The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei, Volume One: The Gathering

By Princeton University Press

The first volume of a celebrated translation of the classic Chinese novel

This is the first volume in David Roy's celebrated translation of one of the most famous and important novels in Chinese literature. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei is an anonymous sixteenth-century work that focuses on the domestic life of Hsi-men Ch’ing, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines. The novel, known primarily for its erotic realism, is also a landmark in the development of the narrative art form—not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context.

With the possible exception of The Tale of Genji (1010) and Don Quixote (1615), there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature. Although its importance in the history of Chinese narrative has long been recognized, the technical virtuosity of the author, which is more reminiscent of the Dickens of Bleak House, the Joyce of Ulysses, or the Nabokov of Lolita than anything in the earlier Chinese fiction tradition, has not yet received adequate recognition. This is partly because all of the existing European translations are either abridged or based on an inferior recension of the text. This translation and its annotation aim to faithfully represent and elucidate all the rhetorical features of the original in its most authentic form and thereby enable the Western reader to appreciate this Chinese masterpiece at its true worth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: May 2, 2013
• ISBN: 9781400847631

Book preview

THE PLUM IN THE GOLDEN VASE

PRINCETON LIBRARY OF ASIAN TRANSLATIONS

The Plum in the Golden Vase

or, CHIN P’ING MEI

VOLUME ONE: THE GATHERING

Translated by David Tod Roy

Copyright © 1993 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hsiao-hsiao-sheng.

[Chin P’ing Mei. English]

The plum in the golden vase, or, Chin P’ing Mei / translated by David Tod Roy.

p.   cm. — (Princeton library of Asian translations)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v. 1. The gathering.

ISBN 0-691-06932-8

ISBN 0-691-01614-3 (pbk.)

I. Roy, David Tod, 1933– .    II. Title.    III. Series.

PL2698.H73C4713    1993

895.I′346—dc20      92-45054    CIP

The publication of this volume was made possible in part through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, to which we would like to express our deep appreciation

This book has been composed in Bitstream Electra

Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources

Printed in the United States of America

10   9   8   7   6   5

Excerpts reprinted from THE DIALOGIC IMAGINATION, by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, copyright © 1981. By permission of the University of Texas Press.

To all those students, friends, and colleagues

WHO PARTICIPATED WITH ME IN THE EXCITEMENT OF EXPLORING THE WORLD OF THE CHIN P’ING MEI OVER THE PAST QUARTER CENTURY

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii

INTRODUCTION xvii

CAST OF CHARACTERS xlix

PREFACE TO THE CHIN P’ING MEI TZ’U-HUA 3

PREFACE TO THE CHIN P’ING MEI 6

COLOPHON 7

FOUR LYRICS TO THE TUNE BURNING INCENSE 8

LYRICS ON THE FOUR VICES TO THE TUNE PARTRIDGE SKY 10

CHAPTER 1

Wu Sung Fights a Tiger on Ching-yang Ridge; P’an Chin-lien Disdains Her Mate and Plays the Coquette 12

CHAPTER 2

Beneath the Blind Hsi-men Ch’ing Meets Chin-lien; Inspired by Greed Dame Wang Speaks of Romance 43

CHAPTER 3

Dame Wang Proposes a Ten-part Plan for Garnering the Glow; Hsi-men Ch’ing Flirts with Chin-lien in the Teahouse 62

CHAPTER 4

The Hussy Commits Adultery behind Wu the Elder’s Back; Yün-ko in His Anger Raises a Rumpus in the Teashop 82

CHAPTER 5

Yün-ko Lends a Hand by Cursing Dame Wang; The Hussy Administers Poison to Wu the Elder 96

CHAPTER 6

Hsi-men Ch’ing Suborns Ho the Ninth; Dame Wang Fetches Wine and Encounters a Downpour 111

CHAPTER 7

Auntie Hsüeh Proposes a Match with Meng Yü-lou; Aunt Yang Angrily Curses Chang the Fourth 125

CHAPTER 8

All Night Long P’an Chin-lien Yearns for Hsi-men Ch’ing; During the Tablet-burning Monks Overhear Sounds of Venery 147

CHAPTER 9

Hsi-men Ch’ing Conspires to Marry P’an Chin-lien; Captain Wu Mistakenly Assaults Li Wai-ch’uan 170

CHAPTER 10

Wu the Second Is Condemned to Exile in Meng-chou; Hsi-men and His Harem Revel in the Hibiscus Pavilion 188

CHAPTER 11

P’an Chin-lien Instigates the Beating of Sun Hsüeh-o; Hsi-men Ch’ing Decides to Deflower Li Kuei-chieh 205

CHAPTER 12

P’an Chin-lien Suffers Ignominy for Adultery with a Servant; Stargazer Liu Purveys Black Magic in Pursuit of Gain 224

CHAPTER 13

Li P’ing-erh Makes a Secret Tryst over the Garden Wall; The Maid Ying-ch’un Peeks through a Crack and Gets an Eyeful 253

CHAPTER 14

Hua Tzu-hsü Succumbs to Chagrin and Loses His Life; Li P’ing-erh Invites Seduction and Attends a Party 274

CHAPTER 15

Beauties Enjoy the Sights in the Lantern-viewing Belvedere; Hangers-on Abet Debauchery in the Verdant Spring Bordello 298

CHAPTER 16

Hsi-men Ch’ing Is Inspired by Greed to Contemplate Matrimony; Ying Po-chüeh Steals a March in Anticipation of the Ceremony 316

CHAPTER 17

Censor Yü-wen Impeaches Commander Yang; Li P’ing-erh Takes Chiang Chu-shan as Mate 337

CHAPTER 18

Lai-pao Takes Care of Things in the Eastern Capital; Ch’en Ching-chi Supervises the Work in the Flower Garden 356

CHAPTER 19

Snake-in-the-grass Shakes Down Chiang Chu-shan; Li P’ing-erh’s Feelings Touch Hsi-men Ch’ing 376

CHAPTER 20

Meng Yü-lou High-mindedly Intercedes with Wu Yüeh-niang; Hsi-men Ch’ing Wreaks Havoc in the Verdant Spring Bordello 401

APPENDIX I

Translator’s Commentary on the Prologue 429

APPENDIX II

Translations of Supplementary Material 437

NOTES 449

BIBLIOGRAPHY 543

INDEX 573

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

P’an Chin-lien Disdains Her Mate and Plays the Coquette 31

Beneath the Blind Hsi-men Ch’ing Meets Chin-lien 49

Dame Wang Proposes a Ten-part Plan for Garnering the Glow 63

Dame Wang Insists on the Proposed Remuneration for Her Plan 68

Hsi-men Ch’ing Flirts with Chin-lien in the Teahouse 74

The Hussy Commits Adultery behind Wu the Elder’s Back 84

Yün-ko in His Anger Raises a Rumpus in the Teashop 94

Yün-ko Lends a Hand by Cursing Dame Wang 101

The Hussy Administers Poison to Wu the Elder 108

Hsi-men Ch’ing Suborns Ho the Ninth 113

Dame Wang Fetches Wine and Encounters a Downpour 121

Auntie Hsüeh Proposes a Match with Meng Yü-lou 135

Aunt Yang Angrily Curses Chang the Fourth 145

All Night Long P’an Chin-lien Yearns for Hsi-men Ch’ing 149

During the Tablet-burning Monks Overhear Sounds of Venery 168

Hsi-men Ch’ing Conspires to Marry P’an Chin-lien 172

Captain Wu Mistakenly Assaults Li Wai-ch’uan 186

Wu the Second Is Condemned to Exile in Meng-chou 195

Hsi-men and His Harem Revel in the Hibiscus Pavilion 198

Hsi-men Ch’ing and His Cronies Form the Brotherhood of Ten 202

P’an Chin-lien Instigates the Beating of Sun Hsüeh-o 212

Hsi-men Ch’ing Decides to Deflower Li Kuei-chieh 221

P’an Chin-lien Suffers Ignominy for Adultery with a Servant 238

Stargazer Liu Purveys Black Magic in Pursuit of Gain 250

Li P’ing-erh Makes a Secret Tryst over the Garden Wall 263

The Maid Ying-ch’un Peeks through a Crack and Gets an Eyeful 265

Hua Tzu-hsü Succumbs to Chagrin and Loses His Life 286

Li P’ing-erh Invites Seduction and Attends a Party 288

Beauties Enjoy the Sights in the Lantern-viewing Belvedere 305

Hangers-on Abet Debauchery in the Verdant Spring Bordello 313

Hsi-men Ch’ing Is Inspired by Greed to Contemplate Matrimony 318

Ying Po-chüeh Steals a March in Anticipation of the Ceremony 334

Censor Yü-wen Impeaches Commander Yang 342

Li P’ing-erh Takes Chiang Chu-shan as Mate 354

Lai-pao Takes Care of Things in the Eastern Capital 361

On Seeing P’an Chin-lien Ch’en Ching-chi Loses His Wits 369

Snake-in-the-grass Shakes Down Chiang Chu-shan 389

Eavesdroppers Discuss Li P’ing-erh’s Feat of Reconciliation 405

Hsi-men Ch’ing’s Cronies Make a Fuss over His New Bride 416

Hsi-men Ch’ing Wreaks Havoc in the Verdant Spring Bordello 425

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

TO MY PARENTS, Andrew Tod Roy and Margaret Crutchfield Roy, who served as Presbyterian missionaries in China and Hong Kong from 1930 to 1972, I owe my initial exposure to Chinese language and culture and my interest in Chinese literature.

It was not until the summer of 1949 when I was a sixteen-year-old school-boy in Nanking that I began, at the insistence of my mother, the serious study of the Chinese language, together with my younger brother, James Stapleton Roy, who is now United States ambassador to China.

During the following decade I was fortunate to be able to study Chinese poetry with Frederick W Mote; literary Chinese and Sinological method with Derk Bodde, Yang Lien-sheng, and Francis Woodman Cleaves; Chinese history with John King Fairbank; Chinese thought with Benjamin Schwartz; and Chinese literature with James Robert Hightower and David Hawkes. I was also lucky to have Harold L. Kahn and Lloyd Eastman as roommates; and Li-li Ch’en, Elling Eide, Philip A. Kuhn, and Nathan Sivin as fellow students. No one could have had a more distinguished roster of mentors or more stimulating and congenial classmates.

I first encountered Clement Egerton’s translation of the Chin P’ing Mei in the library of the University of Nanking in 1949, and it was in the spring of 1950, not long before the outbreak of the Korean War, that I bought my first copy of the Chin P’ing Mei tz’u-hua in Fu-tzu Miao, an area full of secondhand bookstores and curio shops adjacent to the Confucian Temple in Nanking. While serving a two-year hitch in the Army Security Agency between 1954 and 1956, I bought my first copy of Chang Chu-p’o’s edition of the Chin P’ing Mei on January 20, 1955, in the bookstore of the Confucian Temple in Tokyo. In view of the Confucian interpretation of the Chin P’ing Mei that I was to develop several decades later, it is a Nabokovian coincidence that the first two copies of the book that I acquired were purchased in the purlieus of Confucian Temples.

Over the years, as I read and reread the novel, and especially after I started to teach it at the University of Chicago in 1967, I began to think I saw things in it that had not been pointed out before, but I could not have contributed anything to the study of this tantalizingly enigmatic work if I had not been able to stand on the shoulders of such giants as the seventeenth-century critic Chang Chu-p’o (1670–98), and the twentieth-century scholars Wu Han, Yao Ling-hsi, Feng Yüan-chün, and Patrick Hanan, to name only the most important of them. Their work has not only provided an indispensable foundation but has been a constant source of inspiration to me. Like all students of Chinese fiction and drama, I have also benefited greatly from the pioneering publications of Cheng Chen-to, Sun K’ai-ti, Wu Hsiao-ling, James Crump, Cyril Birch, Hsü Shuo-fang, and C. T. Hsia.

My most consistent source of stimulation over the years, however, has been the work of such former students and present colleagues as Andrew H. Plaks, Daniel Overmyer, Paul V. Martinson, Martha Howard, Peter Li, Jean Mulligan, Katherine Carlitz, Gail King, Sally Church, David Rolston, Indira Satyendra, Amy McNair, Dale Hoiberg, Janet Lynn, and Charles Stone.

Successive curators of the East Asian Library at the University of Chicago, including T. H. Tsien, James Cheng, and Ma Tai-loi, himself a major contributor to scholarship on the Chin P’ing Mei, have provided invaluable help in keeping me abreast of the flow of current publications on this subject, a trickle that has recently turned into a flood.

Of those who have read all or part of the manuscript before publication and whose suggestions have helped to improve it in innumerable ways, I wish particularly to thank my friend and former colleague Lois Fusek, the first person to whom I showed the fruits of my labors as I proceeded, and to whose sensitive ear for stylistic niceties I owe the avoidance of many a blunder as well as the gift of many a felicitous emendation. Andrew H. Plaks, David Rolston, and my cousin Catherine Swatek have all read the translation from beginning to end together with the Chinese text and have been generous enough to share with me their detailed and invaluable critical reactions. Others who have read parts of the manuscript and offered suggestions for its improvement include Steven Black, Katherine Carlitz, Susan Daruvala, John C. Duggan, Magnus Fiskesjö, Harold L. Kahn, Matthew Krasowski, Robert A. LaFleur, Lin Chi-ch’eng, Lin Hsiu-ling, Amy Mayer, Robert H. Mazur, Andrea Paradis, Kenneth W. Phifer, Michael J. Puett, Alane Rollings, James St. André, Indira Satyendra, Edward Shaughnessy, Nathan Sivin, Laura Skosey, Charles Stone, Janelle Taylor, and Natalie Wainright.

To my wife, Barbara Chew Roy, who urged me to embark on this interminable task, and who has lent me her unwavering support over the years despite the extent to which this work has preoccupied me, I owe a particular debt of gratitude. Without her encouragement I would have had neither the temerity to undertake the task nor the stamina to continue it.

For indispensable technical advice and assistance concerning computers, printers, and word-processing programs I would like to thank René Pomerleau, my brother James Stapleton Roy, my colleague Ts’ai Fang-p’ei, and particularly Charles Stone.

The research that helped to make this work possible was materially assisted by a Grant for Research on Chinese Civilization from the American Council of Learned Societies in 1976–77. The first draft of the translation itself was supported by a grant from the Translation Program of the National Endowment for the Humanties in 1983–86. The Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago has also been generous in allowing me time to devote to this project. For all of the above assistance, without which this project could not have been contemplated, I am deeply grateful.

Needless to say, whatever infelicities and errors remain in the translation are solely my own.

INTRODUCTION

¹

THE CHIN P’ING MEI (The plum in the golden vase) is an enormous, complex, and sophisticated novel, surprisingly modern in its design, composed by an anonymous author during the second half of the sixteenth century and first published in 1618, or shortly thereafter. The title itself is a multiple pun that gives some indication of the intricacy as well as the ambiguity of the work it designates. It is made up of one character each from the names of three of the major female protagonists of the novel (P’an Chin-lien, Li P’ing-erh, and P’ang Ch’un-mei) that would literally mean Gold Vase Plum; it can be semantically construed as The Plum in the Golden Vase,² or Plum Blossoms in a Golden Vase; and it puns with three near homophones that might be rendered as The Glamour of Entering the Vagina. The seventeenth-century critic Chang Chu-p’o (1670–98), author of a famous commentary on the Chin P’ing Mei, has this to say about the title.

The three characters of the title Chin P’ing Mei constitute a metaphor for the author’s accomplishment. Although this book embodies so many of the beauties of spring,³ every blossom and every petal of which cost the author the creative powers of spring itself to evoke, these beauties should be placed in a golden vase where they can diffuse their fragrance in a cultivated environment and adorn the desks of men of literary talent for all time. They must never be allowed to become the playthings of the rustic or the vulgar. Indeed, plum blossoms in a golden vase depend for their effect on the ability of human effort to enhance the handiwork of Heaven. In like manner, the literary quality of this book is such that it seems, in passage after passage, to have stolen the creative powers of nature itself.⁴

This is a perfectly possible way of interpreting the significance of the title. But there is a passage from a Sung dynasty (960–1279) poem that casts an altogether different light on the matter that is equally consistent with the concerns of the novel. This line from an anonymous poem on the subject of plum blossoms reads, When displayed in a golden vase I fear they are vulgar.⁵ Thus, even the title of this controversial novel poses something of an enigma.

LITERARY IMPORTANCE OF THE CHIN P’ING MEI

This work is a landmark in the development of narrative art, not only from a specifically Chinese perspective, but in a world-historical context. With the possible exceptions of The Tale of Genji (1010) and Don Quixote (1615), neither of which it resembles, but with both of which it can bear comparison, there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature. Although its importance in the history of Chinese fiction has long been acknowledged, the comprehensiveness and seriousness of its indictment of the Chinese society of its time and the innovative quality of its experimental literary technique have not yet been adequately appreciated.

What are some of the reasons for this failure of understanding? On the one hand, its labyrinthine deployment of a bewildering variety of earlier material, ranging from canonical works and liturgical texts to the popular theater and song of the author’s own day, and on the other hand its frequent and notorious resort to explicit descriptions of sexual activity, have combined to confuse the critical faculties of all but a few of its readers. As a result, I believe it is safe to say that it has suffered more from serious misinterpretation than any other work of comparable importance in the history of Chinese literature.

MISREADINGS

What are some of the significant misreadings to which the Chin P’ing Mei has been subjected? In roughly chronological order, it has been interpreted as a roman à clef, a work of pornography, a Buddhist morality play, an exercise in naturalism, or a novel of manners. It has also been dismissed by Professor C. T. Hsia of Columbia University, in what is probably the most widely read English-language essay on the subject, as a work of slipshod craftsmanship, characterized by low culture and ordinary mentality. His essentially negative evaluation is epitomized in the flat statement that One cannot expect a work to possess ideological or philosophical coherence when it manifests such obvious structural anarchy.⁶

Serious arguments can be made for each of the above readings of the Chin P’ing Mei—no one would dispute, for example, that it is, indeed, a novel of manners—and since these readings are not mutually exclusive there is room for considerable overlap between them. But I believe that none of them can be said to do it full justice, and that, far from being characterized by structural anarchy, it possesses, in fact, the most finely wrought structure of any Chinese novel that has appeared before or since, with the sole exception of the great eighteenth-century masterpiece Hung-lou meng (The dream of the red chamber), which is demonstrably in its debt.⁷ It is my contention that the Chin P’ing Mei is, indeed, possessed of ideological or philosophical coherence, and that that coherence is provided by the particular brand of conservative orthodox Confucianism that is associated with the name of Hsün-tzu, the great Chinese philosopher of the third century B.C. The reading that is offered below is controversial, but it is put forward in the conviction that it accounts for more of the features of the text than any of the others.

DESCRIPTION

Before pursuing this line of interpretation any further, let me describe the Chin P’ing Mei a little more fully. It is a novel of 100 chapters, extending to 2,923 pages in the photo-facsimile of the original wood-block printing from which this translation is made,⁸ of which all but chapters 53–57, which are by another hand or hands,⁹ can be demonstrated, on the basis of internal evidence, to be the work of a single creative imagination.¹⁰ Despite its selective reliance on a wide spectrum of earlier sources, including most notably the Shui-hu chuan (Outlaws of the marsh), from which the nucleus of its plot is derived, these sources are integrated into the design of the overall structure in a way that sets the Chin P’ing Mei apart from its predecessors among the great Chinese novels.¹¹ All of these either are the products of multiple authorship or represent the recasting of traditional bodies of material, and all of them are episodic in structure, whereas the Chin P’ing Mei, despite its length, has a tightly controlled unitary plot.

Andrew Plaks of Princeton University has pointed out that the four greatest of the sixteenth-century novels—the San-kuo chih t’ung-su yen-i (Romance of the Three Kingdoms), the Shui-hu chuan, the Hsi-yu chi (Journey to the west), and the Chin P’ing Mei—form a qualitative class by themselves, and that they are characterized not only by common structural features, but possibly by congruent authorial intentions.¹² Although I share this view in its general outlines, I believe that the figural density, to use his term, of the text of the Chin P’ing Mei is so pronounced as to set it apart from the other works, at least in this respect. The book is replete with such rich intertextuality, so many internal and external allusions, resonances, and patterns of incremental repetition or replication, as to make it difficult, if not impossible, to apprehend fully on first reading. It is only on a second or third reading that the manifold functions of the individual components of the work begin to be perceived, as they contribute in their different, and sometimes dialogically¹³ conflicting, ways to the achievement of a unified overall effect. In short, to be fully appreciated, the Chin P’ing Mei requires repeated close readings of the kind that we are accustomed to reserve for the works of the most difficult and demanding novelists in our own tradition, such as James Joyce or Vladimir Nabokov.

Paradoxically, it is, I believe, this very fact that accounts for one of the most misleading misapprehensions about the nature of the work, namely, that it is characterized by slipshod craftsmanship. It cannot be gainsaid that there are a number of loose ends, apparent false starts, and glaring internal discrepancies in the novel as we now have it. I believe that most, if not all, of these can be accounted for, however, if one adopts the hypothesis that it was a work in progress,¹⁴ undergoing constant reworking and revision over a considerable period of time, and that the manuscript left the author’s hands, under circumstances unknown, before he had quite settled on a definitive version. The very density and intricacy of the figure in the carpet¹⁵ make it clear that the novel could not have been composed in any other way.

FIRST APPEARANCE

The first extant reference to the Chin P’ing Mei, which occurs in a letter from Yüan Hung-tao (1568–1610) to Tung Ch’i-ch’ang (1555–1636), indicates that a manuscript of the first part of the work was already in circulation among the members of a small coterie of avant-garde intellectuals as early as 1596. No prior mention of the text has been discovered. The novel in its entirety may not have been completed, however, until sometime after that date, possibly as late as 1606, the earliest date for which any reference to a complete manuscript is recorded.¹⁶ Further revisions and/or editorial tampering with the text could also have occurred right up until 1618, the probable date of publication of the earliest printed edition that is extant.¹⁷

THE A, B, AND C EDITIONS

In his study of the text of the Chin P’ing Mei, Patrick Hanan of Harvard University discriminates between three textual recensions of the novel, which he designates by the letters A, B, and C.¹⁸ This is the A edition. The B edition is thought to date from the Ch’ung-chen reign period (1628–44),¹⁹ and the C edition, which contains an elaborate commentary by Chang Chu-p’o (1670–98), includes a preface dated 1695.²⁰ The C edition eclipsed the two earlier versions in popularity during the remainder of the Ch’ing dynasty because of the quality of its commentary, but its text does not differ significantly from that of the B edition.

Unfortunately the B edition is an inferior recension of the text, published several decades after the author’s time by an editor who not only completely rewrote the better part of the first chapter to suit his own ideas of how a novel should begin, but made significant alterations, including both deletions and additions, on every page of the remainder of the work. It is clear that this editor did not understand certain significant features of the author’s technique, especially in the use of quoted material, for much of the poetry incorporated in the original edition is either deleted or replaced with new material that is often less relevant to the context. It is, however, precisely the subtle way in which the author uses poems, songs, snatches of dramatic dialogue, and other types of borrowed material as a form of running ironic commentary on the characters and action of the novel that makes this work unique. The inevitable effect of any tampering with this quoted material is to distort seriously the author’s intentions and render the interpretation of his work that much more difficult.²¹

A complete, sparsely annotated translation of the A edition of the Chin P’ing Mei appeared in Japanese in 1962,²² but until recently the only reasonably complete renderings into any European language were the four-volume translation of Clement Egerton, published under the title The Golden Lotus in 1939 and reissued in 1972,²³ and the six-volume German translation by the brothers Otto and Artur Kibat, published under the title Djin Ping Meh: Schlehenblüten in goldener Vase between 1967 and 1983.²⁴ The first of these contains no annotation and the second only a slim volume of notes. Both translations were made from a B or C edition. Neither Clement Egerton nor the brothers Kibat are to blame for their unfortunate choice of a text since the A edition was not available to them at the time they undertook their translations in the 1920s; it was only rediscovered in 1932. André Lévy’s splendid, well-annotated French translation of 1985, entitled Fleur en Fiole d’Or (Jin Ping Mei cihua),²⁵ is the first nearly complete translation into any European language to have been made from the A edition, but even this translation unaccountably follows the B and C editions in deleting, either in whole or in part, many of the longer song suites and other types of borrowed material included in the A edition.

Most scholars agree that the A edition is the earliest, and the closest to the work of the original author, and that his innovative rhetorical techniques are best represented by that version of the text. For this reason, in the translation that follows, the first of five projected volumes, I have chosen to translate everything that is included in the A edition, including the two prefaces, colophon, and eight lyrics that precede chapter 1. In addition I have provided in an appendix translations of the lyrics of songs, or song suites, that are only quoted in part, if they are available in other extant sources. I have also gone further than earlier commentators and annotators in attempting to identify the sources of quoted material. I do this because my own research has led me to the conclusion that a knowledge of these sources is germane to our understanding of the story itself, as well as the way in which the implied author²⁶ intends us to interpret it.

NATURE OF THE STORY

What kind of a story is it that the Chin P’ing Mei has to tell? At first glance it appears to be a tale of what Patrick Hanan has called the folly and consequences type,²⁷ fleshed out with an unprecedented amount of testamentary detail and presented, for the most part, through the medium of a formal realism²⁸ that observes no reticences. This description is accurate enough, so far as it goes, but it does not go far enough to account for all of the features of the text. These include apparent inconsistencies in point of view, occasionally blatant violations of probability, and frequent and abrupt shifts in the level of diction from the convincing mimetic evocation of reality to passages of parody or burlesque. Nor does such a description tell us very much about the probable intentions of the real or implied author, or the value system by which he intends the actions of his characters to be judged. Although the entire text of the novel can be drawn upon to substantiate the interpretation I am going to suggest, I believe that it is already adumbrated in the choice of the pseudonym that is assigned to the author in the preface to the earliest extant edition of the work. Let us consider this name for a few minutes to see what it can tell us.

IMPORTANCE OF THE FIRST PREFACE TO THE NOVEL

The pseudonymous author of the first preface to the Chin P’ing Mei tz’u-hua (Story of the plum in the golden vase) tells us that the work was written by a friend of his whom he refers to as Lan-ling Hsiao-hsiao Sheng, or the Scoffing Scholar of Lan-ling. He also tells us that the book was intended by its author to be a serious moral critique of the age.²⁹ I believe that this preface has not received the critical attention that it deserves, and that it may provide us with a key that is essential to the correct interpretation of the novel.

On the basis of textual analysis, it appears likely that the writer of the preface may have been the author of the novel himself, or if not, at the very least a close associate of the author’s who was thoroughly familiar not only with the contents of the novel but also with the rhetorical techniques of the author. As I point out in my annotation to this preface, he shows himself to be conversant with an enormous range of both classical and popular literature, and he interweaves quotations from both types of sources in a manner indistinguishable from that of the author. The degree of intertextuality between the preface and the novel as well as its sources is striking. Since the author of this preface is the only person who has ever claimed personal knowledge of the identity or intentions of the author of the Chin P’ing Mei, his testimony deserves to be taken seriously by all students of the novel.

SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SCOFFING SCHOLAR OF LAN-LING

What, then, is the significance of the pseudonym the Scoffing Scholar of Lan-ling? Because Lan-ling is an ancient name for a place in what is now Shantung Province, and because the novel is set in the Shantung area, it has generally been assumed that this pseudonym merely indicates that the author was a native of Shantung. However, there are problems with this interpretation. On the one hand, the assumption that the novel makes significant use of dialect peculiar to Shantung has never been properly documented,³⁰ and on the other hand, there is some reason to believe, on the basis of internal evidence, that the author of the novel need not have been a native of North China, and may not even have been very well informed about the local customs of that part of the country.³¹ I believe that the assumption that the author was a native of Shantung, which does not tell us anything about how to interpret the novel in any case, is merely a red herring, and that the name the Scoffing Scholar of Lan-ling is, instead, intended to allude to Hsün-tzu, the great Confucian philosopher of the third century B.C.

In the brief biography of Hsün-tzu, which is found in the first and most important general history of China, the Shih-chi (Records of the historian) by Ssu-ma Ch’ien (145–c. 90 B.C.), we are told that late in his life he moved to the state of Ch’u where the Lord of Ch’un-shen, the prime minister of that state, appointed him to the post of magistrate of Lan-ling. After the assassination of the Lord of Ch’un-shen in 238 B.C. Hsün-tzu lost his post as magistrate but continued to reside in Lan-ling and was buried there after his death. Ssu-ma Ch’ien goes on to say:

Hsün-tzu hated the corrupt governments of his day, the decadent states and evil princes who did not follow the way but gave their attention to magic and prayers and believed in omens and luck. The Confucian scholars of his day were petty and narrow-minded, while thinkers such as Chuang-tzu were wild and destructive of public morality. So Hsün-tzu expounded the advantages and disadvantages of practicing the Confucian, Mohist, and Taoist teachings. By the time of his death he had written tens of thousands of words.³²

If Hsün-tzu was motivated to write by a desire to diagnose the evils of his age, as Ssu-ma Ch’ien suggests, and as the internal evidence of his works amply bears out, would not his example be an appropriate one for a similarly motivated author of a later age to invoke by his choice of a pseudonym?

But the place name Lan-ling is not the only element in this pseudonym that may be intended as an allusion to Hsün-tzu. Why did he choose to designate himself the Scoffing Scholar of Lan-ling? In Liu Hsiang’s (79–8 B.C.) preface to his recension of Hsün-tzu’s works, which contains the only other early biography of Hsün-tzu, we find the following statement: "Su Ch’in and Chang I endeavored to persuade the feudal lords with their false doctrines, and thereby attained great prominence. But Hsün-tzu retired and scoffed at them, saying, ‘He who does not advance himself by espousing such doctrines will also escape destruction for so doing.’ "³³

Su Ch’in (fl. early third century B.C.) and Chang I (fl. late fourth century B.C.), the most famous itinerant politicians of the Warring States period (475–221 B.C.), are the archetypical examples in Chinese lore of statesmen whose amoral arguments are designed to appeal only to the self-interest of the rulers to whom they are addressed. I suggest, therefore, that the pseudonym the Scoffing Scholar of Lan-ling is intended to evoke the image of Hsün-tzu, the ancient magistrate of Lan-ling, who scoffed contemptuously at the amoral status-seekers of his day, and who was motivated by his hatred of what they stood for to write the book that has made him, along with Confucius (551–479 B.C.) and Mencius (c. 372–c. 289 B.C.), one of the three most important figures in the history of orthodox Confucianism.

HSÜN-TZU’S PHILOSOPHY AS A KEY TO THE NOVEL

If this hypothesis about the significance of the pseudonym the Scoffing Scholar of Lan-ling has any merit, it may enable us to develop a more satisfactory interpretation of the Chin P’ing Mei. A number of scholars, including Paul Martinson,³⁴ Andrew Plaks,³⁵ Peter Rushton,³⁶ and Katherine Carlitz,³⁷ have already suggested that the value system of the implied author of the Chin P’ing Mei is closer to that of Neo-Confucianism than it is to either Buddhism or Taoism. But Neo-Confucianism, in any of its various manifestations, is a far cry from the form of Confucianism championed by Hsün-tzu. Not only does it incorporate in barely disguised form many features of Buddhist and Taoist thought, but it explicitly repudiates the most fundamental proposition of Hsün-tzu’s moral philosophy, namely, that human nature is evil, and at the same time it reveals a penchant for types of metaphysical and cosmological speculation that Hsün-tzu specifically condemns. My reading of the novel has persuaded me that the implied author adheres to an uncompromising version of Hsün-tzu’s particular brand of orthodox Confucianism, and that the basic viewpoint he wishes to express is, therefore, not only antagonistic to Buddhism and Taoism, but less than friendly toward Neo-Confucianism, the dominant intellectual system of his day.

Hsün-tzu is most famous for his enunciation of the doctrine that, although everyone has the capacity for goodness, human nature is basically evil and, if allowed to find expression without the conscious molding and restraint of ritual, is certain to lead the individual disastrously astray. That the implied author of the Chin P’ing Mei endorses this view should be apparent to even the most superficial reader, but he also makes it quite explicit by quoting in four different places in his novel, including the first chapter, a line that reads In this world the heart of man alone remains vile.³⁸

Hsün-tzu attacks Mencius by name for his doctrine that human nature is basically good and clearly rejects his contention that A great man is one who retains the heart of a new-born babe.³⁹ Hsün-tzu’s position is unequivocal. He says:

Those who are good at discussing antiquity must demonstrate the validity of what they say in terms of modern times; those who are good at discussing Heaven must show proofs from the human world. In discussions of all kinds, men value what is in accord with the facts and what can be proved to be valid. Hence if a man sits on his mat propounding some theory, he should be able to stand right up and put it into practice, and show that it can be extended over a wide area with equal validity. Now Mencius states that man’s nature is good, but this is neither in accord with the facts, nor can it be proved to be valid. One may sit down and propound such a theory, but he cannot stand up and put it into practice, nor can he extend it over a wide area with any success at all. How, then, could it be anything but erroneous?⁴⁰

It is clear from Hsün-tzu’s remarks, both here and elsewhere, that he regarded Mencius as a well-meaning but soft-headed thinker whose position on human nature could not provide a viable foundation for a sound system of moral philosophy. Since the Mencian position on human nature was formally endorsed by both the Ch’eng-Chu and the Lu-Wang schools of Neo-Confucianism, which were prevalent in the sixteenth century, I believe that the implied author of the Chin P’ing Mei would have taken exception to them on this as well as other grounds.

It has been suggested that the Chin P’ing Mei may have been influenced by the iconoclastic and individualistic ideas of the T’ai-chou school of Neo-Confucianism, an outgrowth of the philosophy of Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529), and by the thought of Li Chih (1527–1602) in particular, the best-known exponent of this school. I believe that Li Chih’s emphasis on the t’ung-hsin, or childlike mind, and his assertion, in the words of Theodore de Bary, that man’s nature is originally pure and one should follow wherever it spontaneously leads,⁴¹ would have been anathema to the implied author of the Chin P’ing Mei.

As I read the Chin P’ing Mei, it is consciously intended to be, among other things, a frontal attack on just such views as these. In their place the author would surely have endorsed the following statement of Hsün-tzu:

Now let someone try doing away with the authority of the ruler, ignoring the transforming power of ritual principles, rejecting the order that comes from laws and standards, and dispensing with the restrictive power of punishments, and then watch and see how the people of the world treat each other. He will find that the powerful impose upon the weak, and rob them, the many terrorize the few and extort from them, and in no time the whole world will be given up to chaos and mutual destruction.⁴²

Hsün-tzu not only asserts that human nature is basically evil, but also reiterates the traditional Confucian view that the force of moral example moves downward from the apex of the social pyramid, and that if the leaders of society, from the ruler and his officials at the top to the heads of every individual household in the empire, do not exercise their moral responsibility to cultivate their own virtue and set a good example for their family members, colleagues, and subordinates, the inevitable result will be the collapse of the social order.

Though Hsün-tzu repeats these views on human nature and the force of moral example again and again, he offers no more to substantiate them than an already hackneyed set of allusions to the careers of the rulers of antiquity. He thereby violates his own precept that Those who are good at discussing antiquity must demonstrate the validity of what they say in terms of modern times; those who are good at discussing Heaven must show proofs from the human world.

I believe that the implied author of the Chin P’ing Mei was an adherent of Hsün-tzu’s philosophy in its entirety, and that he must have felt that it could be used to good purpose in diagnosing the ills of his own day. In so doing, however, he accepted the challenge of the philosopher to demonstrate the validity of his theory in terms of modern times and the human world. If I may resurrect an old critical chestnut, he chose to show the truth of Hsün-tzu’s theory rather than merely telling it.⁴³ By so doing he succeeded, perhaps for the first time in the history of Chinese literature, in clothing these abstract and ancient bones in all too human⁴⁴ flesh.

By deliberately choosing to focus his attention on the quotidian minutiae in the household of an ordinary upwardly mobile individual from the midrange of the social pyramid, and periodically reminding his readers of the analogical relationship between this microcosm and the society as a whole,⁴⁵ he created a far more effective picture of the self-destructiveness of a society in the process of moral disintegration than he could have done if he had chosen instead, as most of his predecessors did, to depict the stereotypical acts of the emperor and his ministers at court. No more devastatingly convincing indictment of a morally bankrupt society has ever been penned.

THE CHIN P’ING MEI AND BLEAK HOUSE

The analogies between the methods utilized by the author of the Chin P’ing Mei in framing his indictment of sixteenth-century Chinese society and those employed by Charles Dickens in his most famous critique of Victorian society are so striking that I cannot resist quoting a few excerpts from J. Hillis Miller’s introduction to a recent edition of Bleak House. To an uncanny extent, much of what Miller has to say about the technique of this nineteenth-century English novel is equally true of the Chin P’ing Mei. To demonstrate this, I have simply substituted the appropriate Chinese references for their English equivalents in the following patchwork of quotations, while leaving the rest of his wording absolutely intact.

In writing the Chin P’ing Mei the author constructed a model in little of Chinese society in his time…. The novel accurately reflects the social reality of the author’s day…. The means of this mimesis is synecdoche. In the Chin P’ing Mei each character, scene, or situation stands for the innumerable other examples of a given type…. Nor is the reader left to identify the representative quality of these personages for himself. The narrator constantly calls the reader’s attention to their ecumenical role…. The Chin P’ing Mei is a model of Chinese society in yet another way. The network of relations among the various characters is a miniature version of the interconnectedness of people in all levels of society…. In the emblematic quality of the characters and of their connections the Chin P’ing Mei is an interpretation of Chinese society. This is so in more than one sense. As a blueprint is an image in another form of the building for which it is the plan, so the Chin P’ing Mei transfers Chinese society into another realm, the realm of fictional language. The procedure of synecdochic transference, naming one thing in terms of another, is undertaken as a means of investigation. The author wants to define Chinese society exactly and to identify exactly the causes of its present state. As everyone knows, he finds Chinese society in a bad way. It is in a state dangerously close to ultimate disorder or decay. The energy which gave the social system its initial impetus seems about to run down…. With description goes explanation. The author wants to tell how things got as they are, to indict someone for the crime…. The novel as a whole is the narrator’s report on what he has seen, but it can only be understood by means of a further interpretation—the reader’s. The Chin P’ing Mei does not easily yield its meaning…. The narrator hides as much as he reveals. The habitual method of the novel is to present persons and scenes which are conspicuously enigmatic. The reader is invited in various ways to read the signs, to decipher the mystery…. The narrator offers here and there examples of the proper way to read the book. He encourages the reader to consider the names, gestures and appearances of the characters as indications of some hidden truth about them…. The reader of the Chin P’ing Mei is confronted with a document which he must piece together, scrutinize, interrogate at every turn—in short, interpret—in order to understand. Perhaps the most obvious way in which he is led to do this is the presentation … of a series of disconnected places and personages…. Though the relations among these are withheld from the reader, he assumes that they will turn out to be connected. He makes this assumption according to his acceptance of a figure close to synecdoche, metonymy. Metonymy presupposes a similarity or causality between things presented as contiguous and thereby makes storytelling possible. The reader is encouraged to consider these contiguous items to be in one way or another analogous and to interrogate them for such analogies. Metaphor and metonymy together make up the deep grammatical armature by which the reader of the Chin P’ing Mei is led to make a whole out of discontinuous parts…. The novel must be understood according to correspondences within the text between one character and another, one scene and another, one figurative expression and another…. Once the reader has been alerted to look for such relationships he discovers that the novel is a complex fabric of recurrences. Characters, scenes, themes and metaphors return in proliferating resemblances. Each character serves as an emblem of other similar characters. Each is to be understood in terms of his reference to others like him. The reader is invited to perform a constant interpretative dance or lateral movement of cross-reference as he makes his way through the text…. Though many of the connections in this elaborate structure of analogies are made explicitly in the text, many are left for the reader to see for himself…. The basic structural principle of the Chin P’ing Mei … is allegorical in the strict sense. It speaks of one thing by speaking of another…. Everywhere in the Chin P’ing Mei the reader encounters examples of this technique of pointing whereby one thing stands for another, is a sign for another, indicates another, can be understood only in terms of another, or named only by the name of another. The reader must thread his way though the labyrinth of such connections in order to succeed in his interpretation and solve the mystery of the Chin P’ing Mei. … It is no accident that the names of so many characters in the novel are either openly metaphorical [Ying Po-chüeh (Sure to Sponge), Wu Tien-en (Devoid of Kindness), Ch’ang Shih-chieh (Forever Borrowing), Wen Pi-ku (Language Always Archaic)] or seem tantalizingly to contain some covert metaphor lying almost on the surface…. The novel … is made up of an incessant movement of reference in which each element leads to other elements in a constant displacement of meaning…. Most people in the novel live without understanding their plight. The novel, on the other hand, gives the reader the information necessary to understand why the characters suffer, and at the same time the power to understand that the novel is fiction rather than mimesis. The novel calls attention to its own procedures and confesses to its own rhetoric, not only, for example, in the onomastic system of metaphorical names already discussed, but also in the insistent metaphors of the style throughout.⁴⁶

Although the critical observations above were written not about the Chin P’ing Mei but about Bleak House, I believe that they apply with equal force to the Chinese novel, which seems to have anticipated many of Dickens’s techniques by two and a half centuries. I do not wish to push the similarities between the Chin P’ing Mei and Bleak House too far; after all, they are products of very different times and places, and they convey quite different impressions to their readers. Not only was the attitude of Dickens toward the society he criticized more ambivalent, but he was prevented by Victorian reticence from employing the explicit descriptions of sexual conduct for which the Chinese novel is notorious. Nevertheless, I find the congruity of certain literary techniques between the two works to be striking.

HSÜN-TZU AND THE CHIN P’ING MEI

But if the Chin P’ing Mei is, indeed, as complex and ambitious a work as I am claiming it to be, how does the hypothesis that it was consciously inspired, or ideologically informed, by the work of Hsün-tzu help to elucidate it? If this hypothesis still appears to be far-fetched, I would like to point out some of the significant features of the life and work of Hsün-tzu that seem to me to have analogues in the work of the author of the Chin P’ing Mei.

DIAGNOSIS OF CAUSES OF SOCIAL DISINTEGRATION

Hsün-tzu witnessed during his lifetime the final demise of the Chou dynasty in 256 B.C., and although the date of his own death is not known, it is clear that he lived long enough to foresee the conquest of the entire Chinese cultural area by the state of Ch’in in 221 B.C., even if he did not see it with his own eyes. The action of the Chin P’ing Mei takes place between the years 1112 and 1127, during the reign of Emperor Hui-tsung (r. 1100–1125) of the Northern Sung dynasty (960–1127), and the novel describes the internal collapse of that regime, culminating in the conquest of North China by the alien Chin dynasty (1115–1234) in 1127. It is clear from internal evidence, as well as from the comments of his contemporaries, that although the author set his novel in the Sung dynasty, the conditions that he described in it were really those of his own day, that is, the reigns of the Chia-ching and Wan-li emperors of the Ming dynasty, who were on the throne from 1521 to 1566 and from 1572 to 1620, respectively. These two emperors, who between them occupied the throne for nearly a century, were among the most irresponsible rulers in the history of imperial irresponsibility. To quote from the summations of their careers in the Dictionary of Ming Biography:

In the early years of his long reign the [Chia-ching] emperor’s attention was focused domestically on … [the debate over imperial rituals], and in the later years he turned to the cult of religious Taoism in a search for a life without death. Both concerns ruined many able officials, and wasted the energy and wealth of the empire. In foreign relations these years saw Mongol bands sweeping across the Great Wall almost at will, raiding and killing from the northwestern frontier to the Liaotung peninsula. Along the southeast coast the … [Japanese pirates] caused equal suffering and destruction, and erupted just as often. In spite of his concentration on selfish whims and the menace on his borders, … [the Chia-ching emperor] never let anyone usurp his power and authority. In his time the rich grew richer and the poor became impoverished, particularly in the lower Yangtze area. Wealth bred leisure, which demanded luxuries and entertainment; it also encouraged the development of theatre, art, literature, and printing. The political vigor of the empire, however, began to decline, and the house of Ming showed signs of senescence.⁴⁷

When the [Wan-li] emperor died in 1620, the far northeast frontier … had been overrun by Manchus; ruinous tax increases or extortions had driven large numbers of people into banditry or rebellion in all parts of the empire, and state coffers were … drained; posts in both central and provincial government agencies were vacant as often as not, and officials on duty were locked in partisan antagonisms that almost paralyzed the government; and for a quarter century the emperor had done his best to neglect affairs of state. Extravagance, corruption, and ineptitude had become so normal that post-Ming historians have consistently attributed the collapse of the dynasty in the 1640s to trends that developed in Wan-li times, specifically blaming the emperor himself.⁴⁸

This is precisely the world that the author of the Chin P’ing Mei describes, and he must have felt a special affinity for the following quotations from Hsün-tzu:

Every phenomenon that appears must have a cause. The glory or shame that come to a man are no more than the image of his virtue. Meat when it rots breeds worms; fish that is old and dry brings forth maggots. When a man is careless and lazy and forgets himself, that is when disaster occurs.⁴⁹

Therefore, if the affairs of government are in disorder, it is the fault of the prime minister. If the customs of the country are faulty, it is due to the error of the high officials. And if the world is not unified and the feudal lords are rebellious, then the heavenly king is not the right man for the job.⁵⁰

If a ruler is frivolous and coarse in his behavior, hesitant and suspicious in attending to affairs, selects men for office because they flatter and are glib, and in his treatment of the common people is rapacious and grasping, then he will soon find himself in peril. If a ruler is arrogant and cruel in his behavior, attends to affairs in an irrational and perverse manner, selects and promotes men who are insidious and full of hidden schemes, and in his treatment of the common people is quick to exploit their strength and endanger their lives but slow to reward their labors and accomplishments, loves to exact taxes and duties but neglects the state of agriculture, then he will surely face destruction.⁵¹

One of the major themes explored in the Chin P’ing Mei, as in the Hsün-tzu, is the consequences of failure to assume moral responsibility for one’s own actions. This failure is seen to infect the social system from top to bottom, but it is failure at the top that is most reprehensible for it sets an example that encourages the members of the lower orders of society to follow suit. The statements of Hsün-tsu that I have just quoted read like a description of the character and fate, not only of an incompetent ruler, but of Hsi-men Ch’ing, the middle-class protagonist of the Chin P’ing Mei. As Katherine Carlitz has pointed out, he displays in his conduct virtually all of the characteristics that Arthur Wright has included in his paradigm of the stereotypical bad last ruler.⁵² Innumerable subtle clues planted in the narrative indicate that Hsi-men Ch’ing is intended to function as a surrogate, not only for the feckless Emperor Hui-tsung of the world ostensibly depicted in the novel, but also for the Chia-ching or Wan-li emperors of the author’s own time.

It is no accident that the six traitors, or six evil ministers, who are traditionally blamed for the fall of the Northern Sung dynasty⁵³ have their counterpart in Hsi-men Ch’ing’s six wives. This particular emblematic correspondence has even richer meaning in terms of the concerns of the novel, however, for in popular Buddhism, as readers of the Hsi-yu chi (The journey to the west) will recall, the term six traitors is also used as a metaphor for the six senses.⁵⁴

Hsi-men Ch’ing’s servants and employees, who pander to his tastes, assume no responsibility for their own actions and sedulously imitate the examples of immorality set for them by their master and his wives, function as surrogates for the eunuchs and lesser officials in the imperial administration.

Both Hsün-tzu and the implied author of the Chin P’ing Mei would surely have agreed that whenever persons such as those described in the novel, at either the macrocosmic or the microcosmic level, assume political power, aided by such ministers and abetted by such eunuchs and lesser officials, the result can only be disaster, whether the temporal setting be the last decades of the Warring States period or the final years of the Northern Sung or Ming dynasties.

CHOICE OF POPULAR LITERARY FORM TO DISSEMINATE IDEAS

Chapter 25 of the Hsün-tzu is entitled Ch’eng-hsiang, which is thought to be the name of an ancient variety of work song or chantey. The chapter contains three compositions by Hsün-tzu in this genre, which was of popular origin and which has been described as a remote ancestor of the ku-tz’u, or drum song, a type of oral literature that flourished during the Ming and Ch’ing dynasties and is still performed today. In these three works Hsün-tzu employs this form, borrowed from the popular literature of his day, to express his despair over the disorder of his own times, to diagnose the causes of this disorder, to trace its historical antecedents, and to prescribe the remedies necessary for its cure. Tu Kuo-hsiang, an authority on the intellectual history of ancient China, has described this chapter as an epitome of Hsün-tzu’s thought and has suggested that he chose to avail himself of this popular literary form in order to gain wider dissemination for his ideas.⁵⁵

I submit that the author of the Chin P’ing Mei, who certainly shared Hsün-tzu’s despair over the disorder of his day, and who seems to have agreed with his diagnosis of its causes, may also have seen an affinity between Hsün-tzu’s use of a popular literary form to epitomize his ideas and his own choice of the long vernacular novel, a popular literary form of his own day, as a vehicle for his critique of late Ming society.

IMPORTANCE OF FORMAL STRUCTURE

Hsün-tzu was the most systematic of the ancient Chinese philosophers, and he chose to present his doctrine to the public in the form of a series of self-contained essays, each of which constitutes a coherent exposition of a particular aspect of his thought. As Burton Watson has pointed out, Hsün-tzu’s work represents the most complete and well-ordered philosophical system of the early period. It is so well ordered and integrated, in fact, that one scarcely knows where to begin in describing it, since each part fits into and locks with all the others.⁵⁶

Although the specific forms they employed are completely different, Hsün-tzu’s contribution to the formal development of philosophical discourse finds an analogue in the contribution of the author of the Chin P’ing Mei to the formal development of the novel.

SUMMARY OF THE PLOT

The Chin P’ing Mei is the first Chinese novel with a unitary plot, characterized by a symmetrical structure in which all the constituent parts are successfully subordinated to the effect of the whole. The work consists of one hundred chapters, which may be divided up as follows.

In the first twenty chapters the major characters are introduced and assembled one by one in Hsi-men Ch’ing’s household, which serves as the setting for the main action of the novel. This action takes place in the middle sixty chapters, during the first thirty of which Hsi-men Ch’ing enjoys a rapid rise in socioeconomic status. In this segment of the novel his unremitting pursuit of his own gratification in the sexual, economic, and political spheres seems to be attended by every kind of success for which he seeks. He obtains an official post in the judicial system by presenting lavish gifts to Ts’ai Ching, the most powerful minister at court, and simultaneously gains a son and heir who is the product of a pseudo-incestuous liaison with Li P’ing-erh, the widow of his sworn brother, whom he has taken into his own household against the wishes of his legitimate wife. His gross favoritism toward Li P’ing-erh alienates the other members of his household, but he remains oblivious to this danger in the throes of an infatuation that gradually develops into a deep and genuine emotional attachment.

At exactly the midpoint of the novel, however, in chapters 49 and 50, he unwittingly sets the seal of destruction upon himself and everything he values by his acquisition of a powerful aphrodisiac from a mysterious Indian monk, who is presented to us, without comment, as the personification of a penis, and by his insistence on trying out this aphrodisiac on the unwilling person of his favorite wife while she is in her menstrual period, an act that is both a tyrannical exercise of power and the violation of a ritual taboo.

During the next thirty chapters Hsi-men Ch’ing’s star appears to continue in the ascendant, but the seeds of self-destruction that he planted in the first half of the book

Reviews for The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei, Volume One

[lucy_skywalker · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I read this book when I was nine and almost finished when my mother noticed it was missing from her shelf, so she thought it was too late to take it away from me ;~)

[ifjuly · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

there is nothing like david tod roy's translation of this in chinese literature, at least i've never found anything that even comes close. so much chinese translation comes off as fruity in the silliest way to me--i know, not exactly an academic impression--even in established greats like the recent dream of the red chamber translation. but this is amazing. i want to send roy chocolates or flowers in gratitude, and as a bribe to get him to bring out the last 2 volumes already (still haven't bought the 3rd as it hasn't come out in paperback yet...)! other than rabelais, this is my favorite classic of all time. it transcends all.