and political censure. The truncated Water Margin intimates the connection between rapaciousness among lower officials and imperial ineptitude; most Water Margin villains are in one way or another connected to four self-seeking court ministers who repeatedly lead their gullible sovereign astray. In The Merry Adventures the atrocities of the cannibal Ma Shu-mou are demonstrably the consequence of a ruler barely concerned with the welfare of his subjects. Yüan Yü-ling (1599-1674) likewise sternly criticized abuses of the late Ming in his Sui shih i-wen (Forgotten Tales of the Sui; literally, “Tales Forgotten by Sui Historians,” 1633). In many ways superior to its literary predecessors, this novel condemns abuse of power and privilege at all levels of society, linking a series of outrages to a lack of humanity among the social elite throughout the country. Yüan's work thus sets a high standard for seventeenth-century political and social criticism.

Forgotten Tales of the Sui is set in the Sui and early T'ang periods, the late sixth and early seventh centuries, thus overlapping The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang, from which it borrows various characters and some narrative. Its protagonist, Ch'in Shu-pao (d. 638), grows from teen-aged uncertainty to mature self-assurance against a background of suffering for the masses of people, court indulgence, widespread brigandage, and foreign and civil wars. The novel simultaneously examines the age and the reactions of one individual to it. All the parallels between the events of the Ming Wan-li reign and the novels discussed earlier are also relevant here: Yüan several times draws attention to the similarities he wished his readers to perceive. In particular, Yüan castigates the pampered young men of the urban privileged stratum who, in denying the humanity of others, utterly obviated their own.

To demonstrate Yüan Yü-ling's excellence as a writer for his time, I will quote the rape scene from Chapter 22 of Forgotten Tales of the Sui. Rare—if not unique—in old China's vernacular fiction for its powerfully realistic narration and sheer horror, the scene is hard to match in writing from any culture of this period. It may very well have been based on an actual event; it could hardly be more effective if it had been.

First, its context: Ch'in Shu-pao, now a constable in charge of escorting valuables to the court minister Yang Su, encounters a band of ruffians of his acquaintance not far from the capital. It is nearly the lantern festival, the fifteenth day of the first month by the lunar calendar; they demand to accompany him to see the sights of the city. Ch'in can only assent, but he slips ahead to deliver his convoy and reenters the city with his companions later. Imperial Ch'angan is ablaze with lanterns and packed with people of all ages and levels; society's upper crust and the indigent, sophisticated urbanites and country bumpkins, all have poured into the streets to see the sights. All are giddy with excitement and are dressed in their finest. Young men and women are especially numerous here, the latter enjoying this rare freedom of movement around the city, the former dogging their tracks for a stolen kiss or a surreptitious fondle—or to steal their jewelry.

And there are those who use such chance meetings on a bridge as pretexts for rape and murder. The worst of customs is this rambling about to view the lanterns!

Who would have thought that even old woman Wang, a widow, not knowing calamity from blessing, would stay up a little later than usual to take her full-grown daughter, nicknamed Wan-erh, out to see the sights? Not that there was anything amiss in seeing the sights, but who could have known that it would provoke a crime of great magnitude, a wrong to ruin the happiness of the old lady and to bring to an end the girl's lantern viewing?

All it takes is a single wrong move
To change the outcome of the whole game.

What did she look like, this young lady?

Her waist, supple as a willow in late spring,
          A face like peach bloom at winter's end,
Ice-white flesh, jadelike bones, choicest of the choice,
          Especially so viewed in lantern light, under full moon!

Together mother and daughter locked their door and walked out into the main street to see the lanterns. But no sooner had they left their door when a band of young loafers began to follow them, singing and making comments, sticking very close to ogle Wan-erh. Once they reached the main street they swarmed around the women like ants or bees until they could not even move freely. Not only was Wan-erh frightened, even old woman Wang was utterly panicked. These loafers felt their bottoms and fondled their breasts, but this was only the beginning. They did not expect that a number of good-for-nothings in the employ of young lord Yü-wen would be out on the prowl for any female even three parts pretty. These they would report to their master in order that he could come out and have a look for himself. When they saw how really attractive and truly appealing Wang Wan-erh was, they hurried off to report to their master. As soon as he heard that a beautiful girl was out front, the young lord too rushed in pursuit, and saw how bewitching, how spellbinding Wan-erh was.

His spy having already ascertained that the girl was accompanied only by one older woman, the young lord realized how easy it would be to take advantage of the situation. Thus he went to jostle her around a bit in flirtation. By this time Wan-erh was speechless; she could go neither forward nor back. Old woman Wang did not recognize young lord Yü-wen; when she could bear this no longer, she could only object verbally.

Yü-wen Hui-chi took advantage of this change of events by pretending to become angry. “How could an old woman be so discourteous that she dares to stand up to me like this! Take her away and lock her up!” At this, his crowd of retainers responded in unison, a roar of voices, and dragged them, mother and daughter, away to the gate of his mansion. The widow and Wan-erh were so frightened that they broke out in cold sweat, unable even to call out, as numb as if they had been pushed into a bank of cloud or fog, as if pulled into the midst of thunder and lightning.

There were onlookers along the street, of course, but who among them did not know that young lord Yü-wen was in the habit of behaving so wildly; who would dare to intervene in order to free the ladies? Soon they arrived at the mansion gate. Since old woman Wang was of no use to them, they left her to stay in the gatehouse. Alone, Wan-erh was hustled along by this mob, past several turns and through several courts. It was in the study that the crowd finally came to a halt. Yü-wen Hui-chi was already there.

No sooner had Yü-wen Hui-chi pursed his lips than his crowd of retainers all withdrew outside, leaving only a few maids. Yü-wen Hui-chi looked her up and down: indeed, she was a fine woman. Even though she was fearful, she seemed:

As the delicate blossoms, even more lovely in the rain,
As the yielding willows, yet more charming in a breeze.

At once he drew her to him, twisting her face toward him that he might kiss her on the mouth. Now Wan-erh was an innocent and inexperienced girl—she did not even know the names for such things. Hurriedly she twisted her face away and pushed him back with her hands. When the young lord slipped one hand into the crotch of her trousers, Wan-erh was so alarmed that she kicked out in all directions, hastily blocking his hand and sobbing aloud, tears pouring from her eyes. “Mother! Come quickly—save me!” she shrieked.

How many times by now had old widow Wang called out, “Child, where are you! Give me back my child!” But who knows how many courts and walls lay between them; they could not hear each other no matter how loudly they cried.

With a giggle young lord Yü-wen again clutched her tightly to his bosom, saying, “It's no use to cry out. You're better off doing what I want. If you're nice and let me have my way, you'll become my Young Lady, sure enough. And if that doesn't suit you, I'll have someone take you back home in a few days. But this place is just like a dyer's shop—there's no way that you can come out of here ‘white’!”

How could the girl willingly submit? She stamped both her feet wildly without cease, and the young lord was kept from fondling her no matter how hard he tried. She banged her head against his face, and the young lord was prevented from kissing her at every turn. She struggled against him a while longer, but as they always say, young aristocrats have quick tempers, and he had long since become angry. “Force her on to the bed!” he told his maids, and he pushed her away from him. The maids broke into giggles as they did so.

This was no ordinary bed. It was called a “Mount Wu bed” and had been given to him by a good friend named Ho Ch'ou; it was also called a “perfect bliss bed.”(24) Whenever he succeeded in tricking some young woman of good family into coming here, she would be outraged at the young lord and would twist her body and clench her thighs together, strike out with her feet and push him away with her hands. This happened every time. There was a locking device on each of the four corners of this bed and two brocade straps between them. When a woman was forced on to this bed, with a snap her hands and feet would be held fast, waiting only for “rain and clouds.”

From my view, I wonder what spectacle, what possible interest there could be in binding fast the hands and feet—so tightly that she she cannot move—of a woman who has not given her heart to you? This Yü-wen Hui-chi was nothing more than a fool to see this as stimulating, to want to have his will just one time and never again. Indeed,

A mad bee understands only the pursuit of fragrance,
How could he admire even the most exquisite flower in the bud?

Although Wan-erh was eighteen years of age, all her life she had been physically delicate and shy. She was still a virgin, and that thing of hers had not yet been broken. The young lord called a servant to hold the lamp so that it illuminated Wan-erh while he broke it with his thumb. Just as if it were a peach he had torn apart, the fresh liquid dripped forth, a stream of pale red. Aroused, the young lord's male member rose mightily; with one thrust he entered the seat of her womanhood. Wan-erh cried out in pain at his exertions; then her throat clenched and she was unable to make a sound. Her body held fast, she was unable even to wriggle.

The servants covered their mouths to stifle their laughter; outside the window others of his men and maids secretly watched the spectacle, coupled up and held each other fast, themselves accomplishing their own “task.” Now these men and women were all from among his household; with a young master so profligate, it was not surprising that what the superiors did the inferiors would imitate. Since this Yü-wen Hui-chi indulged himself in dissipation such as this every day, he kept numerous Taoist priests and conjurers of various sects in his household who competed with each other in presenting him with aphrodisiacs. If it were not seal testicles or actinolite crystals, curculigo grass or the phallus plant²⁵ or any other ordinary medication, then it would be some yet more rare concoction from abroad. Day and night he took pills of these kinds. Then too there were various rinses, and he never ceased washing his male organ in them. On his “tortoise head” these concoctions had produced a great ring of flesh like leather, and at the base he also wore a medicine-packed lead hoop. The organ itself was swollen completely full, as if it were a ripe squash. In addition, the ring of flesh on its head made it five or six inches longer when it stiffened, with dark veins curling around it like earthworms. Thrashing and stabbing, it was indeed formidable!

Wan-erh had never been deflowered, and to experience this wild and foolish young man for her first time—his forcing open her vagina was just like stabbing her with a knife. Blood flowed forth to soak her trousers. Her teeth were clenched tight, her hands and feet turned icy cold. The young lord took offense at her unwillingness to submit to him, and even though he was “accomplishing his task” with her, still he remained resentful. Thus he purposely forced the head of his organ roughly into her as if he wanted to make her vagina swell and burst. Entreat him as she might, he would not leave her alone.

But eventually he grew impatient with this business. Noisily withdrawing his male organ, he again brought the light near to shine on her. Unable to bear her shame, Wan-erh could only curse at him. “How can I begin to say it all—I bumped into you by accident, you immoral, cruel-hearted brigand! To ruin me like this—it would have been better if you had just taken a knife and killed me!”

Hearing her curses, the young lord angrily cursed her in return. “You mean little beast, to talk back to me that way! How many women here in the capital, both highborn and low, just can't wait to make it with me—at the mere mention of my reputation as a lover! Now you, you back alley slave girl—there's no making you whole again now that I've broken you in. That's good enough for you—I ought to beat you to death for talking back to me and putting up resistance, you filthy slave. It's no trouble for me just to lock you up here and never let you out of my gate again.”

With that he called a servant to bring him the roster of his pages. The young lord scrutinized the roster and then called them together. “Have a little fun with this woman in my place. If you keep to the order of the roster you'll all have a turn at her. Don't get out of order or quarrel over her. Those of you who've got what it takes should let her have it. If you screw her to death, just bury her in some empty place in the back courtyard. If you don't screw her to death, then put her in the west wing of the study. I'll give her to those of you who aren't married—share her among yourselves at night!

The pages were as happy as if they had received a present from Heaven and with smiles piling up on their faces, one after another they responded, “Many thanks for your kind gift, my lord.” Some among these pages were sixteen or seventeen years old, others were twenty-one or twenty-two, but all of them were vigorous and cruel young men. Receiving their master's vicious command, they did indeed enjoy their sport in turn. Like hungry ghosts they climbed on to her, but the business would be over in one or two jerks. Just see them standing there in a huddle, laughing uproariously. The young master clapped his hands and laughed loudly. There were several who took longer, facing their master as they strove furiously. The young master clapped his hands and cheered them on, bringing out large bowls of wine to reward them.

In the midst of their debauchery, a person came in from outside to make his secret report into the master's ear. “The old lady is still outside and is making a great fuss. How do we get rid of her?” The young master said, “I can't believe that there are such shrews! I'll take care of her myself.” The pages were even more overjoyed now that their master had left the study; up and down on Wan-erh, they worked her until she was neither dead nor alive. She had wept until she had used up all her tears. At last, when she was just like a corpse, those among the pages who had any human decency, and a few did, warmed a little wine, surreptitiously loosened the fetters and helped Wan-erh to sit up, then spread out bedding that she might sleep. Wan-erh revived a little and again asked where her mother was. “She's already been sent back long ago,” the pages said; “why do you ask?” Wan-erh wept without ceasing. The pages crowded around her, urging her to stop. We will relate no more of this, however.

The young lord went out of the gate of the mansion to ask the old woman why she was making such a fuss. But when the woman heard that the young lord had come out she cried all the more, beating her breast and stamping her feet, invoking Heaven and calling on the Earth, begging for her daughter to be freed. “I've already used your daughter,” the young lord said. “You'd better go back to where you came from as fast as you can if you don't want a beating.”

“Don't talk of beating—you'd even go so far as to kill me!” the old woman said. “You must give me back my daughter! I'm a widow, and this daughter is my only child. She's already promised to somebody, but she hasn't been married off yet and so for our two lives we depend on each other, mother and daughter. If you don't give her back to me, I'll die right here this very night!”

“Say what you want, but don't die here,” the young lord said; “this doorway of mine can't accommodate so many dying in it. Go ahead and die if you want to; I don't mind. But it would be better if you just hurried on home.” He called his servants to drive her away. They pushed and pushed, pulled and pulled, beat her again and again, and once they got her moving they pushed her out through the barrier at the mouth of the residential street and latched the gates at both ends in order that she could not reenter.

Since by this time the young lord Yü-wen's appetite still had not yet been sated, again he took a hundred or two hooligans to loiter about on the street. Again his wish was to bump into an accommodating woman who might satisfy his urges.

Now it was already the second drum; before one adventure was taken care of he was off in search of another. This young lord was extraordinarily stupid and evil, but, on the other hand, the old lady had brought it on herself. A lone widow and a young virgin, even from a poor house, ought not to go out into the crowds to view lanterns by themselves. That young lord Yü-wen, who deserved to be beaten to death, was out looking for trouble again. But it is always so that each sip, each sup, all is predestined—how much more so greater matters of life and death! There is no escaping the will of Heaven. The Way of Heaven is to shun licentiousness; this is clear and plain to see. Just observe the consequences suffered by that young lord and then you will know the retribution for lechery!²⁶

In the following chapter, Ch'in Shu-pao and his fellows encounter the grief-stricken widow, hear her tale, and vow revenge. Their determination wins them the praise of all who hear of it. Soon they catch up with the young aristocrat; they stage an impromptu skit in which Ch'in dances close to Yü-wen, twirling his truncheons. With a single mighty blow he smites the villain dead on the spot; the group flees during the conflagration started by his companions to cover their escape, but hundreds of innocent bystanders are trampled, stabbed, or burned to death. Upon hearing news of their son's murder, the Yü-wen family, themselves court officials, immediately have Wan-erh and her mother put to death, the girl beaten to an unrecognizable mass and the old woman summarily cut down.²⁷ Significantly, the next chapter narrates the physical decline of the Sui emperor Wen through sexual excess and Yang's assumption of the throne. The maker of the device that immobilized Wan-erh will later present two such beds to Emperor Yang; it is significant too that the pretender who has Yang strangled some years later is a brother of the young lord in this scene.

It is rare indeed to find in old Chinese fiction scenes so complex in their presentation of evil and irresponsibility, guilt and innocence; realistically, no one character here is wholly above reproach. Likewise, scenes of such great horror are seldom found in classical narratives.²⁸ Instead of graphic descriptions of battle, for instance, one might read simply that bodies covered the ground or that a river flowed red with blood—by convention the reader is spared the details of screams, gaping wounds, dismembered bodies, and the like. Hyperbole and exaggeration in this episode serve to strengthen the novelist's message: that the girl and her mother took an unwarranted risk given the dangers presented by the powerful rakes, that this act—despite the mother's abetting the crime by her incaution—is inhuman, that behaviorally as well as physically young Yü-wen is abnormal, a monstrous freak fit only to be exterminated. The underlying realism of Yüan's description is affirmed all the more tragically by the outcome of the incident: although Heaven “borrowed the hands” of Ch'in Shu-pao to achieve its aims, no idealistically conceived assassination will do. The “young lords” in Yüan Yü-ling's society were well insulated. Reaching them with retaliation necessarily involved many others at the same time and with disastrous consequences; the long arm of elite power stretched nearly everywhere.

Forgotten Tales of the Sui pointedly draws attention to a number of problems of the novelist's era. Like The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang, this work condemns excessive taxes and forced labor intended merely to satisfy imperial greed, declaring such construction projects to be more devastating for the populace than war.²⁹ Likewise, Yüan Yü-ling censures civil officials for their self-centered approach to national matters, reflecting the clique struggles of his day: “Inevitably a state will be ruined by its civil officials.”³⁰ But in contrast to the earlier novel that focuses on Yang's imperial Sui court, Yüan Yü-ling's work is set in the provinces and at a different level of society for the most part, so it gives a different perspective on the troubles of the times. It is rural brigandage that receives most attention here: “There is nothing that vexes the people nowadays more than brigands,” the novelist declares; “I do not know how brigands can be so inhumane, so lacking in fear of punishment.” Yüan even cites the advice of his older contemporary, Ch'en Chi-ju (1558-1639), against the unnecessary movement and disbandment of troops—because such brigands are all too often deserters or demobilized soldiers.³¹ Later he complains that his contemporaries are perversely fond of disharmonious behavior, of making enemies rather than of behaving in a selfless, virtuous manner.³² From these comments, several features of Yüan Yü-ling's values become clear: although addressing provincial problems, his perspective assuredly is not that of the rural poor. Nor would that be appropriate in his stratified society; his identification is with the class represented by young lord Yü-wen despite his castigation of its abuses. After all, he knew the characteristics of his own social group best.

A crisis comes for Ch'in Shu-pao in Forgotten Tales of the Sui when, during the civil wars at the end of the Sui, he is forced to choose a side to support. The quotation that introduces this chapter is an editorial aside from Chapter 53; interestingly, it describes a situation in which the novelist found himself not many years later. That he, like Chin Sheng-t'an, acted in real life in accordance with the principles presented in his novel again proves the seriousness of this art form in seventeenth-century China.

Yüan Yü-ling was from a distinguished Soochow family. The clan had been wealthy for a long time before the seventeenth century. Yüan's great-great-grandfather Yüan Ting had purchased a degree; that generation included a chin-shih degree holder and three others who served in official capacity either in the two imperial capitals or in local positions through purchased degrees. His great-grandfather, Yüan Pao (1499-1576), was a noted bibliophile. The latter's brother Yüan Chiung (1495-1560) was one of the foremost book collectors and publishers of the entire Ming period; his printing ventures included various serial publications on history, geography, and current political questions. Yü-ling's grandfather, Yüan Nien (1539-1617) was a chin-shih graduate of 1577 who served in a number of important provincial posts over a ten-year span late in the sixteenth century. The name of Yü-ling's father is not now known, although many of his relatives of the same surname were known for their writings, particularly poetry, and painting.³³

Yüan Yü-ling himself was best known for his plays; these, mostly romantic comedies, brought both fame and notoriety. His enemies were also profuse, to judge from the number of uncomplimentary references to him in contemporary writings: that he was short and ugly, that he wrote a play to slander his rival for the bed of a local courtesan (which indiscretion cost him his academic degree), that he personally surrendered the city of Soochow to Manchu invaders, and that he was subsequently dismissed from office for dereliction of duty. Although the first of these allegations may be true, the others are patently false, a consequence of the vulgar notion that physical shortcomings naturally correspond to moral truancy. However, other, more reliable, references do indicate Yüan's rather bohemian life style. Like Li Yü, he may well have offended the more hidebound among his contemporaries by flouting social conventions.

As a poet in the ch'ü format, Yüan is classified as one of the K'unshan school, as is Feng Meng-lung—whose work Yüan criticized from a position of greater talent. The ch'ü poetry of the two men is similar in style and content. Both poets strictly adhered to the prosodic rules for this form and strove for a high degree of literary polish.³⁴ Yüan and Feng shared values concerning the composition of drama as well, that stressing the necessity of close correspondence of prosody to musical structure (in contrast to the literati and composers who might neglect one major aspect). For this, both are considered members of the Wuchiang school of drama.³⁵ It would appear that the two were friends, Yüan having dramatized one of Feng's short stories as his Chen-chu shan (Pearl-Sewn Shirt), which pointedly fails to condemn a young wife for falling prey to a handsome seducer.³⁶ Ancedotes also record that Feng tricked Yüan into giving him a large sum of money and in return polished Yüan Yü-ling's play Hsi-lou chi (The Western Bower) by adding one more scene to it.³⁷ Yüan's play on the rise and fall of the court clique headed by the eunuch Wei Chung-hsien (likewise incomplete at its first performance) demonstrates a far greater concern with contemporary issues on the part of Yüan Yü-ling, however.

Much of Yüan Yü-ling's unfavorable reputation is related to his most famous play. The Western Bower centers on a wealthy young rake, a matchmaker, a beautiful courtesan (a talented poetess), and the rake's rival, a young poet. Legend unjustifiably attributes Yüan's composition of the play to his frustration at being defeated in a love rivalry. Such tales give the lady in question the same name as the stage character, have Yüan's supposed alter ego grief-stricken by her loss, and relate that Yüan's altruistic retainer kidnapped the girl for him—all events narrated in the play. Yüan's father was aghast when the suitor filed a legal complaint against him, the legend relates, and he gladly packed his son off to prison. There Yüan was supposed to have written the play to get at least a modicum of revenge. In fact, the heroine of the play is closely modeled on a real courtesan of note, one Chou Ch'i-sheng, who was carried away by a young literatus named Shen T'ung-ho around 1620. That would have occurred when Yüan was scarcely twenty, making the whole incident highly unlikely. Furthermore, the girl was not a great beauty; her face bore the scars of smallpox—as did Yüan's, apparently. Shen was also embroiled in a scandal involving cheating on the civil service examinations; it seems equally implausible that his status would have been such that he could have brought suit against Yüan, a member of a powerful and wealthy clan.³⁸

Most of Yüan's plays were written during the late Ming, although The Western Bower was first performed during the winter of 1645-46 in Manchu-controlled Peking.³⁹ By that time Yüan had left his native Soochow to travel and had been in Peking at the time of its fall, first to the Chinese rebel Li Tzu-ch'eng and then to the foreign conquerors. (Yüan must also have confronted the choice of whom to join among contenders for the throne; as did his fictional hero, Yüan discerned and chose the winning side. It is significant, given the condemnation of brigandage in Forgotten Tales of the Sui, that he did not choose Li Tzu-ch'eng.) By the end of 1645 he was installed in the Division of Water Control in the central government's Ministry of Public Works. Soon afterward, in the spring of 1646, he was transferred to a provincial post, overseer of the customs station at Linch'ing in Shantung province, the province in which Ch'in Shu-pao was raised. Thereafter he served as prefect of Chingchou in Hupei province until his impeachment in 1653 for misappropriation of funds. He returned to Soochow to live in retirement, although he apparently resided for a time in Nanking and perhaps also in Hangchow.

Several of Yüan Yü-ling's plays were criticized for unnecessary lewdness and lack of refinement in diction. Few writers would go so far in their censure, however, as the moralist Tung Han, who recorded the following attack soon after Yüan's death:

Yüan Yü-ling from the Soochow area was proud of his refined skill at composing music and traveled about among high-ranking officials. Professional actors played his ch'uan-ch'i play The Western Bower everywhere. And yet the words of its arias were base, particularly lacking in refinement, far below those of Wang, K'ang, and other gentlemen. He was fit only to serve as their menial, although he was unwilling to admit it. Personally he was corrupt, having no sense of shame. Even when over seventy years of age he maintained the attitudes of a young man, enjoying constant talk of bedroom matters. In company he would always ramble on with licentious verses and obscene stories until people had to cover their ears. Many times I have said to people, “That gentleman will inevitably have to pay for his foul mouth.” Before long, while he was a guest in K'uaichi, he went out in the heat to see someone and suddenly contracted a peculiar malady. He perceived a strange tickle in his mouth; consequently he bit his own tongue until it sloughed off piece by piece. He did not eat for twenty or more days; finally he could not utter a word. When the root of his tongue was all gone, he died.⁴⁰

It is worthy of note that Yüan was among the first wave of Chinese literati to offer their services to the Manchus after the conquest. This is particularly important, since Yüan was already relatively well known among his peers in the lower Yangtze cultural centers—strongholds of Ming loyalties well into the Ch'ing period. It seems most likely that the slanderous anecdotes that survive him may be an attempt, conscious or otherwise, to villify Yüan for his “opportunistic” shift of loyalties. Or they may have been intended, through demonstrating his supposed lack of scruples, to verify that he willingly could have joined the enemy. The bizarre tale translated above was intended to render “poetic justice” for his perfidy. Regardless of the intentions of his detractors, Yüan Yü-ling's actions as recorded by his friends and other acquaintances accord with the political sentiments expressed in his major novel.

Forgotten Tales of the Sui appeared in only one edition, published in Hangchow, presumably, with Yüan's signed preface dated 1633. There may be several reasons why it was not reprinted during the Ming, among them its condemnation of official abuses and its insistance on the appearance of a “true ruler” to replace a decadent and destructive monarch. During the early Ch'ing, one may speculate, Yüan's reputation as a turncoat may have affected the popularity of his writings. Within several decades of the Ming fall much of the work had been incorporated into another novel, Ch'u Jen-huo's Romance of the Sui and the T'ang. As a consequence, the best of Yüan's narrative survives in the later work, which remains popular even today, although his role in its authorship has been ignored until the present century.⁴¹ The other two novels Yüan Yü-ling edited, historical romances concerning the Han period, likewise disappeared soon after their first editions. (Yüan's novels about the Han were far from original; he simply modified two older novels somewhat and put his own name on the title pages. It is tempting to raise suspicions about Forgotten Tales of the Sui as a similarly rewritten work, since commentaries on several chapters mention an “original edition,” yüan-pen or pen-chuan. But no earlier text exists that bears any close relation to this; it is my guess that the commentator simply refers to an earlier draft of Yüan's novel that circulated among his friends in manuscript. As it stands, certain sections were adapted from The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang; others owe their inspiration to episodes in Water Margin, although names of characters and other details have been modified considerably.)

Despite the political comment implicit in its choice of subject matter and explicit in its editorial asides, Forgotten Tales of the Sui deals primarily with the problems surrounding personal freedoms and responsibilities: how free is one, how ought one to choose a social role in life, and what models should one follow. These again are questions relevant only to the leisured and educated, who could ponder the present in relation to their knowledge of the past. The central character in these deliberations is Ch'in Shu-pao who, although he lives a life quite different from Yüan and his friends in detail, still shares the values of the leisured elite. Clarification of this character's search for identity will require a selective plot synopsis.

Ch'in Shu-pao starts life with a romantic view of the world. He is the scion of a line of honored generals, the last of whom fell with the Sui conquest as a paragon of loyalty to his state. The youthful Ch'in is a mediocre student, preferring instead to learn the rudiments of military strategy and the handling of weapons. His sires are dead, and the model they present is far removed from his daily experience. Consequently Ch'in Shu-pao becomes something of a hooligan, getting into fights for the avowed purpose of righting wrongs in the manner of a knight-errant. In fact, Ch'in Shu-pao at this point is as free as he will ever be, headstrong and self-indulgent. Only his mother can restrain him by insisting that he show her proper filial respect. When a friend suggests that he take some conventional employment, Ch'in Shu-pao retorts angrily:

“Never in my entire life have I placed any value on serving some official. I am one of a line of generals. My aim is to lead a line of troops or horse to slay generals and capture standards, to expand the frontiers and extend the domain. This will bring glory and rank to my parents and honors and privileges to my wife and children. But if I don't achieve my aim, I still have a little poor land and a few fruit trees I can rely on to care for my old mother and to support my wife and children. And I have some local wine and a few chickens in our shabby little house that I can use to entertain my true friends. Whenever cares trouble this brave heart of mine, even though I may not know how to sing lyrics and compose verse or to play a zither or strum a lute, if I handle my lance or my staff for a while this is enough to ease my mind. Why should I bow my head to some corrupt official and obey his orders? If I captured a thief he would make it his accomplishment; all the booty I might recover would be just that much more wealth for him! I would be the one to wear myself out capturing bandits, but then they'd only have to slip him a little money and he'd let them go, claiming false arrest on our part. Nor could I ever go slinking around hurting good people just for the sake of filling his ricebowl. I'll have nothing to do with this!”⁴²

His mother insists, however. She feels strongly that the local constabulary, the lowest of all government positions, is the place to begin the rise to the glory that he owes her and his forebears as a filial son. Ch'in can only meekly obey.

Soon this coarse Shantung youth is sent to another province, Shansi, to deliver prisoners into exile. His departure marks the beginning of a new stage in life. Early on in his journey he discovers a man being beset by brigands (actually this is an attempt to assassinate Li Yüan—later the founder of the T'ang—staged by Yang Su) and in his innocence can only sigh philosophically about the lack of peace in the realm. His companion must shame him into saving the man by reminding Ch'in Shu-pao of his obligation, as a self-styled knight-errant, to right wrongs wherever they occur. Ch'in rescues the man, then flees in embarrassment before he can be properly thanked. Soon Ch'in Shu-pao rides into Luchou with his charges, only to be delayed there for months—having forgotten to bring any money with him.

In Luchou Ch'in Shu-pao becomes the pawn of an innkeeper and his own inexperience. Instead of seeking help, Ch'in sits morosely, unable to retort to the insults of his host. Ch'in tries to sell his weapons, to no avail. Finally he sells his horse to a local stalwart who would gladly have helped him out of these financial straits—but Ch'in is too deeply immersed in his own traumas to think of others, even for his own benefit! Repeatedly embarrassed at falling far short of the image he has of himself, Ch'in Shu-pao becomes physically ill, so much so that he is completely immobilized.

Throwing himself thus on the mercy of others, Ch'in has given up most of his ego. That too must be mended along with his body. His models are the learned Wei Cheng (580-643, later an important T'ang minister), temporarily in retirement because the “Way does not prevail,” and the wealthy landowner Shan Hsiung-hsin. Wei teaches him about power politics; Shan is his model of altruistic friendship. All this male influence has driven earlier pressures from his mind; Ch'in is stricken with remorse at news that his mother has been grieving for him all this time. Finally he starts home, becomes involved in an accidental homicide, and ends up in exile, in penal servitude in the army of Lo I (known to history as Li I, having received the imperial surname for his aid in the T'ang conquest).

Lo I is none other than Ch'in's uncle by marriage. He becomes his new behavioral model, but only after Ch'in Shu-pao thoroughly shames himself again by pretending to be more proficient at arms than he really is. This time his face is saved by his twelve-year-old cousin, a phenomenal archer. Ch'in studies diligently, although now he can no longer remain oblivious to his other obligations. Despite his reluctance to leave his benefactor Lo I and his cousin, now a close friend, still he cannot but repay all his debts and return to his mother. Mother Ch'in had gotten him started in his career, such as it was; Lo I's recommendation starts him again as a low-ranking runner for the local circuit intendant. This brings another round of trials: he attempts to treat his erstwhile friends-cum-highwaymen generously while keeping them out of trouble at the same time. He succeeds, only to commit the murder of the wealthy rake in the capital himself, another source of shame—over the needless deaths this righteous act provokes. At home again he serves as a constable, now unable to discover the identity of robbers who made off with a shipment of tax silver for the court. At the residence of a friend, Ch'in Shu-pao weeps in his wine, admitting:

“Sir, I may be good for nothing, but it's not that I can't bear the pain of a little criticism and a little flogging from the magistrate. That's not why I have tears in my eyes. … It was only because I had my heart set on earning a reputation for meritorious service that I went to serve Commander Lai with my weapons and was given a small post. But I didn't foresee that I'd be called down by the governor of the province or that today my body—my parents' most precious gift—would be broken and shamed by an official beating. I'm even ashamed to let you see the tears in my eyes, old friend.”⁴³

Friends assemble to celebrate his mother's birthday, a sign of their respect for Ch'in Shu-pao despite his sufferings over failures in office. Among them are the criminals he seeks; one is a childhood playmate and former sworn brother named Ch'eng Yao-chin (d.665). Ch'in is still playing the altruistic friend, however; without hesitation he burns the warrant for their arrest, thus turning his back on all other obligations. This act again reduces Ch'in's options considerably. Friends must hasten to his aid to forestall disaster; they replace the stolen goods and have him relieved of his duties.

Ch'in Shu-pao's next assignment is to escort a gang of laborers to the Grand Canal excavation site. There he learns of the widespread kidnappings that serve Ma Shu-mou's table (adapted from The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang), captures the abductors, and brings them to the highest local authority for justice. Since this is Ma himself, the kidnappers are soon back at their trade. But now he is a responsible servant of the state; Ch'in Shu-pao does not act impulsively again. Instead, he chooses the time-honored Confucian alternative to participation in tyranny: he retires to his home town.

After several years of this pastoral purification, he is a man in the eyes of the world. This heralds a new stage in Ch'in's career, a higher plateau of maturation. The now adult Ch'in Shu-pao can take the initiative to act without prompting—and in ways that are not patently destructive. He has a newborn son; he has also gained a reckless protégé named Lo Shih-hsin (603-622). Furthermore, he is granted a position of real authority, as a general of the vanguard in the Sui expeditionary force sent against the Korean state of Koryô. Ch'in serves conscientiously and well in this assignment, even avoiding violent conflict when confronted by the father of the young rake he slew in the capital. To this evil minister, Yü-wen Shu (d.616), he declares:

“Enough! I got rid of a public nuisance that day. Now you want to take revenge for your son—I'll just hand over this head of mine and be done with it. I only regret that I haven't yet repaid my mother for her concern and that Korea isn't yet pacified. Away with it! Cut it off whenever you want!” And with that he straightened himself and marched out of the camp, taking great strides.⁴⁴

Ch'in returns home in glory, finally the worthy scion of a line of generals.

Now Ch'in's problems are those of an adult man in a chaotic age. He has “found himself” by developing self-confidence in his role as principled leader of armed men. But his principles still can leave him snared on the horns of a dilemma. Ch'in Shu-pao's next assignment is the pacification of the brigand and rebel bands rife in his native Shantung. Then when several of his friends also rebel, his enemy Yü-wen Shu charges Ch'in himself with brigandage and has his family arrested. Young Lo Shih-hsin manages to free them, but as in Water Margin they have no place of refuge except among the desperados. Despite his high regard for and strong personal loyalty to his commanding officer, Ch'in Shu-pao too can only join Li Mi's (582-618) rebel force at Tile Ridge (Wakang): “What will I do? I had thought to remain here to fulfill my obligations to the state while fulfilling my obligations to my true friend. … I can only write a farewell letter to Commander Chang … and long for a reunion with my mother.”⁴⁵ Ch'in's erstwhile troop is sent against the rebels; both its commander and another of Ch'in's old friends die fighting for the Sui. Ch'in himself is heartbroken, although significantly he is simultaneously freed from his last ties to the Sui.

His commander had been a man of unswerving loyalty to the emperor; Ch'in Shu-pao seeks to emulate him in his own service to Li Mi, now self-proclaimed duke of Wei. A meeting with a rival contender, Li Shih-min (598-649), presents a thorny problem: it is obvious to Ch'in that Shih-min is the “true ruler” he had been seeking, a man of outstanding capacities and fully worthy of his loyalty. Unable to discover a means to transfer his allegiance, Ch'in Shu-pao again seeks refuge behind a different Confucian principle: he rushes off to visit his mother. There he remains until Li Mi is dead, a victim of his own treachery. Thereafter Ch'in is free to join Li Shih-min and the rising T'ang forces, as do many of his friends and acquaintences. When T'ang military forces subdue another rival rebel leader, Ch'in's first benefactor, Shan Hsiung-hsin, is among those taken prisoner. Without hesitation, Ch'in makes a formal farewell, arranges a marriage for Shan's child, and sees him to the execution ground. Then he has Shan buried with honors. His filial concerns are not allowed to conflict with his unswerving loyalty to the new T'ang state—nor are other personal considerations permitted to interfere.

The fictional Ch'in Shu-pao has achieved the heroic role allotted him by the recorders of Chinese history, as a faithful commander in the civil wars that established the three hundred years of T'ang rule early in the seventh century. Significantly, the Ch'in Shu-pao of the novel's last few chapters is nearly devoid of a convincingly complex personality; the novelist is completing his life story, but by then events submerge the man. He has become too prominent nationally for the novelist to examine his movements as an individual character separate from those of other leaders involved in the struggle for power. And as an adult, Ch'in simply is of less interest to Yüan Yü-ling than he was during his formative years.

The ultimate stultification of Ch'in Shu-pao in Forgotten Tales of the Sui is a consequence of Yüan Yü-ling's choice of a historical figure to be his protagonist. As he points out in his preface, his interest is with the maturation of this character more than with what he had ultimately become ten centuries before Yüan's time:

Why use the word “forgotten” in the title of this history? It is because I am supplementing the standard histories. The standard histories chronicle events … to transmit what is credible. Forgotten histories collect what has been overlooked … to transmit what is marvelous. Works which transmit the credible place greatest value on truth (chen). … Works which transmit the marvelous place greatest value on fancy (huan). … I have created Forgotten Tales of the Sui to write of Ch'in, duke of Hu, in his obscurity. And in addition I have included those of his time who served with him. …

Thus my intention from the beginning was to supplement hereby the histories with that which had been forgotten; it was not necessarily to proceed in a direction opposite to that of the histories. Thus I have ventured to embellish a tale to append to the histories, writing to fill in what the histories lack while maintaining the historians' original ideas. …⁴⁶

Customarily, modern literary historians have tended to overlook novelists' prefaces as facetious or as mere apologias for writing fiction rather than more serious literature. Yüan's preface to Forgotten Tales of the Sui smacks lightly of both. And yet it serves as an important key to the work, given the context in which it appeared. Historians ever since Ssu-ma Ch'ien in the early Han period had seen nothing amiss in the restrained use of imagination in the dramatic presentation of historical events; logic shows that conversations and statements must have been fabricated by historians to demonstrate the personalities of historical personages as confirmed by recorded events. Likewise, historians organized their biographies by types of social roles (eunuchs, ministers, generals) and behavioral models (filial sons, chaste widows, loyal subjects). Yüan Yü-ling here has provided a fictitious maturation process to match what orthodox historians recorded of the man's life as an adult. The purpose of giving his imagination free reign is to produce a kind of “truth” despite its basis in fantasy. That in recording truth Yüan achieved what might in large part be called realism can be seen in the rape scene quoted above. His “illusions of reality” are indeed convincing. The stages in Ch'in's maturation, then, may be viewed as similarly realistic. As has been demonstrated already, Yüan addressed his narrative to contemporary problems; the “truth” he fabricates thus is of his own age, not necessarily that of the Sui a millennium before. The pressures felt by Ch'in Shu-pao are those of the seventeenth century. Whether they accurately reflect those of the Sui as well seems immaterial.

Ch'in Shu-pao's attempts to establish himself in the world involve his adoption of various behavioral models and his assumption of several social roles. In his earlier years the models he pursues are of two distinct types, “stalwarts” or “outstanding men” (hao-chieh) of highest moral principles, resolute in their application of these principles, and “swordsmen” or “knights-errant” (hsia), men of courage and personal dedication whose reckless altruism all too frequently complicates further the wrongs they strive to right. While both are positive character types in Forgotten Tales of the Sui, Yüan Yü-ling clearly prefers the former for their cool-headed resourcefulness and integrity; the latter, often bunglers despite their good intentions, become the objects of his gentle humor. The former tend toward paragons of social consciousness in a Confucian sense; the latter are more often the Chinese version of the “rugged individualist,” free spirits who act in accordance with their (frequently dimmed) personal lights. While stalwarts can and do lead men, swordsmen here must be under the firm guidance of other, more socially conscious individuals who control their destructive impulses. Neither type is automatically above reproach, however; each is morally complex as a group, if not individually.

Examples of both categories are to be found among Ch'in's youthful friends. Wang Po-tang (d.618) is a scholar (hsiu-ts'ai) and therefore of the higher cultural group, but most of Ch'in's early influences come from swordsmen—for example, the friend who goads him to save Li Yüan while on their first official mission. Shan Hsiung-hsin is a stalwart; his broad knowledge and generosity appeal strongly to Ch'in. More important, the stalwart has the wisdom to discern the time proper for action. Shan willingly enjoys retirement and advises Ch'in to do the same. Shan, however, is also headstrong. The gold he conceals in Ch'in's luggage causes further traumas for the youth; that his elder brother was accidentally slain by Li Yüan makes it impossible for the vengeful Shan Hsiung-hsin ever to join the T'ang forces. Consequently, Li Yüan orders him executed, again causing Ch'in and his friends considerable anguish.

The young Ch'in Shu-pao always mimics those near him. Shan Hsiung-hsin inspires him to new heights of responsibility; he hurries home to attend to familial duties, only to be further delayed en route. His escorts on his way to exile for accidental homicide are stalwarts, albeit also reckless to an extent. His uncle Lo I is of a higher cultural order; a few months in his service even move Ch'in to try his hand at verse. This is an act of desperation, a plea scrawled on a wall that he be allowed to visit his mother. But Ch'in Shu-pao is barely literate. His poem, quite unoriginal, wins the desired response, although Lo I clearly perceives the limitations of the youth's education. Ch'in's companions as he visits Ch'angan are identified as swordsmen. One may infer, then, that the murder of the rake is a reaction to their penchant for impulsive behavior. Ch'in Shu-pao's own instability is revealed in an interior monologue just before he enters the capital. First, Li Ching (571-649), the minister's agent for receiving the gifts brought by Ch'in Shu-pao and others, warns him of impending calamity. Then he ruminates:

“None of those fellows believes in yin-yang or in spirits and ghosts. … Now the official business is finished, but how can I tell them about running into his exalted person, about his telling my bad fortune from the signs on my face, and about his warning to leave at once? No true gentleman could say a thing like that. A true gentleman would put aside his own wishes to accommodate others! Since my business is finished, how can I tell them such a fairy tale as this? … My friends would all laugh at me!⁴⁷

Surely it is not confidence in his convictions that moves Ch'in at this juncture; appropriately, he is active in seeking approval from the behavioral models at hand.

As a consequence of the conflagration in Ch'angan, Ch'in Shu-pao becomes more self-conscious and more cautious, as he demonstrates in subsequent episodes. Celebrants of his mother's birthday are of four cultural levels. Wang Po-tang and Li Mi, who are aristocratic in deportment; Shan Hsiung-hsin, who is unpolished but has the air (ch'i) of a stalwart; several who at least make a proper appearance; and the crude thief, Ch'eng Yao-chin.⁴⁸ Although Ch'eng completely loses self-control on this occasion, Ch'in Shu-pao follows the example of the more cultured men present, and is calm and decisive in his altruistic response—even though his destruction of the warrant is not a rational solution to the problem. It is Li Mi and others among the elevated who replace the lost silver and have Ch'in transferred to new duties. By the time he retires from office for a respite with his family, he is finally a fully realized stalwart, self-confident and self-reliant. Hereafter Ch'in serves in several social “roles” quite at variance with each other, as bandit leader and as able military commander, but his values are established. His maturation through the use of successive behavioral models is complete; he has chosen to become a man of refinement and fidelity to principle, surpassing all his erstwhile models, stalwart and swordsman alike. Ch'in Shu-pao has chosen the only role appropriate for a man of his caliber in a chaotic age, as an active leader of men in the struggle to regain peace and tranquillity in the realm.

After Ch'in Shu-pao, the most engaging character in Forgotten Tales of the Sui is Ch'eng Yao-chin. In his untrammeled exuberance, this “swordsman” hero is just the opposite of the grave and conscientious Ch'in Shu-pao. But while his Ch'in Shu-pao develops from rambunctious youth to become a renowned general of heroic proportions, Yüan Yü-ling reserves for Ch'eng Yao-chin the ironic mode—Ch'eng is consistently a fool, Yüan's vehicle for comic relief as well as for further comments on man in society.

Ch'eng Yao-chin is introduced in Chapter 27 of Forgotten Tales. When a wealthy local stalwart, Yu Chun-ta, hears that shipments of imperial silver to finance the Grand Canal excavation will pass near his manor, he begins searching for a man sufficiently foolhardy to steal it on his behalf. A retainer suggests Ch'eng, a convicted felon; later Yu meets him by chance in a wineshop. Their conversation is remarkable for its realistic vitality:

Clasping his hands together in salutation, he asked: “What might your eminent name be, elder brother?”

“Lowly name's Ch'eng,” Yao-chin replied.

“And where might your lofty residence be?” Squire Yu asked.

“Live in Pigeonville,” he replied.

“There's a certain brother Ch'eng Chih-chieh in Pigeonville—surely he is one of your prominent clan?” the squire asked.

Yao-chin laughed. “What ‘prominent clan’ are you talking about? Except for my mother I live all by myself. I don't know if there's anybody at all in my clan besides me. I'm called Ch'eng Yao-chin; formal name's Chih-chieh. They also call me Big Ch'eng. What do you want with me?” …

“Could it be that you're selling those bundles of kindling?” he asked.

“Not far wrong,” Ch'eng Yao-chin replied. “All I have is my mother at home; I weave a few bamboo baskets and make up a couple of bundles of kindling to earn a living. I carried them out today, but nobody wanted to buy them. The wind being so high, I'm going to wait here a while and have a cup of warm wine before I head home.”

The sight of the two together—one so prosperous and the other a poor bumpkin—causes the other patrons of the tavern considerable amusement. Soon the pair go off to Yu's manor for more wine. There Ch'eng Yao-chin breaks the flow of polite conversation by asking directly:

“You want me to do a job for you?”

“You're mistaken,” Yu Chun-ta said. “I have long admired your altruism and courage, brother, but I have not had the opportunity to make your acquaintance. But since today we have met, I would like to avail myself of your services to manage a bit of business. Now that we are together here and starting a new relationship, let us become sworn brothers to link us forever—and to remove any suspicions between us.”

“I'm kind of rough,” Yao-chin said. “Why would you want to swear brotherhood with me?”

Yu Chun-ta persuades Ch'eng Yao-chin to participate in the ceremony and then sends him away with an ingot of silver for his mother. However, Ch'eng's robe is in tatters; the silver tears through the sleeve in which he carries it and falls to the ground. He arrives home late, intoxicated and penniless, to receive a vehement scolding from his mother—who, cold and hungry, has been anxiously awaiting his return:

Seeing his face flushed from drinking, before she knew it her gorge began to rise. “You brute—how could you get so drunk that you forgot all about me here at home with neither food nor fuel,” she said. “I'm half stiff with hunger. What's that stupid grin all about? You must be out of your mind, you brute. You make me so mad I could die! But let me ask you: what did you do with the money you earned from selling that kindling?”

“Now, mother, don't get so heated up,” Ch'eng Yao-chin said. “I made it big today—why even talk about that kindling?”

“You're drunk,” his mother said. “That's the wine in you talking—how can I believe a word of it?”

“If you don't believe me, just let me show you the silver I've got here in my sleeve,” he said.

“Where is that silver?” she asked.

Yao-chin felt in his sleeve, but could not feel it. Then he felt along the full length of the sleeve. “Where could I have lost that silver?” he asked, stamping his feet.

“I told you it was just drunken talk,” the mother said.

Although Ch'eng's mother gives little credence to his tale, she can no longer bear her hunger. She forces Ch'eng to carry her on his back to the Yu manor. The night is pitch black, and he stumbles at every step. By the time they arrive, Ch'eng Yao-chin is entirely sober.⁴⁹

This episode, one of the most humorous in Forgotten Tales, includes some of its liveliest dialogue. Yüan Yü-ling achieves remarkable success in capturing the flavor of living colloquial speech. Even more remarkable, however, is the degree to which Yüan has surpassed the Water Margin model for swordsman heroes to create a truly memorable portrait of Ch'eng Yao-chin.

The country person does appear as a fool in Chinese, as in Western, literature, although it is far more common for Chinese writers to present the rustic, particularly the woodcutter, in a Taoist light, aloof from the petty concerns of the world. From his detachment, the rustic then can comment on matters of philosophy and politics; characters of this sort appear regularly in verse and drama, as well as fiction.⁵⁰ Ch'eng Yao-chin is a rustic, to be sure. But with appropriate irony, he is not the woodcutter of tradition; instead he only gathers kindling, and in wisdom he is decidedly below the fictional norm. Consequently, this character should be seen as a humorous combination of attributes from this model and from the Water Margin heroes.

As a case in point, Ch'eng's “military skills” are limited to a facility with the ax—for cutting wood. Water Margin heroes all have considerable proficiency in hand-to-hand combat; although Ch'eng Yao-chin has fitted his ax with an exceptionally long handle for martial practice, he still has to be taught to use this tool as a weapon. Water Margin heroes for the most part willingly join the brigands to get revenge for injustices they have suffered; because he has been pardoned by the emperor (through a general amnesty on Yang's accession to the throne), Ch'eng Yao-chin is extremely reluctant to steal the imperial silver. Water Margin heroes would regard such theft as blows against the emperor's unworthy underlings, and it is clear to most other Forgotten Tales characters by this time that the Sui is falling through internal corruption. To compound the irony of implied comparisons with the archetypal woodcutter, Ch'eng the buffoon has absolutely no understanding of politics: When finally he agrees to steal the silver, his decision is based on nothing more profound than a feeling of obligation to Yu Chun-ta for offering to support his mother. The deed accomplished, he proudly announces their names to his victims—who naturally report them to the local magistrate. Yet in this comedy of errors, the guard has garbled the names, with the result that Ch'eng's identity remains hidden despite his indiscretion.⁵¹

Although the reader cannot but look down, as it were, on Ch'eng Yao-chin for his boorishness, his childish naïveté makes him an extremely appealing character, as subsequent scenes demonstrate. Unaware that he has not been named in a warrant, Ch'eng turns highwayman in the Shantung border region, robbing travelers along the highroad. Before long a band of stalwarts led by Shan Hsiung-hsin passes through on their way to the birthday celebration for Ch'in Shu-pao's mother. Ch'eng recognizes none of them, and attacks ferociously as a consequence. One of their number attempts to make peace:

Lowering his lance, Wang Po-tang called out in a loud voice, “Hold, friend! We are all ‘of the same path.’”

Not understanding his dialect, Ch'eng Yao-chin raised his ax and aimed a blow at Wang Po-tang's helmet. “I'm not one of those ‘on the path’ that don't eat meat!”

“A fine fool,” Po-tang laughed quietly. “We're all friends of the greenwood!”

“This is the seventh wood and here you have to buy safe passage from me!” Yao-chin cried.

Ch'eng Yao-chin is the butt of all the humor here, of course, as he reveals his ignorance at every turn. First he demonstrates his inexperience as a highwayman, mistaking the argot expression for a reference to the “path” of Buddhist clergy. Then he betrays his provincialism as well by mistaking “greenwood” for “sixth wood” (lü-lin and liu-lin, respectively in standard northern reading, although pronounced far more alike in other dialects); his comment on the “seventh wood” is a product of this misunderstanding—again, a result of his ignorance of outlaw argot—and a feeble attempt at a witty reply.

Before long, the battle is stopped—Wang Po-tang blocks Ch'eng's blows until the latter is exhausted—and after identifications are made, Ch'eng willingly goes with Shan Hsiung-hsin's party to an inn for wine:

There they drank for amusement. By the time the others had reached only half of their capacity, Ch'eng Yao-chin was already quite drunk. He loved wine and whenever he had the chance he would not stop drinking until he was fully intoxicated. Holding his winecup in his hand, he thought to himself how hard that bitter work had been during his period of penal exile beyond the pass. Those had been years of anguish for him. But soon after his pardon he had met Squire Yu, who had convinced him to do that bit of business in Long Leaf Forest. And now he had made the acquaintance of the world's greatest stalwarts.

“I'm happy!” Although these words never left his lips, they rumbled about within his breast. And with a thought so strong in his mind, it had to come out his mouth. Draining his winecup, he slammed it fiercely against the table and shouted aloud as if calling for wine: “I'm happy!”

Although the winecup shattered into tiny pieces, this was of little consequence. But when he stamped on it with his foot, he broke a big hole in the boards of the floor.

Ch'eng and his companions are upstairs in the wineshop; dust and debris fall on three more stalwarts dining below, and another fight ensues. Again, this conflict is quickly calmed;⁵² and in Chapter 43 yet one more mistaken identity causes Ch'eng Yao-chin to attack a potential friend. In both instances his utter guilelessness forestalls any lasting offense to his fellows. Likewise, the reader cannot but find the character appealing for the consistency and realism in its delineation.

In dramatic contrast to Ch'in Shu-pao, the character of Ch'eng Yao-chin changes little on the pages of Forgotten Tales of the Sui. He is first and last a swordsman; he never matures to a higher level of understanding, although ultimately he does become a general in the T'ang armies. Ch'eng and Ch'in together exemplify the commentator's observation at the end of Chapter 29: “One can see that the affairs of this world may only be accomplished by stalwarts in their chivalry or by fools in their directness.”⁵³ That is, some men learn to choose their roles in life; others are continually in need of guidance. Similarly rough heroes in earlier novels, Lu Chin-shen and Li K'uei in Water Margin, for example, regularly cause difficulty for their guardians; they threaten the success of their respective causes when allowed freedom to act on their own. Lo Shih-hsin in Forgotten Tales is just this sort of character as well. Put in command of a siege, he slaughters the city's inhabitants!⁵⁴ Ch'eng Yao-chin, however, is successful in the context Yüan Yü-ling provides; both he and Ch'in Shu-pao serve faithfully and well in the T'ang conquest, and are rewarded with wealth and rank. In this regard, Yüan Yü-ling bears witness to the Mencian dictum that some must lead, using their heads, while the rest, those who work with their hands, must inevitably follow. Nor is it by accident that the heroes of this novel include few scholars. No man here, not even Ch'in Shu-pao, earns a place for himself by studying Confucian texts or by adherence to Confucian norms. One might find nothing unusual in a paucity of scholars when the subject is brigandage and civil war, but intellectuals (Wu Yung and Chu-ko Liang) do play major roles as strategists in the topically similar Water Margin and Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Like Chin Sheng-t'an, Yüan Yü-ling had few illusions that civil administrators could bring peace to the realm. Instead, men of intellectual abilities must be men of action and vision—not just of thought.

Ch'in Shu-pao's reflections on his fortune as foretold by the seer Li Ching and on the predelictions of his rationalistic ruffian companions in Chapter 20 reveal an aspect of self-concept that can only have been of substantial importance in seventeenth-century China. As we have seen, characters of the swordsman type do not believe in spirits, conceptions of human events based on Yin-Yang theory, or physiognomy. Stalwarts, on the other hand, are distinguished for their ability to discern the time appropriate for action. This involves not only perspicacity on the part of the individual, but also beliefs in fate and the workings of Heaven popular in the seventeenth century. These concepts are regularly mentioned in the narrator's introductory comments to each chapter, and clearly they represent genuine beliefs of Yüan Yü-ling and his peers. But references to destiny are balanced by comments and situations that belie this fatalism, indicating that man is primarily responsible for his actions. This blend of attitudes that appear mutually contradictory to modern readers was not necessarily so to Yüan Yü-ling; he attributes the responsibility for human actions to both Heaven and man on different occasions. Although he questions man's ultimate freedom through the vehicle of this novel, Yüan himself was unclear on this problem—he was exclusively neither pure idealist nor materialist, to borrow modern terms.

Yüan Yü-ling begins Forgotten Tales of the Sui by indicating that its hero is destined to become famous, that his greatness is as inherent as the grandeur of a mature pine in a tiny seed. Such “seeds” must await their time to mature, he explains; hence heroes with foresight remain obscure until Heaven provides the opportunity for great deeds.⁵⁵ Heaven arranged to have Ch'in rescue the future T'ang founder in Chapter 3; it provides portents of the future at the births of emperors, here Yang of the Sui and Li Yüan's son Li Shih-min. Heaven steels man for trials yet to come, the narrator explains in Chapter 9, before detailing Ch'in's travails;⁵⁶ young lord Yü-wen's punishment, his slaughter by Ch'in Shu-pao, is irrevocably fated, the reader learns later. It is Heaven that brings the downfall of the rapacious Sui court, Yüan stresses on several occasions, but this is recompense for its ruler's personal behavior. Yang could have preserved his state; Li Mi could have founded one. But Heaven deprived them both because they destroyed their own chances, Yang through excesses and Li Mi through arrogance.⁵⁷ Thus they bear at least partial responsibility for their defeats. The “true ruler” is one ordained by Heaven, but he is one who both “accords with the will of Heaven” and “responds to the hearts of men” (shun t'ien-i, ying jen-hsin). “When the will of Heaven devolves upon a leader, the will of man follows suit,” the narrator comments in verse. Although one character goes so far as to equate the will of Heaven with the hearts of men, this contender for the realm fails, a victim of his own pride.⁵⁸ It is the narrator himself who chides this man in his introduction to Chapter 59, saying: “For events in this world you can only depend upon yourself to accomplish them—how can you depend on others?”⁵⁹ Clearly in Forgotten Tales of the Sui, man is not the mere pawn of a mindless fate or of some frivolous deity; neither is he free to work out his own destiny. Ch'in Shu-pao attributes his difficulties to “luck” (shih-yün) on many occasions, and more specifically to its lack.⁶⁰ It is Heaven that is testing him, using him to effect its purposes—for good.

This seems to be the essential point in Yüan Yü-ling's fatalism: he presents Heaven as a balancing agent, as in early Chinese cosmology, a mindless force for restoring primeval social harmony. To that end one is free to act in accordance with Heaven, but disregard for proper morals will bring disaster to the offender, as it did to Emperor Yang of the Sui. More fantastic claims for destiny—that Yang was a reincarnated rat, for example—appear in Forgotten Tales of the Sui for their curiosity. Ch'in Shu-pao does not believe in them; nor, would it appear, does Yüan Yü-ling. Significantly, the more base heroes here, the “swordsmen,” rationalists who will not hear of fate, are mostly, if not all, of the poorer working class. It is the “stalwarts” who perceive the will of Heaven; they include literate men, large landowners, and trusted officials. It is with this class that Yüan identifies; it was from this class that Ch'in sprang, although he grew up among poorer people. When his hero Ch'in Shu-pao rejoins the elite as a T'ang general, Yüan no longer treats him with ironic distance. The ambiguity here on the question of individual responsibility for one's acts, deliberately or unconsciously, is typical of Yüan's class, most of whom were unwilling or unable to act to correct the social and political injustices they so clearly perceived and described in fiction.⁶¹ Undoubtedly his readers shared this sentiment; they most likely included those who, professing loyalty to the fallen Ming well after the fact, went into retirement rather than risk their lives in political action as well as those who, like Yüan himself, chose to serve with at least some degree of loyalty in the political alternative most likely to bring stability back to China, the Manchu regime. But with typical realism, people constitute the “fate” with which Yüan Yü-ling moves his characters; others cajole, force, or encourage Ch'in Shu-pao to act, and thereby to mature. Others totally control Ch'eng Yao-chin. To seventeenth-century writers, the greater force at work in the lives of men was in fact the collective; responsibility to the group should and would always take precedence over untrammeled self-expression in China, then as now.

Notes

1. Introductory comment to Forgotten Tales of the Sui, Chapter 53; Sui shih i-wen, hereafter cited as SSIW, p. 368.

2. See note 61, chapter 3.

3. Yen-shih, 1:12. The novelist uses an unusual term, yin-tsei, translated here as “sullen and vindictive,” adopted, it appears, from the Shih chi biography of the wandering knight Kuo Hsieh. See Burton Watson, trans., Records of the Grand Historian of China, 2:457. That Empress Tu-ku deeply loved the future Emperor Yang and other details of this fictional portrait are verified by the chronological history Tzu-chih t'ung-chien and by Sui shu, the dynastic history; see Wright, Sui Dynasty, pp. 157-97.

4. Yen-shih, 1:29-31.

5. Yen-shih, 1:46-47.

6. Yen-shih, 1:48.

7. Yen-shih, 1:52.

8. Yen-shih, 1:64-65.

9. Yen-shih, 1:85, 87.

10. Yen-shih, 1:89; 2:108, 116. One is reminded here of the two aspects of the career of Tung Ch'i-ch'ang just before this novel was written—those of Confucian mentor of a prince and of irascible sensualist; see chapter 2.

11. Yen-shih, 1:137; 2:48, 72.

12. Yen-shih, 2:79.

13. Yen-shih, 2:108.

14. Yen-shih, 1:107.

15. Yen-shih, 1:117.

16. Yen-shih, 1:140, 142.

17. Yen-shih, 1:155-56, 165.

18. Yen-shih, 2:120; for the details omitted from this expurgated edition, see the original Jen-jui-t'ang edition of 1631, 7.13b.

19. Yen-shih, 2:174.

20. Yen-shih, 2:175; for similar statements, see also 2:163, 167, 168, 173.

21. Yen-shih, 2:191-92, 196-97. See also 2:165, 168, 181, 182.

22. See introductory poems to Yen-shih, Chapters 3, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 20, 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 32, and 35; in addition, 1:193.

23. Yen-shih, 2:168; see also introductory poems to chapters 16, 21, 26, and 36.

24. Ho Ch'ou is the name of the character who presents Yang with his bed for deflowering virgins in The Merry Adventures of Emperor Yang. As I demonstrate in Appendix i, Yüan was familiar with the earlier novel, having copied sections of it into Forgotten Tales of the Sui. His repetition of this name here clearly was intended to link this act with Emperor Yang's debauchery in the mind of the reader. Mount Wu is the most erotic of Chinese images, alluding to a rhyme prose, fu, of the Han period in which the poet records his sexual encounter with an immortal maiden.

25. “Phallus plant” is my rendering for jou-ts'ung-jung, Boschniakia glabra, a mountain plant with a long fleshy red stem which, apparently, was used as an aphrodisiac because of its appearance; see the illustration in Tz'u-hai, p. 1088. Lest botanists object, let me warn them that my point here is not scientific accuracy in translation of plant names, but instead to retain some of the exoticism of the original while making the significance obvious. Consequently, I have been rather free in my renderings of these aphrodisiac names.

26. SSIW, pp. 139-43. The “second drum” or second watch of the night was between 9 and 11 p.m., roughly. Mote, “Millennium,” p. 58, notes that Yüan's native place, Soochow, was packed with people from all social stations during festivals; we may assume that events such as that narrated here did occur in fact.

27. SSIW, pp. 143-48.

28. The castration of Wang I in The Merry Adventures is quite graphic, as are various descriptions in Chapter 31 of that work involving the pain suffered by Yang's unwilling or inexperienced sex partners. Likewise the tortures and executions narrated in various old novels can be replete with references to blood and suffering. But all such descriptions are only a few lines long. One rare scene comparable in brutality and length is in one of The Twelve Towers stories by Yüan's contemporary, Li Yü: Three young men set themselves up in business to serve the tastes of the elite, selling books and art objects. All are bright and knowledgeable, but one in particular is feminine in his beauty and reserve. A court official makes advances, only to be rebuffed. Finally the official has the young man drugged and castrated, then rapes him regularly until his victim acquiesces to the official's service. But the youth burns with a desire for revenge; he accumulates evidence of corruption against his captor and finally, through a friend, presents this to the emperor. Outraged, the sovereign has the minister executed. For his part in bringing him to justice, the youth is granted his wish: the skull of his tormentor for use as a chamber pot. The story is set in the middle of the sixteenth century; its villain, the historical Yen Shih-fan (1513-1565), was widely hated for his political manipulations, although his death seems not to have come about in this way; see DMB, pp. 1586-91. For the story, entitled “Ts'ui-ya lou,” see Li Yü ch'üan-chi, 14:6133-94; a translation can be found in Mao, Li Yü's Twelve Towers Retold by Nathan Mao, pp. 52-62, but see my review of that translation in Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association (1976) 11(3):219-22. Given Yen's reputation, Li was not vilifying him further, but rather continuing popular legend; Yen's notoriety could hardly have been made worse by this story. The brutality in the story serves to make all the more ironic its denouement, as it does in the rape scene in Forgotten Tales. Some readers might find humor in the incongruity of the outcomes of these two scenes, but editorial comments in both the novel and the short story make clear their authors' political criticism.

29. SSIW, p. 231; see pp. 156, 163, 177-78 for similar sentiments.

30. SSIW, p. 322. This statement appears in the commentary attributed to Chien-hsiao-ko (Whistling Swords Studio) on the title page of the first edition. This pseudonym is one used before by the novelist himself, however; hence my lack of distinction between text and commentary in determining the novelist's attitudes. See also SSIW, p. 219.

31. SSIW, pp. 114, 256.

32. SSIW, p. 338.

33. The most convenient summary of this information can be found in Chaoying Fang's biographies of Yüan Chih and Yüan Chiung in DMB, [Dictionary of Ming Biography] pp. 1626-29. See also Su-chou-fu chih, 80.10a-11b, and Wu-hsien chih, 39A.22b. A biography of Yüan Chih occurs in Ming shih, 287. Fang gives Yüan Yü-ling's birthdate as 1592 on p. 1627, but evidence indicates 1599 as the more likely date.

34. Lo Chin-t'ang, Chung-kuo san-ch'ü shih, 2:155, 165-66. Willard Peterson records the Manchu capture of Soochow (1645) in his “Ku Yen-wu,” part 1, pp. 139-40.

35. Dolby, History of Chinese Drama, p. 99; Ch'en Wan-nai, Yüan Ming Ch'ing chü-ch'ü shih, p. 450. Both uncritically repeat the old saw about Yüan “ruining his career” twice, which is a half-truth at best.

36. This, one of the best of Feng's stories, is to be found as the first in his earliest collection Ku-chin hsiao-shuo, pp. 1-37; translations are to be found in Cyril Birch, trans., Stories from a Ming Collection, pp. 37-96, and Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau, eds., Traditional Chinese Stories, pp. 264-92. For a fascinating study of this and another of Feng Meng-lung's justly famous stories, together with their literary antecedents, see P. D. Hanan, “The Making of The Pearl-Sewn Shirt and The Courtesan's Jewel Box.

37. Ch'u Jen-huo, Chien-hu hsü-chi (Soochow?: Ssu-hsüeh ts'ao-t'ang, 1691-1703), 2.13a, quoted in Meng Sen, “Hsi-lou chi ch'uan-ch'i k'ao,” p. 7b, and translated in Birch, trans., Stories from a Ming Collection, pp. 9-10. Cheng Chen-to, Ch'a-t'u-pen Chung-kuo wen-hsüeh shih, p. 1000, notes that Feng Meng-lung edited Hsi-lou chi rather more thoroughly later and renamed it Ch'u-chiang ch'ing.

38. The late date of the play's first performance, 1645-46, similarly makes it highly unlikely that Yüan wrote out of burning resentment. He may have never met the real lady in question. See Hegel, “Sui shih i-wen k'ao-lüeh,” pp. 1-4. The anecdotes referred to occur widely, even in Wu-hsien chih, 79.4a. See Meng Sen, pp. 1a-3b. A contemporary of Yüan Yü-ling, Wang Cho, ascribes a biting comment to him that typifies his attitude toward conventions: “Fame is the bane of humanity, comfort the bane of morality, intelligence the bane of poetry, and straightforwardness the bane of prose.” See Wang's Chin Shih-shuo (Yüeh-ya-t'ang ts'ung-shu ed.), 2.4ab. For the text of Hsi-lou chi, see Liu-shih-chung ch'ü.

39. See Meng Sen, p. 1b, citing a poem by Kung Ting-tzu (1616-1673).

40. For a description of the Linch'ing customs barrier where Yüan Yü-ling served, see Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth Century Ming China, pp. 226-31. Ch'u Jen-huo's Chien-hu shih-chi, 1.13a, refers to Yüan's residence in Nanking and records a conversation between the two novelists, Yüan and Ch'u. For critiques of Yüan's plays, see Chiao Hsün, Chü-shuo, p. 47; Chiang Jui-tsao, Hsiao-shuo k'ao-cheng, p. 407. The account of Yüan Yü-ling's death is to be found in Meng Sen, “Hsi-lou chi ch'uan-ch'i k'ao,” pp. 15a,b, with a modified version to be found in Wang Hsiao-ch'uan, Yüan Ming Ch'ing, p. 351. Wang and K'ang are Wang Chiu-ssu (1468-1551) and K'ang Hai (1475-1541), two distinguished writers and close friends, both of whom wrote plays on ingratitude; see DMB, pp. 692-94, 1366-67. I am indebted to David Roy for the identification of these two men, as I am for the reference to the customs station mentioned above. In addition to Feng Meng-lung, Yüan's close friends among writers of his age included Wu Wei-yeh, Kung Ting-tzu, Ts'ao Jung (1613-1685), Fang I-chih (a chin-shih of 1640), and Chu Sui-ch'u.

41. Although several Ch'ing literati listed certain of Ch'u Jen-huo's sources, Hu Shih was the first to notice Ch'u's clear admission of indebtedness to earlier writers in his preface to Romance of the Sui and the T'ang. See Hu Shih wen-ts'un, 4:412-16, and Hegel, “Sources and Narrative Techniques,” pp. 19-23.

42. SSIW, p. 18. A historical analogue for the youthful Ch'in Shu-pao and for his less ruly companions is described in Spence, Death of Woman Wang, pp. 79-89.

43. SSIW, p. 193. Ch'in Shu-pao's travails in the inn are likewise a realistic description of the plight of hapless travelers and refugees at the hands of unscrupulous innkeepers; see Spence, Death of Woman Wang, p. 119. In one of Feng Meng-lung's vernacular short stories, the founder of the Sung dynasty falls ill in a monastery; see Ching-shih t'ung-yen, chüan 21, pp. 289-307; translated as “The Sung Founder Escorts Ching-niang One Thousand Li,” in Ma and Lau, eds., Traditional Chinese Stories, pp. 58-76, esp. p. 61. It may be that Yüan Yü-ling consciously or otherwise adapted this scene for his Forgotten Tales.

44. SSIW, p. 251.

45. SSIW, p. 298.

46. SSIW, “Hsü,” pp. 1-4, excerpted. For a fuller translation and discussion of this portion on the character of Ch'in Shu-pao, see Hegel, “Maturation and Conflicting Values: Two Novelists' Portraits of the Chinese Hero Ch'in Shu-pao.”

47. SSIW, p. 127.

48. SSIW, p. 198. Note too the differences among them in literacy; see SSIW, pp. 206-7. Yüan discusses the stalwart on pp. 191, 383.

49. SSIW, pp. 172-75.

50. One of the best-known episodes involving such wise rustics appears in the novel Journey to the West, Chapter 20; see Anthony C. Yu, trans., Journey to the West, 1: 214-21. James I. Crump, Jr., has discussed figures of this type in a recent but as yet unpublished paper entitled “Eadem sed aliter,” presented at Washington University in St. Louis in April 1978.

51. SSIW, pp. 175-80. This robbery is the cause of Ch'in Shu-pao's humiliation; he is flogged repeatedly for failing to apprehend these highwaymen.

52. SSIW, pp. 187-90; the quotations are from pp. 187 and 189.

53. SSIW, p. 190.

54. SSIW, pp. 392-93; for a similarly ill-considered action, see p. 264.

55. SSIW, p. 2; see also pp. 108, 223, 330, and 364 on the specific time allotted for certain actions.

56. SSIW, p. 57; here the novelist paraphrases Meng-tzu, 6B.15; see Lau, trans., Mencius, p. 181. See also SSIW, p. 208.

57. SSIW, pp. 16, 281, 304, etc., on Yang; on Li Mi, see pp. 328, 366-67. Likewise, Heaven saves Li Shih-min from calamity on p. 395. The contrasts here between Li Mi and Li Shih-min probably quite deliberately parallel those between Hsiang Yü (232-202 b.c.) and Liu Pang (256-195 b.c.), historical contenders for the realm in the late third century b.c. The latter founded the Han after defeating Hsiang Yü, the arrogant Hsiang's troops having deserted him to join the more virtuous and charismatic Liu Pang. See Shih chi 7-8, translated in Watson, Records of the Grand Historian, 1:35-121, esp. 37-73.

58. SSIW, p. 386, echoed in a line of verse on p. 409; the fallen contender is Tou Chien-te (573-621); see p. 405.

59. SSIW, p. 410.

60. See SSIW, pp. 71, 82, 97, 108.

61. Here again, the “social affinities” (Northrup Frye's term) of this character are, like many protagonists in various vernacular short stories of the late Ming, with the literati and their ostensible values. See Patrick D. Hanan, “The Early Chinese Short Story: A Critical Theory in Outline,” esp. 190-91. In a comment that pointedly identifies Yüan Yü-ling's attempt to reveal lessons for his contemporaries in fiction about the past, he states: “Those desperados of the past are the same as the brigands of today. If you send any one talented man against them, their victory or defeat hangs in the balance. And if you send against them a man who has a firm grasp of strategy, not one of them can avoid being conquered. Destroy one of them and the rest will be thrown into panic.” (SSIW, p. 265, author's commentary on Chapter 39). Obviously Yüan looks to men of talent and education for his solution to the lawlessness of his own time.

Bibliography

Primary Works in Chinese

Chin Shih-shuo. Wang Cho, ed. 1683; Yüeh-ya-t'ang ts'ung-shu, Ch'u-pien. Wu Ch'ung-yüeh, comp. In Pai-pu ts'ung-shu chi-ch'eng. Taipei: I-wen yin-shu-kuan, 1964-1969.

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Note: All works in this section are arranged by translator, not by author or title.

Birch, Cyril, trans. Stories from a Ming Collection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958.

Lau, D. C., trans. 1960. Mencius. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1970.

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—“The Making of The Pearl-Sewn Shirt and The Courtesan's Jewel Box.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies (1973), 33: 124-53.

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—Ming Ch'ing shih lun-chu chi-k'an. Peking: Chung-hua shu-chü, 1959.

Mote, Frederick W. “China's Past in the Study of China Today—Some Comments on the Recent Work of Richard Solomon.” Journal of Asian Studies (1972), 32: 107-20.

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