19. Ming Drama and Short Fiction
During the Yuan period, while zaju or northern drama was de-
veloping in the north, a different type of drama was taking shape and
spreading in the south with Wenzhou, Zhejiang, as its center. South-
ern drama, as it was called, had its beginnings in the Northern Song.
Using southern dialects and southern folk songs, it was popular
among the ordinary people of Zhejiang and its neighboring provinces,
including Fujian, Jiangsu and Anhui. Only a few complete works of
southern drama have been preserved, partly because literary men of
the Song and Yuan looked down upon this form of drama and would
not try to write plays for it, and partly because northern drama was
the main trend and attracted greater attention.
If those few southern plays are compared with northern plays,
some of the differences between these two types of drama can be
seen. In a northern play, there are usually four acts, and only one
actor or actress sings in one act, and the other actors and actresses
talk but do not sing. Besides, one rhyme is used in all the songs in
one act. In a southern play, the number of scenes is flexible: there
may be only a few and there may also be as many as forty or fifty
scenes. In one scene more than one actor or actress may sing, and
sometimes two or more of them may sing together, and the songs in
one scene may have different rhymes. In short, there is greater free-
dom in arrangement and form in southern drama.
Towards the end of the Yuan and at the beginning of the Ming
there appeared some good southern plays, of which the best known is
the Story of the Pipa by Gao Ming. It tells the story of how the filial
and faithful Zhao Wuniang goes alone to the capital with a pipa to
find her husband Cai Bojie, who has passed the examinations, become
a government offical, and married the prime minister's daughter.
During the Ming, northern drama was on the decline and south-
ern drama flourished. Many important writers took an interest in
southern drama and wrote plays. The most outstanding among them
was Tang Xianzu (1550- 1616).
Tang was born in Linchuan, Jiangxi. Having passed the civil
service examinations, he got only positions of a low rank, because he
hated to please powerful people. Finally he had to retire and went
back to his home town, to devote himself to writing. He wrote four
plays, which are all connected with dreams, so collectively they are
called the "Four Dreams."
The Peony Pavilion, one of the "Four Dreams, "is his master-
piece. Du Liniang, the heroine, is the daughter of a high-ranking of. fi-
cial. In her father's big house she lives a very dull and unhappy life.
The feudal ethical code and the strict rules laid down by her father
deprive her of all freedom. One spring day, urged by her maid, she
goes to her family garden for a walk. There she is delighted and also
surprised by the beauty of nature. As she is tired, she dozes off and
has a dream. In it she meets a young scholar named Liu Mengmei,
and falls in love with him. When she wakes up, she knows clearly
that the dream will never come true. After that she falls ill with a sad
heart, and finally she dies. Three years later, the young scholar she
dreamed of comes to her city on his way to the capital to take the im-
perial examinations. He happens to pick up the portrait Liniang
painted of herself, and at night he meets Liniang's ghost. She tells
him that-he should open her grave at once. This he does, and Liniang
comes out of the grave a living lady as beautiful as she ever was.
They are then married and begin their happy life together.
The plot seems unreal, but it reveals a very bold new spirit: a
young woman from an upper-class family dares to love a young man
in spite of all traditions. She not only loves the young man, but dies
for him and becomes alive again for him. She is really a woman with
new ideas, and Tang Xianzu in portraying such a splendid heroine
shows himself to be a dramatist who defies old beliefs.
We have talked about two important periods in the development
of fiction: the Tang dynasty when short stories were written in re-
fined classical Chinese, and the early and middle Ming dynasty when
long novels like Three Kingdoms appeared. There was another im-
portant development in the Ming in the field of fiction:the writing of
short stories in plain spoken Chinese.
In the Song and Yuan, short stories had been told and sung by
story-teUers to crowds gathered around them. There were story-
tellers' notes; as they were not written by experienced writers, their
language is generally rather crude. During the Ming, certain writers
began to polish those notes and write new stories. In the last years of
the dynasty there was a great advance in short fiction.
During this period the man who made the greatest contribution
to the growth of short fiction was Feng Menglong( 1574- 1646). He
was born in Suzhou, Jiangsu. For some time he was a county magis-
trate, but all his life he was a passionate lover of literature, especially
fiction. He collected, edited, revised and published a great number of
short stories, plays and folk tales. The first collection of short stories
he edited was originally called Ancient and Modern Stories. When
the second and third collections came out, he entitled them Ordinary
Words to Warn the World and Lasting Words to Awaken the
World. Then he changed the title of the first collection to Clear
Words to Illustrate the World. The three volumes were then given a
general title: Three Volumes of Words.
In these three volumes are collected 120 short stories based on
earlier story-tellers' notes and revised or rewritten by Feng. As a re-
sult of his work, those stories are not only interesting but also read-
able. Most of them reflect life in prosperous cities, and most of the
characters are people of the lower and middle classes. Some of the
stories describe young people who are faithful to those they love;some
describe craftsmen, vendors and small merchants who are willing to
make sacrifices to help their friends;others expose the crimes of cor-
rupt officials and big landlords, and the conflicts within feudal fami-
lies. They are like mirrors in which the reader can see what urban life
was like, and how people of different classes lived and behaved in the
Ming and earlier periods.
Take the story of the oil vendor Qin Zhong, for example. He is
poor and is very low on the social ladder, but he wins the love of a
beautiful prostitute Shen Yaoqin, because he is sincere and loves her
wholeheartedly. When Shen compares this poor young man with
those sons of wealthy families who treat her as a plaything and insult
her, she sees the meaning and value of true love, and decides to marry
Qin. This story shows a change in urban people's attitude towards
marriage: sincere love is more important than wealth and social posi-
tion, and in this theme lies the significance of the story.
When Feng Menglong was editing his stories, another writer was
doing similar work. Ling Mengchu(1580- 1644)was born in Wu-
xing, Zhejiang. Like Feng, he was a lover and promoter of popular
literature. He compiled two volumes of short stories called Surpris-
ing Stories to Make One Slap the Desk, or Two Volumes of Slapping
for short. He wrote most of the 78 stories in them, though the mate-
rial came from earlier folk tales.
Later, a man who called himself the Old Man Hugging the Jar
selected 40 from the nearly 200 stories in the Three Volumes of
Words and Two Volumes of Slapping and put them together in a
book entitled Wonderful Sights, Ancient and Modern, which was to
become more popular than the five original books.