The Golden Lotus, Volume 1 Read online

  Published by Tuttle Publishing, an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.

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  Copyright © 2011 by Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Based on the edition first published in 1939 by Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. Pinyinized and corrected for this first Tuttle edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Xiaoxiaosheng.

  [Jin ping mei ci hua. English]

  The golden lotus = Jin ping mei/Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng (pseudonym);

  a translation from the Chinese by Clement Egerton, with the assistance

  of Shu Qingchun (Lao She); introduction by Robert Hegel —1st Tuttle ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-1-4629-0630-7 (ebook)

  1. China—Social life and customs—960–1644—Fiction. 2. Domestic

  fiction. I. Egerton, F. Clement C. (Frederick Clement Christie) II.

  Lao, She, 1899–1966. III. Title. IV. Title: Jin ping mei.

  PL2698.H73C513 2011

  895.1’346—dc22 2010049040

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  Contents

  General Introduction by Robert Hegel 5

  Translator’s Introduction 22

  Translator’s Note 25

  List of Principal Characters 26

  The Golden Lotus 30

  1. The Brotherhood of Rascals 34

  2. Pan Jinlian 55

  3. The Old Procuress 70

  4. Ximen Qing Attains His End 81

  5. The Murder of Wu Da 89

  6. The Funeral 98

  7. Ximen Qing Meets Meng Yulou 105

  8. The Magic Diagrams 116

  9. Wu Song Seeks to Avenge his Brother 127

  10. The Exiling of Wu Song 137

  11. Li Guijie, the Singing Girl 145

  12. Pan Jinlian Narrowly Escapes Disaster 154

  13. Li Ping’er 171

  14. The Cuckold 182

  15. The Feast of Lanterns 195

  16. Li Ping’er Is Betrothed 204

  17. The Amorous Doctor 215

  18. Ximen Qing Bribes Officers of the Court 227

  19. Ximen Qing’s Vengeance 238

  20. The Reconciliation 252

  21. Wu Yueniang Relents 264

  22. Song Huilian 278

  23. Ximen Qing’s Dalliance with Song Huilian 284

  24. The Ladies Celebrate the Feast of Lanterns 294

  25. Laiwang’s Jealousy 303

  26. The Tragic End of Song Huilian 313

  27. The Garden of Delights 329

  28. The Two Shoes 339

  29. The Fortune-Teller 348

  30. The Birth of Guan’ge 362

  31. Qintong Hides a Wine Pot 372

  32. Li Guijie 385

  33. Han Daoguo and His Wife 396

  34. Ximen Qing Administers Justice 407

  35. The Favorite 421

  36. Ximen Qing Entertains the Laureate 442

  37. Wang Liu’er 450

  38. Pan Jinlian Is Melancholy 462

  39. The Temple of the Jade Emperor 473

  40. Wu Yueniang and the Nun 486

  41. The Baby Guan’ge Is Betrothed 494

  42. Ximen Qing Feasts in Lion Street 502

  43. The Lost Bracelet 511

  44. The Thief Is Discovered 523

  45. Beggar Ying and Wu Yin’er 529

  46. Daian in Trouble 537

  47. The Villainy of Miao Qing 552

  48. The Censor’s Accusation 561

  49. The Monk from India 573

  50. The Indian Monk’s Medicine 589

  51. Pan Jinlian Makes Mischief 599

  52. Ying Bojue Teases Li Guijie 618

  53. Pan Jinlian Is Unfaithful 634

  General Introduction

  by Robert Hegel

  For centuries now, the novel in your hands has been denigrated as a “dirty book” (yinshu), one that describes, and might encourage the reader’s own, illicit behavior. Consequently it has frequently been proscribed, and many editions are expurgated. Yet even before it was completed, perhaps around 1590, leading Chinese writers of the time shared the manuscript among themselves, avidly poring over it, marveling at its rich and nuanced representations of daily life and individual social interactions. They also commented on its intricate structure and its biting indictment of the immorality and cruelty of its age, especially on the part of the leaders of the state. Golden Lotus was without precedent in China and was not to be equaled in sophistication in any of these areas for another two centuries.

  In contrast to more “sprawling” sagas in other languages and all previous Chinese-language novels, Golden Lotus is tightly focused on one household, and for much of its length on two individuals. One is the prominent merchant Ximen Qing, a handsome, well-placed, and fortunate young man; his connections in the imperial government lead to his appointment in the local judicial administration. But unlike the other Chinese novels of the time that narrate great military campaigns and the far-ranging adventures of outlaws, this text focuses on Ximen’s private life: his parents are dead, leaving him with a substantial inheritance and no one to rein in his excessive self-indulgence. Much of the novel takes place within his extensive household, at the center of which is his beautiful fifth wife, Pan Jinlian (literally, “Golden Lotus”). Initially, she had been the helpless plaything of older men. But after her seduction by Ximen Qing she becomes insatiable in her desire to exert control over her husband and, through him, the entire household. Jinlian’s primary weapon in this struggle is simply sex: she employs any and all activities to monopolize his desire. Golden Lotus reveals the inner politics of this wealthy family, particularly the machinations of Jinlian and others as she claws her way to a position of dominance. The intertwined lives of these two central characters bring out their brutality in their incessant concern for momentary pleasure; both are heedlessly self-destructive, and that tendency brings about the ultimate collapse of the entire household. Throughout this process, parallels between events within the Ximen household and the attitudes and activities of the emperors of the time suggest a scathing condemnation of petty self-indulgence on the part of Ming imperial house.

  Approaches to the Novel

  Jin Ping Mei cihua, its original title, combines elements from the names of three female protagonists: Pan Jin lian (“Golden Lotus”), Li Ping ’er (“Vase”), and Hua Chun mei (“Spring Plum”), to read “The Plum in the Golden Vase, a ballad tale.” The title provides rich clues to its meaning. Although its final element celebrates the inclusion of large numbers of poems and songs, the novel is primarily about characters, not just these three but dozens of others as well,
and about their complex interactions as each makes his or her way through life always on the lookout for personal advantage. From the perspective of the seventeenth-century critic Zhang Zhupo (1670–1698), placing beautiful “flowers” (women) in elegant surroundings allows them to be appreciated properly by the refined reader. Yet the title would seem to refer to an anonymous earlier poem suggesting that when these most beautiful flowers are placed in an elegant vase, the aesthetic elements clash with each other, and the combined effect cheapens both the blossoms and their receptacle. From its very title, the novel suggests ambiguity and calls for the reader’s engagement in interpreting its various meanings, ranging from the elegant to the decidedly vulgar.* Thus from the outset the perceptive reader is warned to be aware of multiple levels of signification.

  The novel is justly famous for two very conspicuous elements: its detailed characterization and its frequent narrations of sexual encounters. The denizens of the Ximen house and his contacts outside are realized primarily through extensive dialogue; the novelist creates a multiplicity of voices, dialects, and social registers to suggest the texture of contemporary society. Pan Jinlian seems to mimic the language of popular romantic songs, even though their plaintive lyrics contrast sharply with her often cold-blooded plots against her rivals. Ximen Qing adopts the language of official documents when communicating with his prospective patrons.† Efforts to identify the native place of the author through these voices and that of the narrator have been unconvincing; the novelist was simply a master of many voices.‡

  Chinese editions regularly delete portions of the novel’s numerous scenes of sexual activity, considering these frank descriptions a liability appropriately kept away from the delicate eyes of a susceptible reading audience. Few editions preserve the entire text as it was first printed in 1618. The present translation, its first complete rendition in English, deletes much of the original poetry and yet it retains all of these problematic scenes. However, they were put under wraps. Even though many are comprised of flowery phrases in the original, the translator initially (1939) rendered selected terms and phrases into Latin. A subsequent edition (1972) translated the Latin passages into an English that is often more anatomically correct than the original, as they appear in this version. Yet when one counts up the passages Egerton found offensive, or those deleted from even the most heavily bowdlerized Chinese editions, we find the novel to have been only slightly diminished: for all its notoriety, only a very small portion of this complex narrative—some fraction of one percent of the total text—is devoted to describing sex. Instead, the bulk records the speech and recounts the more mundane daily activities of its many characters. This does not make the narrative any less troubling to read, however; its view of humanity is generally far from positive.

  As early readers clearly perceived, the text is structured with mathematical precision. The novel is a hundred chapters in length, with a pivotal scene in Chapter 49. Up until that point, and apparently slightly thereafter, Ximen Qing’s fortunes are on the rise: he grows in wealth, prominence, and power. The novel’s second half narrates his decline: he is overextended financially and socially and physically depleted. The first twenty chapters introduce the novel’s main characters; they are mirrored by Chapters 80 to 100 in which they scatter after Ximen Qing’s death in Chapter 79. Scenes set in cold places are balanced by those set in hot locales; frigid comments occur in hot places, and heated encounters happen where it is cool. In terms of their narrative flow, chapters occur in groups of ten throughout the work: decades generally reach an emotional peak in the fifth chapter with a narrative twist in the seventh, while a dramatic climax is reached in the ninth. This is a major reason the novel was so celebrated: close reading reveals that it was meticulously constructed by a highly self-conscious—and remarkably innovative—author.§

  The Golden Lotus is considered the first single-authored novel in the Chinese tradition. To a great extent, this is true. However, a substantial portion of the early chapters was borrowed from an earlier novel, a short story and other prose texts; likewise, hundreds of popular songs, common sayings, and current jokes have been adapted here. Yet each earlier text is woven into the fabric of the novel so skillfully that they do not necessarily stand out to later readers. Recognizing popular stories and songs that would have delighted the novel’s original readers is a pleasure now lost to us; only a few of these adapted texts are visible in this translation. Critics from the seventeenth century onward have complained that readers tend to overlook what was an ongoing and very complicated literary game successfully crafted to impress and enthrall the author’s highly educated contemporaries—with whom the critics identify. The novelist’s endless sampling of texts from contemporary culture does contribute a degree of choppiness in his style, as translators and some critics have noted. Even so, generations of readers have found the novel gripping, its characters mesmerizing in their tragic vulnerability even as they treat others with callous lack of concern or even cruelty.

  At the most obvious level, the novelist demands that his readers understand his essential message: the inevitable consequences of self-indulgence, particularly in the four vices of drunkenness, lust, greed, and anger, are suffering and ultimate destruction. In this he offers the “counsel” that Walter Benjamin saw in all stories.* The novel offers glimmers of hope of release through Buddhist salvation, but even these are compromised by contradictory versions of the role of Ximen’s posthumous son in his father’s ultimate salvation, for example. Some critics consider such indeterminate interpretations to be evidence of sloppy editing on the part of the novelist;† I see them as his means of throwing into question any quick and easy escape from the consequences of one’s actions or the pervasive venality of his age.

  The historical setting of the novel is itself ominous. As the first chapter tells us, the fictitious Ximen Qing lived during the reign of the Emperor Huizong (r. 1101–1126) of the Song Empire (968 –1279). This monarch was an accomplished painter and calligrapher; his work can be found in major museum collections around the world. But he was a far better artist than he was administrator; during his reign bandits pillaged widely, in numbers far beyond the ability of his imperial armies to control. Moreover, growing tensions along the northern frontier erupted into a full-scale invasion by the Jurchens, a nomadic people who had established a sedentary empire of their own in 1114, the Jin. Song imperial guards were no match for their disciplined and dedicated forces. Huizong and his successor, the Song emperor Qinzong, were taken captive in 1127 and eventually died of exposure and disease after long periods of detention in the north by the Jin. As a consequence of that military disaster, the Song Empire hastily moved its capital south to the modern city of Hangzhou; there the Southern Song persisted until the Mongol conquest brought the dynasty to an end in 1279.

  The novel regularly refers to six major villains at the imperial court; these are historical ministers who garnered great wealth and power for themselves at the expense of their talented but ineffective liege. Ximen Qing wins his position in the local judiciary by currying favor with their ringleader, Cai Jing (1046–1126): he uses major portions of the wealth brought by his marriage to sixth wife, Li Ping’er, to secure lavish birthday presents for Cai— who was later impeached by the censor Yuwen Xuzhong, (1079–1146). By setting the novel at this particular juncture, the novelist casts a pall over the heedless merriment of Ximen and his fellows, rendering all his activities even more frivolous in the face of the looming cataclysm. Not surprisingly, the novel was produced at a time (ca. 1590) when central power in the Ming Empire (1368–1644) was at the mercy of similar strongmen in the position of central ministers; late Ming rulers were among the least competent in Chinese history. The novel was first printed during the decades when the throne was in thrall of the ruthless eunuch Wei Zhongxian (1568–1627) and the gang of bureaucrats at his bidding. Its unmistakable resonances between the fall of the Northern Song and contemporary events imbue the novel with an air of prophecy—
about the potential in the author’s own time for another disaster similar to what befell the Song. That did come to pass before long, of course. Banditry rose and spread during the last decades of the Ming, to become so powerful that one of the major rebels captured Beijing in 1644, driving the last Ming emperor to kill his wife and daughters and then to hang himself on the hill just north of the Forbidden City, the present Imperial Palace Museum. This act provided the necessary rationalization for the Manchus—who saw themselves as successors of the Jin—to invade and overrun the Ming in order to restore social order. They rapidly succeeded; their empire, the Qing (“Pure”), lasted until 1911.‡

  The Literary Context for the Novel

  The Golden Lotus appeared toward the end of the century that witnessed the birth of both the novel and the short story in vernacular Chinese. Before then, and indeed until the twentieth century, Chinese narratives had generally been written in the classical literary style. Ultimately derived from a written version of the language spoken during the time of the great philosophers Confucius (Kong Zhongni, 551–479 BCE) and Mencius (Meng Ke, 371– 289? BCE), the succinct ancient style was the vehicle for philosophy, history, and especially poetry—the major form in the Chinese literary tradition. Despite its generally didactic function, narrative was often considered more utilitarian than artistic, and could be written with less formality as a consequence—in contrast to refined classical prose essays that often incorporated the arts of the poet. Writing in the vernacular, especially when it imitated the verbal art of the professional storyteller, seemingly took this educational function seriously as it focused on the mistakes and crimes committed by people at all levels of society. However, the vernacular literature of late imperial China demonstrates the authors’ uses of these new forms to develop the art of writing.

  The earliest novel in Chinese was Sanguo zhi tongsu yanyi, “A Popular Elaboration on The Chronicles of the Three Kingdoms,” commonly referred to in English as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Its first imprint was dated 1522, although one preface bears the date 1494, suggesting that it was completed two decades earlier. By tradition it has been attributed to a fourteenth-century playwright named Luo Guanzhong, but there is no evidence to suggest that the text is anywhere that old. Starting around 1550 there appeared a virtually unbroken series of fictionalized histories of the individual empires that occupied portions of the Chinese landmass of today; most of these texts were dreary adaptations and rewordings of historical chronicles demonstrating little sense of how to develop a good story. By contrast, a second novel, the Shuihu zhuan (known in English as The Water Margin or, more recently, Outlaws of the Marsh) relates the adventures of 108 bandits whose individual exploits and misadventures draw them together as an ever-growing rebel band in a Shandong mountain fastness called Liangshan. The product of many hands, this novel circulated in versions of dissimilar lengths; it was “finalized” to a degree by the seventeenth-century editor Jin Shengtan (1608–1661) whose annotated seventy-chapter version has been the standard ever since. Late in the sixteenth century two other major novels appeared, The Golden Lotus and Xiyou ji (Journey to the West). Journey relates the adventures of a timid cleric based on the historical monk Xuanzang (600–661) who traveled from Chang’an, the capital of the Tang Empire, through various Central Asian kingdoms to India to obtain Buddhist scriptures. On this fictional pilgrimage he rides a horse that is really a transformed dragon and is guarded by a pig monster, a man-eating ogre known as Sand, and the Monkey King. For his wit and mischief, along with his physical and mental prowess, the Monkey becomes the novel’s central character. Together these works have been termed the “Four Masterworks,” si da qishu, in the Ming novel form. All are now available in fine English translations.