The Plum in the Golden Vase Or, Chin P'Ing Mei, Volume 1: by David Tod Roy

By David Tod Roy

In this primary of a deliberate five-volume set, David Roy offers an entire and annotated translation of the recognized Chin P'ing Mei, an nameless sixteenth-century chinese language novel that specializes in the household lifetime of Hsi-men Ch'ing, a corrupt, upwardly cellular service provider in a provincial city, who continues a harem of six better halves and concubines. This paintings, recognized essentially for its erotic realism, can also be a landmark within the improvement of the narrative paintings form--not simply from a particularly chinese language viewpoint yet in a world-historical context.

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91 The author does not introduce all his innovative effects at once;in fact, the first twenty chapters of the novel are in some ways the least representa­ tive. Much of the first ten chapters,especially those parts of chapters 1-6 and 8-10 that deal with the story of W u Sung, s relations with P, an Chinlien and Hsi-men C h’ing,are taken,with relatively little alteration, from chapters 23—27 of the Shui-hu ch’üan-chuan. The reader who is interested in such comparisons should read these sections of the Chin P'ing Mei to g e th e r with Sidney Shapiro’s translation of those chapters in Outlaws o f the Marsh.

W hat is the significance of this alteration? First of all it needs to be pointed out that the supposed small-town provincial setting of the novel is itself one of the author’s feats of legerde­ main. The real model underlying the description of the locale in which the events of the novel take place is neither Yang-ku nor C h , ing-ho,nor any of the other sites in Shantung Province that have been proposed, but the xxxvi INTRODUCTION city of Peking, which served as the capital of the Ming empire from 1421 to 1644.

T. ^ It is an ironic coincidence that both the author of the Chin P’ing Mei and Freud have been popularly misunderstood to endorse precisely those permissive atti­ tudes that they most severely condemned. A u t h o r ' s N e e d t o D is g u is e H is I n t e n t io n s The question remains, however, in view of the all too common misinterpre­ tations of the novel, why the author of the Chin P’ing Mei chose to express himself as elliptically as he did. I believe that his reasons for doing so were probably the same as those that led so many of his illustrious predecessors to adopt the device of criticizing by indirection.

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