Jinpingmei
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Culture vultures
By Fu Wen and Zhao Ran Residents of Xigaoxue in Henan Province suddenly found themselves with a chance to cash in last December, after a site believed to be the tomb of ancient general Cao Cao was unearthed in their village. The villagers had even more reasons to celebrate after experts from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences confirmed the authenticity of the site, and were told that an exhibition hall for the tomb was under construction in the village. The local government will now take land from the villagers to develop the required facilities, saying it will pay 16,000 yuan ($2,356) for every mu (0.06 hectare) of farmland taken to develop tourism facilities for the tomb of Cao, a warlord during the Three Kingdoms era (220–280). Xu Huanchao, head of Xigaoxue village, said about six hectares of land would be requisitioned for the facilities. "We will also build parking lots and restaurants to support the operation of the tomb as a famous nationwide tourism destination," Xu said. Villagers were hoping for a bigger payout from the government for their land. However, with most of the villagers earning between 2,000 yuan ($295) and 3,000 ($442) a year, the potential for tourism is proving attractive enough. Making history However, the project is not without its problems. Recently, Yan Peidong, a scholar from Hebei Province, claimed that the tomb is a forgery. He says that he has even visited an illegal workshop in Henan where workers admitted that they had made fake items for the tomb. Despite the doubts raised by the scholar, Anyang county, which has jurisdiction over Xigaoxue and reportedly raked in 876 million yuan ($129 million) in revenues in 2009, has already invested some 20 million yuan ($2.94 million) in exploitation and infrastructure construction. An official surnamed Zuo at the Anyang government's publicity department said they have not confirmed the exact date of opening for the exhibition hall, but that preparatory work is under way. However, a local resident told the Global Times that his boss at an information technology company could already enter the site by paying 50 yuan. The situation in Xigaoxue, along with other similar tourism projects based on historical figures, has raised concerns that the country is capitalizing on its rich past while sacrificing authenticity. Li Bai, a renowned poet from the Tang Dynasty (618–907), became a subject of debate for different cities that laid claim to being his residency last year. The cultural and tourism bureau in Jiangyou, Sichuan Province, and the Lu'an government in Hu-bei Province, are arguing over which one of them has the right to use Li's name in their respective promotional campaigns claiming to be the residency of the poet, the China Economic Weekly reported earlier. Even fictional characters have become the subject of heated debate. Three locations in Shandong and Anhui provinces have invested a total of 1 billion yuan ($147 million) in developing tourism sites related to Ximen Qing, the main character in the classic Chinese novel Jinpingmei (The Plum in the Golden Vase). In the book, Ximen Qing is portrayed as an immoral and lustful merchant who climbs up the social ladder through corruption. However, when it comes to developing tourism, the dark side of the character was conveniently ignored. Two counties in Shandong, and Huangshan in Anhui are laying claim to being the fictional figure's hometown, believing it will help boost tourism, the China Economic Weekly reported earlier. Yanggu county in Liaocheng, Shandong Province plans to invest 5.6 million yuan ($820,212) in building a 25-mu cultural tourism zone based on the novel in order to attract 200,000 tourists and raise 3 million yuan ($439,000) a year. Replicas of the medicine shop, salt shop, pawnshop and silk warehouse run by Ximen Qing, as well as a teahouse where he enjoyed secretive trysts with the adulterous wife Pan Jinlian, will be set up. Money talks… "The argument over literary characters' residency is based on empty facts that cannot be confirmed by any scholars of history," Liu Chengji, a researcher at the Beijing Normal University, told the Global Times. Liu said many former residences of famous historical figures were destroyed during the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), making it hard to gauge the authenticity of many of the sites that have appeared in recent years. "It is hard to see the good will of the local government when they promote outstanding Chinese culture while boosting the local economy by naming themselves the residency of literary characters like Ximen Qing," Liu said. "We should be responsible for what we do now because hundreds of years from now, what we have established today may be considered as real facts." Zhou Xiaozheng, director of the law and sociology research center at the Renmin University of China, told the Global Times Monday that fighting over historical sites reflects the current obsession over money and GDP figures. "Many local governments are only focused on money nowadays, using lies to gain instant success and quick profits by overexploiting historical resources," said Zhou. "Many historical figures became famous in Chinese history due to noble characteristics including integrity and kindness. However, these precious characteristics have not been passed down in today's GDP-oriented overexploitation." "The only way to stop this kind of farce is to change the country's focus from GDP to sustainable development and encourage the promotion of cultural heritage," Zhou added.
Crusading for recognition for 'work of literary genius'
In an office littered with thousands of notes inscribed on stacked paper flash cards, David Tod Roy has labored on what he calls his "life's work" for three decades. Painstakingly pouring over a 16th-century novel that in woodblock form ran more than 3,000 pages, the University of Chicago professor of Chinese literature has devoted the bulk of his career to the translation and annotation of Chin P'ing Mei, or The Plum in the Golden Vase. Written anonymously, the work focuses on a corrupt mobile merchant and his harem of six wives and concubines. While the book is most often recognized for its erotic realism, The Plum in the Golden Vase is a landmark book not only in the history of Chinese literature but world literature, Roy said. Its role in shaping the later (and arguably most famous of all Chinese novels) Dream of the Red Chamber is undeniable, he said. "It's an extremely significant book," he said. "Every time I've taught this book, I've become more convinced of its importance and impressed by its rhetorical sophistication. Some people have viewed it purely as an erotic novel, but at the time it circulated among members of the educated elite and the literary avant-garde, who all recognized it for being a work of literary genius." He first became aware of the novel as the teenage son of Presbyterian missionaries in Nanjing and Shanghai, where he studied at the Shanghai American School with his brother, former US ambassador to China J. Stapleton Roy. He later taught the work at Princeton University and the University of Chicago. The Plum in the Golden Vase was ground-breaking for its focus on ordinary life in a middle-class family; earlier Chinese literature had focused only on emperors, powerful officials or figures in mythology. The book's incredibly detailed descriptions of daily life, dress, cuisine, legal malfeasance and yes, sexual activity - all make it a "rich sourcebook for any student of 16th-century society," Roy said. As a language resource, the book is also remarkable for having documented the era's vernacular, from the refined speech of the elite to street slang and cuss words, he said. But in keeping with a tradition that is entirely Chinese, the novel is more than the story at its surface, Roy said. In Chinese literature, poets and novelists have often veiled their criticisms by not only changing the time period depicted in their work, but also through the use of metaphor and allusion. In The Plum in the Golden Vase, the merchant at the center of the plot likely stands for the emperor at the time the author was writing, Roy said. The six women of his household represent the six bureaus at the head of the imperial bureaucracy. "The ancient Confucian belief was that if an emperor led a moral life, that would have a favorable effect on all of society, with the opposite being equally true: if the emperor was immoral, that would have a bad effect on the morals of the entire society, and you see that in smaller form with this family in the book," Roy said. "The author clearly believed that Chinese society at the time was corrupt from top to bottom, but employed criticism by indirection, as many writers did." Although the novel was previously translated by Clement Egerton in 1938 (under the title The Golden Lotus), that version appeared partially in Latin (due to the sexual nature of the novel) and was more of a paraphrase of the book. With this translation, Roy has attempted to remain faithful to the original novel's text. In the New York Review of Books, critic Jonathan Spence wrote: "Roy has made a major contribution to our overall understanding of the novel. He has annotated the text with a precision, thoroughness and passion for detail that makes even a veteran reader of monographs smile with a kind of quiet disbelief." David Rolston, a professor of Chinese literature at the University of Michigan who studied with Roy at the University of Chicago, noted the translator's mastery of both Chinese and English vocabulary and style. "He is incredibly successful in finding dynamic equivalents between the languages," he said. "He has a magnificent control of language that you don't find in younger generations. This book has been a constant companion for him, and it's truly amazing to see someone whose entire career has been focused on one work at this level. Additionally, he has an enormous knowledge of previous literature." The thousands of pop-culture and literary references that appear in the original novel were mostly uncited. Roy traced and documented the original sources in a way that illuminates the book further than any other study has done, Rolston said. Those sources appear in Roy's translation as footnotes. Roy compared the author's use of earlier works to the manner in which an artist might create a mosaic, and noted that the author James Joyce also injected his work with the songs and references of his time. He is extremely pleased with the increased interest in Chinese literature among Western readers, he said. He said that when he was a student, there were only four or five universities in the US with China programs. "Things have changed very radically in the last half century, and needless to say that's a very good thing," he said.
Jin Ping Mei
Jin Ping Mei is a Chinese naturalistic novel composed in the Ming Dynasty. It is the first Chinese vernacular novel, laying a foundation for later creations. The pseudonym of the novel is Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng ("The Scoffing Gentleman of Lanling"). Lanling is somewhere within present-day Zaozhuang City of Shandong Province. Presumably, the author was from Shandong. Jin Ping Mei takes its name from the three central female characters - Pan Jinlian (whose name means "Golden Lotus"); Li Ping'er (literally, "Little Vase"), and Peng Chunmei (spring plum blossoms). Set in the late years of the Northern Song Dynasty, the novel depicts a ghost-like world made up of power-monopolizing Grand Mentors in the imperial court, bureaucrats and tyrants in local areas as well as ruffians and hooligans. Based on the story of “Wu Song killing his sister-in-law“ in Outlaws of the Marsh, the novel portrays the sinful life of Ximen Qing and his family. Ximen Qing is a representative figure of sordid forces in three capacities: bureaucrat, tyrant and wealthy merchant. It exposes the darkness and corruption of the mid-Northern Song Dynasty society. Actually, through describing the situation in the Song Dynasty, the novel reflects the real life of the mid-Ming Dynasty, when power-wielding officials and local despotic gentry colluded with each other to oppress and exploit the people and to obtain illegal gains. Jin Ping Mei is the first ever independently-created novel in the history of Chinese literature. Since the birth of work, the composition of novels by literati has become a mainstream. Novels before Jin Ping Mei drew materials from historical stories, myth or legends. Jin Ping Mei has broken the tradition by focusing on characters in real life as well as daily domestic life, increasingly boosting the maturity of Chinese realistic literature creation and serving as a necessary exploration and preparation for the later composition of A Dream of Red Mansions. Jin Ping Mei is called one of “the top four incredible books“ of ancient China along with The Romance of Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh and Journey to the West. The work holds an important status in the history of Chinese literature. Meanwhile, it’s been acclaimed as a work of “great literature value“ by international scholars, who also regard it as a “literature to society“.
Knowledge Graph
Examples
1 Jin Ping Mei gives a real insight into the middle class of Chinese people living in the Ming dynasty. It's widely considered as on a level with the four great classical novels of imperial China (namely Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, the Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber).
2 Hu Changqing, a former vice governor of Jiangxi Province who was executed in 2000 for bribery, was said to be an aficionado of erotic novels such as Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy, and Jinpingmei. Ma Xiangdong, a former vice mayor of Shenyang, Liaoning Province who was executed for bribery, often carried gambling books with him, according to the People's Daily.
3 Jin Ping Mei is the title of a Chinese vernacular novel, meaning that it was written in common Chinese rather than in the Classical Chinese used for more esoteric works.