21. Early Qing Fiction and Drama
During the reign of Shunzhi and Kangxi( 1644 - 1723), the Qing
rulers tried hard to unify and stabilize the country. They adopted a se-
ries of military and political measures to strengthen their rule, and to
a large extent they succeeded. The central and local governments were
reorganized; laws were made and administered; officials of all levels
were appointed. Although people of all nationalities were chosen as of-
ficials, the Manchu aristocrats formed the core of the regime.
To unify people's thought, the early Qing rulers, including
Kangxi, Yongzheng and Qianlong, continued the Chinese tradition of
honoring Confucius and Confucianism. Confucian scholars, especially
those who believed in and spread the philosophy of principle, were
praised and respected. They could pass the civil service examinations,
which had been restored to recruit officials from among scholars. At
the same time, the Qing rulers banned books which they thought
were harmful to their rule, and punished and even killed a number of
scholars who were considered disloyal or opposed to them.
During the reign of Yongzheng and Qianlong(1723 - 1796), the
Qing government started two huge cultural projects: the compilation
of A Collection of Books of Ancient and Modern Times and the edit-
ing of The Complete Library of the Four Treasuries. The former,
completed in 1725, consisted of 10,000 volumes divided into six ma-
jor parts and 6,109 items according to content. The latter, completed
in 1782, ten years after the work began, consisted of 79, 337 vol-
umes, divided into four major parts( or treasuries) :Confucian classics,
histories, philosophical works and literary works. This great project
helped to preserve many valuable books, but those disliked by the
Qing rulers were not included.
In spite of the thought control imposed by the government, men
of letters produced many excellent works, especially stories and plays,
in the first hundred years of the Qing dynasty. The literary traditions
of the Ming were valued and carried on by Qing writers. Besides,
some of them had desired to express their dissatisfaction at and hatred
of Manchu rule. So their works not only had high literary merit, but
also contained progressive views.
One such writer was Pu Songling (1640 - 1715), who wrote
Stange Tales from a Scholar's Studio. Born into a declining landlord
family in Zibo, Shandong, Pu lived a hard life almost all his life. He
had to work as a secretary for an official or teach students at a
landlord's house far from home for low pay. Even after he was 60
years old, he still had to walk long distances to places where there was
work to do.
Talented as he was, he could not pass the imperial examination
or find a government post. As a result, he lived among the ordinary
people most of the time and understood their life and feelings, their
likes and dislikes. This helped him to write many of the stories col-
lected in Strange Tales from a Scholar's Studio.
In the book there are over 400 stories. Many of them are about
ghosts and foxes, but in telling them the writer's real intention is to
expose the darkness of human society, the corruption of officials, and
the hypocrisy and injustice of the civil service examination system.
There are also stories about young people longing for true love but
prevented from getting it by feudal customs and traditions.
"The Cricket", one of the stories, tells how an emperor, who
liked cricket fighting, forced local officials to present strong crickets
to him and how the people suffered because of this hobby of the
emperor's. An honest man by the name of Cheng Ming could not find
a good cricket and the local official ordered him to buy one. For this
Cheng was almost broke. Then he luckily found a strong cricket, but
his careless young son killed it. Severely scolded by his father, the son
wanted to commit suicide. He was saved, and lay in bed unconscious
for a long time. Then Cheng Ming found a cricket good at fighting,
which he presented to the emperor through various officials. This
changed the fate of Cheng Ming's family. Finally his son regained
consciousness and told his parents that he had turned into a cricket
and had fought and defeated many other crickets in the imperial
palace.
What a terrible picture this story draws of feudal rule! To satis-
fy a small desire of the ruler, innocent people had to face ruin and
death. This shows the depth and sharpness of the writer's criticism of
the unjust society.
Pu Songling wrote all his stories in beautiful and vivid classical
Chinese. He departed from the practice of telling stories in the spoken
language started by the Ming novelists and story-tellers, but contin-
ued the tradition of Tang writers of short fiction. After him some oth-
er writers wrote stories in the classical style, but their works were
hardly comparable with his strange tales.
In Pu's time there were two well-known dramatists producing
excellent plays. They were Hong Sheng (1645 - 1704 )and Kong
Shangren( 1648- 1718). Hong was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, lived
in Beijing for a long time without any success in his political career,
and became famous when he was over 40 years old because of his play
Palace of Eternal Life. Then he did something that happened to
make the emperor angry, and he had to leave the capital and return to
Hangzhou to spend his last years.
Palace of Eternal Life mainly describes the love between Em-
peror Minghuang of the Tang and his concubine Yang Yuhuan. After
Yang's death, the emperor thought of her day and night. Finally both
of them, on orders from the Jade Emperor, rose to Heaven and became
an eternal couple there. The play also describes the corruption and
conflict of the ruling class and its oppression of the people. So besides
the love theme the play has a political theme, which is valuable in a
way. But these two themes, according to some critics, do not strength-
en, but weaken each other.
Kong Shangren was born in Qufu, Shandong, a distant descen-
dant of Confucius. He worked for some time in the Central University
in Beijing, and later he was sent to the Changjiang River valley to
help with flood control. While visiting Nanjing and Yangzhou, he
learned much about the fall of the Southern Ming, and began to think
of writing a play about it. After he returned to Beijing, he devoted his
time to writing the play The Peach Blossom Fan. It was a great suc-
cess. Perhaps because of this he was dismissed from his post. He then
returned to Qufu to live a quiet life as a common citizen.
The Pea.ch Blossom Fan is a historical romance, based on the
events of the short-lived Southern Ming regime in Nanjing. When
Beijing had fallen to the Manchu army, some Ming ministers and gen-
erals helped a Ming prince ascend the throne in Nanjing. This was the
beginning of the Southen Ming. While the Manchu army was march-
ing south, important men in the Nanjing regime were not trying to
organize resistance. On the contrary, they were becoming more and
more corrupt, seizing wealth and power, seeking pleasure and paying
no attention to the critical situation facing them. Within a year this
regime collapsed.
The play gives a faithful account of this tragedy. Woven into the
historical events is the love affair between Li Xiangjun, a beautiful
and talented prostitute, and Hou Fangyu, a well-known scholar of the
time. Faithful to the man she loved, Li was determined not to marry
anyone else. She hated those evil men in the Nanjing government.
Once one of them tried to force her to be his concubine. She resolutely
refused, and knocked her head against the floor, intending to kill her-
self. Her blood splashed over a fan given her by Hou. She did not die;
nor did she go to that official's home. A friend of hers, who was a
painter, drew branches on the fan and turned her blood drops into
peach flowers--a painting that was a symbol of her devotion and
resolution.
It is clear that by writing the play Kong Shangren intended to
reveal the real causes of the fall of the Southern Ming, so as to help
people to draw lessons from them. The play shows his patriotic senti-
ments and his deep understanding of the history and social change of
this period.
About half a century after Hong and Kong wrote their plays, the
popular satirical novel The Scholars was written by Wu Jingzi
(lg01- 1755).Wu was born in Quanjiao, Anhui. His father was an
honest scholar, uninterested in fame and wealth. After his father's
death, he became poor and had to sell what property he had inherit-
ed. Then he moved to Nanjing, and lived a poor life there. He would
not take the civil service examinations simply because he looked down
upon them. In Nanjing and Yangzhou, which he often visited, he got
to know many officials and scholars who had passed the examina-
tions, and learned that many of these people were shamefully selfish,
and would not hesitate to use underhand methods for their own inter-
ests. They provided him with material for the novel he was going to
write. In his last years he studied Confucian classics and wrote some-
thing about them, but what he wrote was lost after he died.
A learned scholar himself, Wu saw through the attractive masks
put on by those scholars who were shallow and hypocritical. In the
novel he describes many "scholars" who did everything they could to
pass the civil service examinations first and then climb the social lad-
der and make money. As they had neither learning nor moral integri-
ty, they could only serve the ruling class as lackeys.
Fan Jin, one of the characters, had sat for the examinations more
than 20 times without success. He was looked down upon by all his
relatives and neighbors. Then one day news came that he had passed.
He was so excited that he was out of his senses. To sober him up, his
father-in-law, a butcher, slapped him on the face. After this farce, he
quickly became important and rich, and squeezed into the official cir-
cle to oppress the common people.
Wu wrote the book at a time when the Qing rulers had consoli-
dated their power, and were trying to buy over scholars by giving
them government posts through the civil service examinations. Wu
hated this system and had only contempt for those who wanted to
benefit by it.
The novel may be called a work of critical realism. Its main ob-
jective is to show the ugly side of society and expose evil people, while
earlier novels, like Three Kingdoms and Water Margin, mainly de-
scribe heroes who embody good moral qualities. The Scholars marked
the beginning of satirical fiction in China's literary history.