The Golden Lotus, Volume 1

by Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng

  Due to their heavy debts to earlier texts, the other three novels should be considered compilations and adaptations, rather than the creative writing of single authors. Three Kingdoms makes this clear from its title: it refers to the earliest survey of the turbulent third century compiled by historian Chen Shou around the year 280. Its proximate source was one of the proto-novels known as pinghua (“plain tales”) printed in the 1320s. By contrast, Outlaws of the Marsh drew upon a fertile tradition of oral and theatrical narratives about this heroic bandit troupe who ultimately come together to struggle against the evil ministers at court who are misleading their ruler—Emperor Huizong of the Song. They nominally retain their loyalty to the throne nonetheless. Journey to the West rewrites a broad range of plays, shorter vernacular tales, and historical accounts about the great Tang pilgrim to create a original composition that ultimately imitates the narrative structure of an esoteric Buddhist scripture. All three are essentially collective works that have been edited by one or more writers into their present forms. Although its multifaceted reliance on earlier texts is unmistakable, Golden Lotus represents a major step in the direction of originality.*

  The best known textual source for Golden Lotus is, of course, Outlaws of the Marsh. There Wu Song is a stalwart hero, known, as are many of the others, for righting wrongs on behalf of the powerless. One is his misshapen brother, a dwarf whose attractive wife Pan Jinlian falls for the rake Ximen Qing and kills her husband to get him out of their way. Virtually all Chinese readers would have been familiar with the earlier novel and this episode in particular because of its long and detailed seduction scene—and for the equally detailed scene in which Wu Song kills a tiger with his bare hands. By building on that tale, Golden Lotus draws attention to the stark contrast between Ximen Qing’s urban world of sex and commerce and the marginal realm of “rivers and lakes” (jianghu) inhabited by Wu Song and the other heroic outlaws; the adapted material merely sets the stage for a new location and far more developed characterization in Golden Lotus. Wu Song’s revenge for his brother’s murder comes swiftly in the parent novel; by contrast, in Golden Lotus he is exiled for most of the text, returning only at the end to wreak bloody vengeance on Jinlian after Ximen’s death.†

  While the other early vernacular novels regularly narrate the violence of individual combat but avoid all explicit descriptions of sexual activity, Golden Lotus draws on a then-current fashion for erotic novellas in the classical language for many of its scenes. Of the fewer than twenty of these medium-length compositions still extant, all deal with the sexual exploits of one young scholar and many, many women. One has thirty wives by the end of the tale; others have fewer formal wives but more wide-ranging conquests among the other women their tireless heroes meet. Most detail sexual activity in the flowery language found in this novel as well.* By adapting this tradition of mindless titillation into serious vernacular fiction, the novelist has in effect harshly parodied a fashionable trend in reading of his day.

  Golden Lotus appeared just as the vernacular short story in Chinese was developing. Around 1550 the eminent Hangzhou publisher Hong Pian edited a collection of sixty of these tales. They circulated in six collections of ten stories each; only twenty-seven of the total survive today, having been driven off the market by the success in the 1620s of more refined stories edited by Feng Menglong, a scholar who produced three collections of forty stories each before finally becoming a local administrator. Some of these were his original adaptations of earlier tales; many reflect older turns of phrase and thematic concerns. A number dating from around the middle of the Ming narrate the misadventures of merchants. Patrick Hanan has aptly described this theme as “folly and consequences.” Here, again, our anonymous novelist developed this fairly commonplace idea from the short story form into the central motif of his novel.† In essence, Golden Lotus narrates the terrible consequences of excessive desire in its multiple forms.

  Adaptation in Golden Lotus involves the use of earlier narrative material in new and original ways. Instead of simply copying both the text and the thematic content of pre-existing fiction, songs, jokes, and the like, our unidentified novelist carefully fitted each piece into his own overarching theme, adapting every one to suit his larger narrative project. He signaled this practice by following the conventions of presentation in the printed versions of these materials.‡ It is tempting to imagine that the novelist simply wrote out of his own personal collection of popular literature. Although large private libraries were not uncommon among the learned who could afford them, to have a large collection of these ephemera was only possible because of the rapid development of printing during the Ming period: a broad range of printed texts would have been available at that time for a relatively modest investment.§

  About the Edition Translated Here

  Golden Lotus apparently was written during the early years of the Wanli era (1573–1620) of the Ming Empire, late in the sixteenth century. Several prominent scholars of the day commented on it as it circulated in manuscript around 1605;¶ its earliest extant printed edition, entitled Jin Ping Mei cihua (“Ballad Tale of... ”), is dated 1618. A second version, impoverished in style by some critical estimates, was produced somewhat later, during the Chongzhen reign period (1628–1644); it deletes a number of the poems from the older edition and other wording throughout to shorten the text somewhat. The Chongzhen edition was the only one available for centuries; this is the version translated here.** The earlier cihua edition was considered lost until 1932, when a copy was discovered in Shanxi and was purchased by the Beijing National Library. The Chongzhen edition also formed the basis for the most heavily annotated version, produced early in the Qing period by Zhang Zhupo (1670–1698); Zhang also wrote extensive prefatory notes pointing out the novel’s artistic features. His preface is dated 1695.†† Until David Roy began his monumental five-volume complete translation of Jin Ping Mei cihua, there were only Japanese and French renditions of the older and fuller version. The versions also vary in what comes first: the Chongzhen edition begins with Ximen Qing’s oaths of brotherhood with his party-loving cronies, laying the emphasis from its first page on the protagonist’s excessive indulgence. The older cihua edition first traces Wu Song’s rise to prominence by killing a tiger with his bare hands; this episode leads, elliptically, to an introduction of his stunted brother, the latter’s wife Pan Jinlian, her affair with Ximen Qing, and then to life in the merchant house. Chapters 53–57 in both versions seem to have been written by yet another author, perhaps because that portion of the manuscript had been lost while being circulated among the small circle of its initial readers before it was completed.‡‡

  About the Author

  As with the three other “masterworks” of the Ming novel, Golden Lotus was produced anonymously, using an untraceable pseudonym. In fact, the idea of individual authorship of vernacular fiction in Chinese only developed during the seventeenth century. Before then (and afterward as well) writers freely adapted and improved on earlier texts with no apparent concern for either originality or proprietary control over what they had written—even of the loose sort writers held for their poetry and essays. That is, writing lines parallel to, alluding to, or even quoting from earlier texts was not only acceptable, it was a common practice. By doing so a poet demonstrated his ability to appreciate an earlier writer by locating himself emotionally and intellectually in the same place as his predecessor; this practice was intended to expand the scope and significance of his own composition by generalizing, even universalizing, an individual’s personal experience and insights.

  Earlier novels, even the “masterworks,” recast older material from the oral, theatrical, or print traditions, quoting or paraphrasing while writing new portions to create a unique compilation. Most authors did not derive income from publishing their novels directly, as far as can be known; most texts circulated in manuscript among limited circles of the elite, often the novelist’s friends and acquaintances. In addition to the segment ada
pted from Shuihu zhuan which every reader would immediately recognize, this novelist incorporated dozens of songs, jokes, stories, and anecdotes then in circulation, and innumerable passing references to other narratives. Shang Wei has argued successfully that the novel could only have been written by a man who had access to hundreds of written texts, perhaps a collector of ephemera as suggested above.* But all Golden Lotus sources were substantially modified to fit one overriding vision of the decline and fall of virtually all of his characters.†

  For that reason, Golden Lotus is the first substantially single-authored novel in Chinese, despite its reliance on other sources: the artistic vision is clear, consistent, individual, and unprecedented in its focus. Whoever he was, this novelist possessed keen insights into human weaknesses, had a broad knowledge of society, and felt considerable political outrage. He is usually identified with the prefacer of the first edition, “Lanling Xiaoxiao sheng,” the “Scoffing Scholar of Lanling.” Lanling is the old name for a place in Shandong province, as is the supposed setting for the novel, Qinghe County. And yet attempts to find Shandong dialectal expressions in the novel have not been particularly successful. American scholar David Roy uses these facts to bolster his argument that the novelist based his social critique on the teachings of the pessimistic Confucian philosopher Xun Qing (312?–240? BCE)—who held office in a place called Lanling and was later buried there. Roy argues that the philosopher’s argument about human nature—that it is basically selfish and needs the discipline provided by proper ritual behavior in order to reform it—is amply exemplified in Golden Lotus.‡ Moreover, Master Xun’s contention that leaders must serve as strong moral exemplars lies behind the novel’s castigation of Ximen Qing, of the Song Emperor Huizong, and, by implication, the Ming Jiajing and Wanli emperors as well. Chinese scholar Wu Xiaoling also demonstrates that the nominal setting for the novel, the city called Qinghe (“Clear River,” in practice an epithet of praise for the emperor’s sagacity), has many features unique to the Ming imperial capital, Beijing.§ Here again as with so many elements in the novel, the Shandong location is an ironic reference to the novelist’s here and now, by implication the capital of a realm doomed by moral weaknesses to suffer a disastrous end.

  About the Translator

  Frederick Clement Christie Egerton was born around 1890, the son of an English country pastor. In 1910 he published a book of church music and the following year was consecrated as a bishop of the Anglican Church, an episcopus vagans of the Matthew Succession, a highly controversial move at that time. This heresy led a church scholar to remark that Egerton subsequently was “reconciled with the Holy See, became a soldier and performed no ministerial functions.”¶

  During the Great War Egerton served in the British Army, where he rose to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel. After a divorce from his first wife—with whom he had run away when she was quite young and with whom he had four children—in 1923 he married Katherine Aspinwall Hodge (b. 1896) from New York; later she would work as a secretary at the American Consulate in London.** The couple had no children. During the 1920s he visited Japan and later commented on the beauty of Mount Fuji. Apparently he began his study of Chinese soon after returning from East Asia.

  After the war Egerton’s profession was listed as “editor.” He was a skilled and prolific writer of broad experience and interests. From his early dedication to religion, Egerton turned to education, and then two decades later he published his translation of Golden Lotus. About the same time his highly detailed travelogue appeared, African Majesty: A Record of Refuge at the Court of the King of Bangangté in the French Cameroons (1938). This was followed by a short political treatise, Reaction, Revolution, or Re-birth, and in the 1940s by his biography of the right-wing Catholic prime minister of Portugal, Antó nio de Oliveira Salazar. He published two more books on Angola in the 1950s, presumably in favor of Salazar’s policies toward Portugal’s African colonies; Egerton had been highly favorable of the French colonial administration of the Cameroons in the 1930s.

  In African Majesty Egerton described himself in his forties as “a fattish, bespectacled, middle-aged, would-be slightly cynical publisher” (p. xvii) who was largely bald (p. 189) and who resided on Lime Street in London, presumably near the Leadenhall Market. He had taken part in seminars offered at the London University School of Economics by the widely influential pioneer in that field, the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1884–1942) (p. 4). He was also “very fond” of reading travel books, and yet he had little patience for “travelers” who seldom left their comfortable carriages to engage with the people they purported to be describing. His travel diaries demonstrate far more contact with local people.

  Egerton’s anthropological interests in learning more about the differences among human cultures is what drew him to West Africa (xvii) and to other subsequent adventures. It may also have informed his tackling Golden Lotus as a novel of social behavior. Although he was a prolific photographer who took innumerable still photos and even motion pictures while on his journeys, he admitted that he lacked the technical skills to keep his cameras functioning (p. 260). Egerton likewise acknowledged about his first African expedition,

  I was very eager to find out, so far as I could, the attitude of the Bangangté people to what we call the problem of sex. We, ourselves, seem to have gone more wrong on sex than on anything else, and that is saying a great deal. It absorbs our energies out of all measure. It permeates every department of our lives. It arouses the bitterest controversies. It is the most popular form of amusement. It saturates our art and literature. It fills our gaols; it lurks in the background of most of our murders and suicides. Even the advertisers who try to sell us motor-cars or cigarettes endeavor to do so by appealing to our sex interest. When all other topics of conversation fail, there is always sex to fall back upon. And, most amazingly, we conventionally behave like ostriches and keep up a polite pretence that sex is not really important or, if it is important, it is too disgusting to be mentioned in decent society. With all this atmosphere behind me, I cannot pretend to be uninterested, or even purely scientifically interested, in the matter of sex. (p. 296)

  From this perspective, a consuming interest in Golden Lous would seem perfectly natural for Clement Egerton.*

  Egerton’s work on the novel began soon after his second marriage. Short on cash and dependent on his new wife’s meager income, Egerton suggested sharing an apartment with a friend he had made at London University, the man he referred to as C. C. Shu (Shu Qingchun, 1899–1966)—who was soon to become famous among Chinese readers as the Beijing novelist Lao She. At that time Shu was a lecturer in Chinese at the School of Oriental Studies, where he taught from 1924 to 1929; they agreed that he should pay the rent while Egerton and his wife provided food for the three of them. He and Egerton also exchanged language lessons for their mutual benefit.

  Although in his 1936 essay “My Several Landlords” (“Wode jige fang-dong”) Lao She says that they lived together for three years, 1924 to 1926, he never mentioned their collaborative work on Golden Lotus, although he did admit that he read fiction avidly as a means to develop his own English reading skills. Undoubtedly he encouraged Egerton to do the same for Chinese.† Shu was extremely productive himself, however; in addition to his teaching duties, during those years he completed two Dickensian novels in Chinese, Old Zhang’s Philosophy (Lao Zhang de zhexue, 1926), and Master Zhao Says (Zhao zi yue, published 1928), and then his humorous and sensitive study of cultural differences, Ma and Son (Er Ma, also published 1928).

  Many decades later and without citing his sources, martial arts film maker King Hu (Hu Jinquan) commented that the Golden Lotus translation was the product of close collaboration between the two men, and surely it must have been.‡ Egerton had begun to study Chinese in London not long before he and Lao She met. Lao She notes that Egerton finally landed a job just as he was moving out in 1926; whether Egerton continued his study of Chinese thereafter is not clear. Given the comple
xity of the various voices and the innumerable contemporary references in Jin Ping Mei, it is highly unlikely that a foreigner could translate the text after only a few years of language study, even for a gifted language learner (Egerton reportedly was able to read Latin, Greek, German, and French). It seems much more likely that as his Chinese tutor Shu might have provided a rough translation, which Egerton then spent years polishing into its present form. Ironically, Egerton complains that the novel’s style was “telegraphese,” more likely a characteristic of Lao She’s imperfect English than an attribute of the Ming novelist writing in his own language.* But Egerton had a fine sense of English style, which is clearly visible in the resultant translation. For his part, even though he praised Jin Ping Mei as “one of the greatest Chinese works of fiction” and considered its author “very serious” in his intent, Lao She never acknowledged his role in this translation project. Perhaps he was embarrassed—not by its morally objectionable content as many have claimed, but by the linguistic mistakes he may have inadvertently introduced there.† Lao She need not have worried; generations of readers have found very few problems in this Golden Lotus translation. His efforts have surely contributed to a far more widespread appreciation of the Chinese novel of the late imperial period.