Once the tie between Luo Guanzhong and the novel is severed, many problems are eliminated, and arguments using internal criteria to establish dating can be put forward with greater assurance. A number of scholars have argued for a mid-Ming date (the latter half of the fifteenth century, say) on the grounds that at least a century would have had to pass to allow for the development from the PH and the drama to so magnificent a form. The most extensive and comprehensive presentation of a mid-Ming theory has been made by Andrew Plaks in the Three Kingdoms section of his Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel. He argues that the affinities between Three Kingdoms and other mid-Ming novels like Journey to the West and Shuihu zhuan (Outlaws of the marsh) are sufficiently close to justify its being grouped with them. He points to the grand design of the novel, its subtle, finished style, and its self-consciously wrought texture as evidence that Three Kingdoms belongs to the literary tradition of the sixteenth century (or perhaps that it was one of the creators of that tradition).
The preceding discussion is intended as a general introduction for the Western reader to the historical and literary significance of Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel. If he has not already done so, the reader may wish to get into the novel itself at this point. The following, more specialized discussion of the text used for this translation, the Mao text of the mid 1660s, explores the political situation when the editors worked, the nature of their commentary, and the relationship of their text to the TS text.
THREE KINGDOMS IN THE MING-QING TRANSITION
We turn now from the Yuan-Ming transition of the mid-fourteenth century to the Ming-Qing transition of the mid-seventeenth century—that is, from the time when the author is alleged to have lived to the mid-1660s when the novel was put in its final form, the form which has eclipsed all other editions and become the universal edition, not only for the Chinese text but for all translations including the present one. Mao Lun and his son Zonggang were the editors of this universal edition. Mao Lun was probably the architect of the project, but as a convention, Mao Zonggang is often spoken of as the editor, though he may have been more an amanuensis.
Mao worked on an edition of the 1522 novel annotated by Li Zhi (Zhuowu); most scholars, however, believe that Ye Zhou, not Li Zhi, was the real annotater. Mao claimed to be revising the "Li" text on the authority of ancient source materials or guhen, such as the SGZ, the Hou Han shu, and the Shishuo xinyu. But he had far more than textual accuracy on his agenda. Mao took issue with many of Li Zhi's annotations, and his edition is as much a repudiation of Li Zhi's views as it is a revision of the novel itself.63
Mao's work was twofold: he revised the actual text; and he added his own commentary to it. The revision entailed reducing the length of the novel by about one-sixth, from some 900 thousand characters to 750 thousand, mostly by removing original Han or Three Kingdoms documents and by smoothing out the narrative at various points. Mao changed, added, and deleted sometimes whole scenes, sometimes only a few words or phrases; he rewrote the chapter headings; and he reduced the number of poems highlighting the text from about four hundred to some two hundred, substituting in the process a number of Tang and Song masterpieces for the more conventional verse in the TS. Many significant passages that Mao altered are restored in the notes to this translation, but his stylistic improvements of unclear or wordy passages are not noted, nor in most cases are the deletions and substitutions of verse. However, Mao's tendency to remove lines in praise of Cao Cao's advisers and commanders—in particular his praise of Xun Yu (Wenruo) on the occasion of the latter's death—should be mentioned. According to one scholar, the TS's thirty-four verses in praise of Cao's advisers and commanders were reduced to six by Mao Zonggang.64
Aside from revisions of the novel's text, Mao provided a three-part system of commentary: first, the dufa (reading method), a lengthy essay on how to appreciate the novelist's narrative method, plus a fanli or list of major editorial changes; second, a one-page commentary introducing each chapter; third, the notes interspersed throughout the text of each chapter. This exhaustive system is an invaluable service to the reader and a fascinating example in its own right of literary criticism and aesthetic theory. The Mao edition seems to shift the history-fiction balance toward the "purely literary" end of the scale—literature as enjoyment rather than as lessons. Mao's notes often speak of the novel's literary devices as a means to enhance appreciation. For instance, in chapter 34 Mao writes: "The pleasure of reading: without panic, there is no pleasure; without anxiety, no relief; without tension, no relaxation." Mao also illuminates many subtle patterns of incident and characterization which serve to organize the voluminous and complex material in the novel and to create pleasing designs.
By contrast, didactic concerns dominate the 1494 and the 1522 prefaces that are omitted from the Mao edition. The 1494 preface by Jiang Daqi places the novel in the tradition of the Spring and Autumn Annals (attributed to Confucius) and Zhu Xi's Gangmu, histories which mark the "rise and fall of kingdoms" in a grand sweep of time while "preserving a moral judgment" in every turn of phrase. Not only is the novel a worthy successor to these works, Jiang Daqi says, it has the added virtue of reaching the broadest possible public (tongsu) with its message, which challenges the reader to reflect on how his own conduct measures up to the standards of loyalty and filial piety as they are fulfilled (or betrayed) in the novel. "Merely to read [duguo] it but not apply [its lessons] vigorously in one's own life," the preface says, "is inferior to [real] study [dushu]."
The author of the 1522 preface, Xiuran Zi, has a comparable lesson to offer: "[The reader] needs no laborious thought to realize that legitimate authority must be supported and usurpers removed; that the loyal, the filial, the self-disciplined, and the honorable are teachers of men, and that treacherous profit-seekers and craven flatterers must be eliminated. [The novel] does wonders for the moral atmosphere by establishing right and wrong clearly and completely before the [reader's] eyes."
In addition to his aesthetic interests, Mao Zonggang also had a powerful concern with moral and historical issues, particularly with the legitimacy of the Shu-Han dynasty and the superior claim of its founder, Liu Bei. Though most of the dufa explores the novel's literary technique, the essay begins with a statement on history and morality, a comparison of the three forms of succession: legitimate, transitional, and usurped. Mao then proceeds to distinguish lineage and territory as grounds for legitimacy. "Why deny legitimacy to the house of Wei? In terms of territory, [holding] the northern heartland is the main thing; but in terms of principle, Liu lineage is the main thing. Principle takes precedence over territory... and so Zhu Xi's Gangmu correctly legitimates Shu." Accordingly, as editor, Mao fortifies Liu Bei's claim to the Han mandate by sharpening the opposition between Liu Bei and Cao Cao and deleting lines that describe Cao Cao's better and Liu Bei's worse qualities.
If Mao Zonggang, too, was using the Liu Bei-Cao Cao contrast to serve certain political ends, a review of certain facts concerning the period when the Maos, father and son, prepared the Three Kingdoms text may be in order. Since little is known about the editors' lives or their views, any conclusions on this matter must remain in the realm of supposition and inference.
The Maos lived through the Ming-Qing transition—the decline of the Ming dynasty, and its fall in 1644 to the non-Han Manchu invaders. They witnessed the establishment of the Qing dynasty (the form of Manchu rule over China, as the Yuan was the form of Mongol rule), to which the Han Chinese continued to offer resistance. There were mass suicides, and there were massacres. One of the most notorious was a Manchu military action carried out in 1645 in Jiading, a city close to the Maos' hometown of Suzhou. At the same time, a Ming dynasty took shape around a survivor of the Ming imperial house. This dynasty never mounted a major challenge to Qing power, but it managed to survive in one form and place or another until 1683, when it ended its forty-year struggle against the foreign conquerors' rule.
There was much in the fall of the Ming to remind the Maos of
the fall of the Han and the subsequent forty-year struggle of the Shu-Han kingdom. The Ming court had had a powerful eunuch faction (led by Wei Zhongxian) guiding the emperor and opposed by a body of scholar-bureaucrats (the Donglin group), a contest that undermined military solidarity and may well have recalled the dang gu proscriptions and persecutions of the late Han with which the novel opens. The last Ming reigns, like the last Han reigns, were plagued by a persisting pattern of peasant rebellion that, like the Yellow Scarves uprising, forced the dynastic government to divert resources sorely needed for northern border defense to internal control. From the north, where once the Xiongnu, Wuhuan, and Xianbi made war and peace with their Han neighbors to the south, the Ming faced a military threat from the Manchus, a non-Han nation that in 1616 had created the Later Gin dynasty. The name Later Gin was used partly because many of the leaders traced their descent to the Jurchen and partly to remind the Chinese (the Gin used the particularly intimidating reign title Tian Ming, "Mandate of Heaven" ) that the Ming might suffer the same fate as the Northern Song after it fell to the Gin in 1127. The picture is completed by the formation after 1644 of the loyalist resistance movement (including Donglin scholars) around remnants of the Ming imperial line, later called the Southern Ming.65
Thus, the issues and factors that brought about the Han-Three Kingdoms transition and also went into the making of the Three Kingdoms literary tradition and finally the novel itself, were again evident and interacting powerfully during the period of the Ming-Qing transition.
Scholars differ on how this affected Mao Zonggang. Some argue that his Three Kingdoms has a covert pro-Ming side. Others hold the contrary view, that the edition is designed to serve the purposes of the Manchu court. (A translation of the novel into Man-chu was made in 1650 at the behest of the Qing court. ) It is equally likely (and more in keeping with the overall mood of the novel) that the editor maintained an attitude of resigned but critical detachment rather than passionate advocacy with respect to the change of dynasty.
Far from making statements directly in support of the Southern Ming resistance, the editor seems to have taken steps to avoid offending the Manchus. For instance, Sun Jian, the founder of the Southland, is never called by his Han title (as he is in the TS), General Who Destroys the Barbarian (polu). The Manchus, who were trying to present themselves to the conquered Hans as a legitimate Chinese dynasty, objected to the word lu in any context as a xenophobic reference to themselves. Rather than offend the court, Mao eliminated the word from Sun Jian's and all other Southland titles. But Mao's superficial deference to Manchu dignity may have been required for the survival of his book, or himself. Any serious criticism of Qing rule would have to be indirect and ambiguous.
Ye Weisi and Mao Xin claim Mao Zonggang for the anti-Qing camp. They point to his comments in chapter 119 concerning Jiang Wei's false surrender to a Wei general as a ruse for saving the Shu-Han emperor. Mao Zonggang writes: "If Jiang Wei was overdoing it, does that mean Lu Xiufu was overdoing it, or Zhang Shijie, or Wen Tianxiang?" Why, Ye Weisi and Mao Xin argue, would Mao Zonggang bring up this famous trio of Southern Song resisters to the Mongols unless he meant to suggest his own support for Ming opponents of the Manchus, opponents such as Shi Kefa and Coxinga? If Mao Zonggang had such a hidden agenda, his comments in chapter 96 are also relevant: "You ask, why are southerners so deceitful? Don't you realize this is loyalty, not deceit? To fool an enemy is no deceit. To repay the king's love is loyalty. Say rather that the men of the south are full of loyalty, not deceit." Since northerners in the novel (Cao Cao for one) also practice deceit, it is difficult to account for this passage except as a cryptic reference to the ongoing struggle of the Southern Ming loyalists against the Manchu court.66
Sharing this view of Mao Zonggang is Du Guichen. In a recent article he argues that Mao Zonggang's pro-Liu, anti-Cao stand was for pro-Ming, anti-Qing purposes and also that Mao Zonggang's formula "principle takes precedence over territory" obliquely drew resistance to the Manchu conquest into a context of resistance to foreign invasion from the Southern Song on. Du suggests a connection between the three mini-dynasties of the Southern Ming (1644-62) and the heroic Shu-Han kingdom, adducing a reply by Shi Kefa to a letter from the Manchu court. The Manchu regent Dorgon had demanded that the first Southern Ming emperor renounce his reign title and declare himself a vassal of the Qing. Shi Kefa, a leading Southern Ming general, replied by placing that reign title, Hong Guang, in a line of imperial titles maintained defensively by Chinese emperors of the past, including Liu Xuande.67
Another detail suggestive of Mao Zonggang's pro-Ming views is his use of lines by the poet Yang Shen (1488-1559) to set the stage for the novel. Yang Shen was the son of Yang Tinghe, a prime minister under Emperor Wu Zong (r. 1506-22). Yang Tinghe was famous for his efforts to block the eunuchs at court, but he fell afoul of Wu Zong's successor, Emperor Shi Zong (whose Jia Jing reign began in 1522), and lost his struggle against the eunuchs. In 1524 Yang Shen was exiled to Sichuan and spent the last thirty-five years of his life there. Looking back in the light of the Manchu conquest, Mao Zonggang may have seen the Yangs as prototypes of the high Ming period, genuine loyalists standing for the integrity of the court, men whose fall marked the dynasty's turn toward its doom. (Yang Shen's better-known contemporary Hai Rui was released from prison in 1567, only days after Emperor Shi Zong died. ) Did Mao Zonggang have a political as well as a literary purpose in placing Yang Shen's poem (without attribution) at the front of his text?
Another figure relevant to the Mao edition is Jin Shengtan (1610? -61), a widely known literary critic who had succeeded in giving new life and importance to a number of popular works (and also to a selection Du Fu's poems) by providing them with extensive commentary. His method of annotation for Shuihu zhuan influenced the Mao commentary to Three Kingdoms. Jin Shengtan also had a political identity, and it eventually cost him his life. He participated in the Kumiao or Temple Protest incident of 1661, a demonstration in opposition to the Qing court's newly appointed magistrate of Suzhou and his program of punitive taxation. The Temple Protest came one year after Coxinga, on orders from the Southern Ming court, led a naval attack against Manchu forces. Even though the attack posed no serious threat, the government linked the Temple Protest to it as another instance of sedition. Like many involved in the protest, Jin Shengtan was executed. The larger purpose of the Manchu authorities' harshness was to impose social and economic discipline on the province of Jiangsu.68
We do not know how Mao Zonggang felt about the death of his fellow townsman and literary inspiration. But his edition of Three Kingdoms bears a preface dated 1644 that is attributed to him. Most modern scholars doubt the date and the authenticity of this preface, arguing that Mao was trying to enhance the value of his book (and the prestige of his critical method) with the authority of the critic famed for his annotations to Shuihu zhuan. It seems difficult, however, to believe that Mao Zonggang could have honored a writer so recently executed by Manchu authorities in this way, and so the more likely possibility is that a later promoter added the name of Jin Shengtan.69 There remains a significant minority of scholars who continue to accept the Jin Shengtan preface; its presence in any edition has a political undertone that is anti-Manchu, whatever the literary or commercial purposes of its inclusion.
It may never be known what these tantalizing hints add up to. Perhaps the largest clue is the story of Three Kingdoms itself with its reputation as a tale of heroes long associated with Han resistance to foreign occupation. That Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang chose to prepare and present this work twenty years into a foreign dynasty seems to support those scholars' arguing that the editors held pro-Ming, anti-Qing attitudes. Certainly the formula quoted above, "principle takes precedence over territory," which opens the dufa, could have given comfort to the Ming resisters: Manchu forces had squeezed them off the mainland by 1662 (the first year of the Kang Xi reign), leaving Taiwan province as the sole refuge for the redoubtable Coxinga.
If the Maos h
ad pro-Ming attitudes, one might ask whether they were active sympathizers with the southern Ming loyalist dynasties or simply felt a passive nostalgia for the fallen regime. In an article published in 1989, Chen Xianghua has reprinted a short essay by Mao Zonggang that sheds a little light on this problem. The document is a colophon that Mao Zonggang wrote in 1709 for a volume containing the juren examination answer and handwritten testament of the Ming scholar-official Jiang Can. (Jiang Can died in 1661, the year that Jin Shengtan was executed. ) Jiang Can was a principled Confucian and a sincere Ming loyalist. Mao Lun had been engaged by Jiang Can as a tutor for his eldest son's grandson, and so Mao Zonggang became friendly with some of the younger members of the Jiang family, especially Jiang Can's grandson Ming, another staunch loyalist. From the Maos' intimate association with the Jiang family, we may infer that at least the Maos were not enthusiastic supporters of the Qing dynasty.70
The other side of the issue—that the Mao edition supports the Qing court—is also fortified with strong arguments. In the words of He Lei, who introduces the 1973 edition of the novel published by Renmin wenxue chubanshe:
Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang's revisions catered to the governors of the Manchu dynasty. The Manchu court regarded Three Kingdoms as an important book and had even had someone translate it into the Manchu language together with the Four Books [Analects, Great Learning, Doctrine of the Mean, and Mencius]. In addition, the court lavished praise on Lord Guan as loyalty and honor incarnate... and propagandized for the theory of legitimate succession. The Manchu court tried to sell its slogan "Avenge the Ming," positioning itself as the legitimate successor to the Ming dynasty. It denied the legitimacy of the Wei dynasty, treating the Cao house as usurpers.71
Three Kingdoms Page 166
