The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei: Vol. One: The Gathering

The Golden Lotus #1

by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng, David Tod Roy (Translator)

The first volume of a celebrated translation of the classic Chinese novel

This is the first volume in David Roy's celebrated translation of one of the most famous and important novels in Chinese literature. The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei is an anonymous sixteenth-century work that focuses on the domestic life of Hsi-men Ch’ing, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines. The novel, known primarily for its erotic realism, is also a landmark in the development of the narrative art form―not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context.

With the possible exception of The Tale of Genji (1010) and Don Quixote (1615), there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature. Although its importance in the history of Chinese narrative has long been recognized, the technical virtuosity of the author, which is more reminiscent of the Dickens of Bleak House , the Joyce of Ulysses , or the Nabokov of Lolita than anything in the earlier Chinese fiction tradition, has not yet received adequate recognition. This is partly because all of the existing European translations are either abridged or based on an inferior recension of the text. This translation and its annotation aim to faithfully represent and elucidate all the rhetorical features of the original in its most authentic form and thereby enable the Western reader to appreciate this Chinese masterpiece at its true worth.

Genres: China, Classics, Fiction, Chinese Literature, Literature, Erotica, Asian Literature

714 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1596

About the author

Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng (Chinese: 蘭陵笑笑生) or "The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling", a clear pseudonym.

Jin Ping Mei (Chinese: 金瓶梅; pinyin: Jīn Píng Méi), translated as The Plum in the Golden Vase or The Golden Lotus, is a Chinese naturalistic novel composed in vernacular Chinese during the late Ming Dynasty. The anonymous author took the pseudonym Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng (蘭陵笑笑生), "The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling," and his identity is otherwise unknown (the only clue is that he hailed from Lanling in present-day Shandong).

The identity of the author has not yet been established, but the coherence of the style and the subtle symmetry of the narrative point to a single author. The British orientalist Arthur Waley, writing before recent research, in his Introduction to the 1942 translation suggested that the strongest candidate as author was Xu Wei, a renowned painter and member of the "realistic" Gong'an school of letters, urging that a comparison could be made of the poems in the Jin Ping Mei to the poetic production of Xu Wei, but left this task to future scholars. The "morphing" of the author from Xu Wei to Wang Shizhen would be explained by the practice of attributing "a popular work of literature to some well-known writer of the period".

Reviews

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is deplorable, but man’s heart is
More venomous than a snake;
Who is aware that the eye of heaven rolls as
Relentlessly as a wheel?

A deceptive book, apparently a titillating soap opera about a dissolute 12th century merchant and his love affairs, but really a complex structure of criticisms of the author’s 16th century world, a corrupt state heading for eventual defeat by the Manchus. The author is so accomplished that it reads beautifully either way. You can enjoy the trickery, eroticism, succulent meals, exotic clothes, poetic descriptions and pervasive humor, or you can appreciate the multilayered portrayal of decaying Ming China in the late 1500s.

I read the whole first volume before I looked at the translator’s introduction, so I didn’t have his theory about the conservative Confucian criticism of the anonymous author. Still, it’s clear about two thirds of the way in that trouble is brewing. The main character is suddenly threatened with collateral damage from the military defeats and subsequent dishonor of his daughter’s father-in-law. He side-steps the consequences with some well-placed bribes, but suddenly the corrupt behavior that permeates the book takes on a darker tone.

By chance I read Wang Yang-Ming’s Instructions for Practical Living while I was ambling through Chin P’ing Mei, so I could contrast Wang’s type of Neo-Confucian instruction with the everyday life portrayed here. Wang asserts that Confucian principles, such as reverence for parents, are inherent in the mind, if we can return to our pure, natural state by subduing our passions. Not so, translator Roy proposes. He argues that even though Wang was a near contemporary of the author of Chin P‘ing Mei , the novelist agreed with a strict early Confucian, Hsun-tzu: man’s original nature is evil and requires constant instruction and effort to overcome.

[There are some low-level spoilers from now on, and some information from the introduction; you may want to defer if you plan to read Chin P’ing Mei.] Well, pharmaceuticals-merchant Hsi-men Ch’ing and his women suggest Hsun-tzu was closer to the truth. The core of the story is taken from The Outlaws of the Marsh, a novel earlier in this productive century that I haven’t read yet. Suffice it to say that adultery, poison, bribery, and general skullduggery start things off. Hsi-men Ch’ing is corrupt and shows no compunction at corrupting others. He has no control over his passions—in fact the last scene in the book leaves him rampaging through a house in the pleasure quarter, ordering it torn apart in his rage. More often we see him indulging his lust; by the close of volume one he has installed six wives/concubines in his house.

But, they and the servants are adept at pulling the wool over his eyes, at least temporarily. Match-maker crones take advantage of his lust. His new infatuations manipulate him into costly and potentially dishonorable steps. Six women in the house with only one man among them is asking for trouble—subtle back-stabbing is the order of the day. Hsi-men Ch’ing almost never attends to business; he leaves it to his employees. There is only pleasure: eating, drinking and sex (and for all the varieties of love-making indulged in, it’s remarkable that there are no children in this book.) His toadies (Sponger Ying, Tagalong Hsieh, Heartless Wu, and Blabbermouth Sun) use jocular persuasion to lead him into lost days and nights—at his expense of course—in the pleasure quarter.

Roy argues that His-men Ch’ing is meant to be the dissolute emperor Wan-li (ruled 1572-1620), and these toadies his self-serving ministers. It’s convincing, but I would read the first volume as I did, before reading the detail in the introduction, so you first meet the characters on their own terms. They are vibrant individuals and don’t need a shadow role to fully inhabit their world. Furthermore, the introduction outlines the plot of all five volumes, so getting a start without viewing the characters in anticipation of their future actions is better.

Finally a word about the writing itself. There are patterns of prose and poetry, recurring phrases, and (Roy says) patterns in the overall structure of 100 chapters, that may show Daoist influences, or just be masterful writing. I loved the frequent interspersed short poems that quoted traditional songs related to the action. Occasional longer poems, as excerpted below, can be quite lovely or telling. The humor is everywhere, and of every form: ironic, scatological, double-entendred, slap-stick, situational—read it and laugh. The language likewise ranges from rustic and crude:

This single conversation had such an effect on the old lady that she was ready to fart ferociously and pee in her pants, in her excitement

[re: an aunt arranging to essentially sell her widowed niece to His-men Ch’ing.]

to incredibly lovely, at the Lantern Festival:

There are camel lanterns
And green lion lanterns,
Bearing priceless rarities, snorting and roaring;
As well as gibbon lanterns
And white elephant lanterns,
Proffering treasures fit to ransom cities,
Gamboling and playing.
All arms and legs,
Crab lanterns,
Cavort in the clear waves;
With gaping mouths and long beards,
Catfish lanterns,
Gulp down green algae
Silver mouths vie with one another in brilliance,
Snowy willows compete with each other in beauty;
Pair by pair, the follow in the wake of brocade sashes
And dangling pomanders,
Branch by branch, they brush against decorated pennants and turquoise carriage curtains.
…
The makers of artificial plum blossoms,
Attach them ubiquitously to dead branches.
Paper cutouts of spring moths,
Stuck rakishly in the hair over the temples,
Quiver in the east wind;
Gold-flecked gimcrack hairpins,
Twinkle atop chignons with a glitter
that rivals the sun’s.

Roy says that you have to read this book over and over to fully understand how intricately the author interlaced his patterns, images, language, and themes, and I believe it. I look forward to the rest of it. Roy devoted his working life to the book, and we can be grateful.

A note: I listened to the book in the recording by George Backman, who is a genius. He catches the spirit of the book perfectly: lively, licentious, sly, boisterous, two-timing---and perfect Chinese for the names and places.

[Chloe Gong · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can't believe how hard this slaps.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Chin P’ing Mei, or
The Plum in the Golden Vase, or
Gold Vase Plum, or
Plum Blossoms in a Golden Vase, or
The Glamour of Entering the Vagina, or
Welcome to China, “N.R.”!!
i.e., ‘s about damn time.

And so here we go, volume one of a five volume novel (100 chapters), one novel of six (classic, Chinese), most of which are about as gargantuan. I get sucked into this thing by a marketing ploy performed by the amazonian overladies --; buy volume one for a mere ten bucks (add enough other stuff to get the FREE shipping), then prepare to shell out as much as forty bucks per for the remaining four volumes and you see that you’re looking at The Potentially Most Expensive Novel In My Library (TP-MEN-IML), nearly more money than what one might spend on that there Schmidt Traum. So you see my conundrum and you won’t make too lite of me if I pause for a period before carrying on with this wayward novel.

So, but we began this novel with a remark by translator-annotator David Tod Roy (where’s his Nobel?) characterizing our quintuple=decker as “difficult....demanding....Joyce....Nabokov”. As you may expect, this characterization is both true and false. It’s so terribly false in regard to the surface of the novel. The surface of the novel is a breeze. The only thing difficult/demanding about it is the massive cast (56 pages for the Cast of Characters) of characters. There’s some nice Joyce/Nabokov-esque word games and play=things (such as the risqué possibility hidden up there in the title), but not really enough, and they are annotated by Roy, and Roy does a pretty bang-up job of making something similar work in English -- as he quotes his translator-mentor, “My one abiding principle has been to translate everything -- even puns”. But of course, once the pun gets translated it has to be annotated, and there’s quite a bit of fun to be had seeing how puns get built in Chinese (but only a handful so far in this here volume the first). The difficult/demanding characterization is true in so far as we’d like to talk about depth; I suspect that there are fathoms and fathoms of depth in this novel ; quotations, allusions, intertextuality, dialogism (that’s ‘Bakhtin’ to us, as Roy duly points out) -- kind of like trying to read Moby-Dick without knowledge of ta Biblia or Shakespeare or really anything at all, I mean I don’t know anything about Chinese literature (or history or anything), but Roy seems to know everything. Which is where the annotations come in -- everything is identified as to its source, 106 pages of it -- 106 pages of ::
The proximate source of this quotation is....
The first four lines of this passage of parallel prose....
The proximate source of this sentence....
The probable source of these two lines is....
The probable source of this couplet is....
Kao Ch’iu (d. 1126) is a historical figure. For his biography....
For the story of how the....
This line, with slight textual variation, recurs three times in Chin P’ing Mei ch’üan-chuan.....
You get the picture. Totally (mostly) useless to a reader like me with zero knowledge of any of these sources (mostly identified via their Chinese title, which is fine, and there is a Bibliography here too) ; and rarely are there any interpretative comments in these annotations which would be helpful to a reader like me. But, you know how fantastic it is to find another Elliot allusion in that Gaddis novel you are reading..... In other words, it can render itself difficult/demanding, but it need not do so.

So, not difficult to read ; a bit outside of most of our reading habits, especially if those reading habits are mostly of the postmodern, modern, or 19th century variety ; it gets less outside our reading habits if those reading habits include a healthy dose of pre-1800 noveling. It’s kind of a pleasant experience to open up something like this and feel one’s way forward ; strange and other-ish, yet easy enough with which to become acquainted. I’d say though too that there is something a little less than satisfying in the prose department ; and I’ll include the stuff that looks like poetry because whether it is poetry or ‘parallel prose’ in the Chinese, in the English it all reads like translator prose. But it also reads a little like 17th or 18th century English prose -- because for us reading in the year 2014 we are always looking through a glass darkened by a certain attending to prose-sculpture perpetrated by our modernist forebears (yesyes, those baroque guys, I know). Days were when prose just didn’t matter much ; one had poetry when it mattered. Some of that goes down here. And too, the 714 pages of this first volume contains a mere 427 pages of novel (60%) -- the rest is introduction, cast of characters, annotations, bibliography, index) -- so unless you are a compulsive reader of everything (including copyright pages), it’s not as gargantuan as you may be led to believe (until, I guess, it is multiplied by five).

And yes, there is sex in here. And yes, it’s a bit more frank than anyone but your grandmother. It’s just that it’s not salaciously presentified ; this is, after all, realism, not fantasy.

But yeah I’m going to break down likely sooner than later and carry on with this wayward novel.

[Whitaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Chinese classic work, The Plum in the Golden Vase, takes the well-known story of Wu Song, his brother and his brother's wife to spin a novel that details the downfall of a family as a result of the debauchery of its members.

Wu Song's story is as well-known to the Chinese as the story of Romeo and Juliet is to Anglo-europeans. Wu Song is a hero, a martial arts exponent that, in The Water Margin, goes around fighting injustice. He gets his start when he goes to live with his brother, Wu Dalang. Unlike the stalwart handsome hero, however, Wu Dalang is a dwarf. Yes, yes, the difference is akin to Tyrion and Jamie of GoT fame save that Wu Dalang is, tragically, nowhere near as smart as Tyrion.

Poor, ugly and stupid Wu Dalang has the misfortune to be married to a great beauty, Pan Chin Lien. She was forced into marriage with him by her former master. Her beauty attracts the attentions of wealthy, handsome man-about-town, Hsi-Men Ching, and she starts an affair with him. The two eventually decide to clear the way to Pan Chin Lien becoming Hsi-Men Ching's fifth wife by poisoning Wu Dalang. When Wu Song discovers the murder, he decides to exact a brutal revenge on the pair. This is where The Plum in the Golden Vase departs from the traditional tale and heads off into "fan fiction" territory: instead of succeeding, Wu Song is caught before he can kill the couple and he is sentenced to hard labour.

Pan Chin Lien and Hsi-men Ching shippers get full satisfaction from the rest of the novel, which describes their relationship in intimate and pornographic detail. This is not for the faint-hearted. Centuries before Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lolita and Maurice shocked Anglo-european mores, there was a literary work that described sex not in euphemistic terms but in hard core detail. While there are many genteel references to "the game of clouds and rain" and poetic verses eulogising a warrior wielding his spear to attack a lady's defences, there are also exceedingly graphic and frank descriptions of both straight and gay sex (referred to euphemistically as enjoying the southern breezes).

While the novel is notorious for its pornographic content, it is far more than mere smut and contains a veritable treasure trove of the details of life as lived by the extremely corrupt and debauched 1%: their clothes, food, forays to the red light district (or licensed quarter as it is called in the novel), poetry and song, bribery and corruption, medicine... It is also an enjoyable tale in its own right as Pan Chin Lien plots against the various wives to ensure that she continues to retain Hsi-men Ching's favour. Cue ominous music when Hsi-men Ching takes on wife number six...

David Roy's foreward explains how the novel is a scathing critique of, not simply the Ming dynasty 1%, but also the emperor himself and is well-worth reading for that. My only peeve with the work is the list of characters that is provided: given the huge cast of characters, it is an absolute necessity for keeping track of who's who, but beware the spoilers as the character descriptions provide a pithy summary of their entire story in the novel.

Note: This translation was reviewed and recommended by NYRB.

[Larou]

[Note: While I am posting this under the first volume, this review really is about the whole of the novel]

The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P’ing Mei is another of the Six Classic Chinese novels. It was written in the 16th century, that is about two hundred years before The Scholars and is considerably longer – the English translation spans five volumes of about 800-1,000 pages each, and while there is a lot of editorial material in each volume, I’d estimate it comes to at least 3,000 pages total. “Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng” apparently means “The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling” and is an obvious pseudonym; the author remains unknown to this day, although the editor of my edition (on which later more) has a theory about who may have written the novel. I even have a theory of my own, as it happens (on which more later).

The novel takes place over several years and centers around the fate of merchant Hsi-men Ch’ing and his extensive household (a wife, several concubines – the number varies throughout the narrative – and a host of servants), his rise, his glory days and eventual downfall and dissolution of his estate. It is probably most famous (or possibly notorious, depending on your preferences) for its explicit eroticism, to the point where it even has been called pornographic. So let’s get that out of the way first: everyone who is going to read Chin P’ing Mei for its titillation factor is going to be severely disappointed. Yes, sex does play a very important part here and is openly thematized throughout, and yes, there are some really, really detailed sex scenes – but those are few and far between. I could probably count them on the fingers of my hand, and stretched out over 3,000 pages that is not much at all. (I did, however, learn more than I ever thought I would about the variety of sex toys in ancient China.)

The Plum in the Golden Vase also has some of the loveliest euphemisms for the sexual act that I’ve come across; the one occurring most frequently is “game of cloud and rain” but probably my favourite is “game of breeze and moonlight.” Of course, I have no way of knowing whether those images are original to this novel or whether they were commonly used clichés in 16th century China when the novel was written. And that turns this novel into quite the challenge for a non-scholar.

Because a 21st century reader who has never moved much beyond European culture is utterly unable to put anything here into any kind of context, there is nothing I could relate this novel to which made reading it an often very frustrating experience. This was not so much an issue with The Scholars – that novel is far more accessible and can be enjoyed in a fairly straightforward manner even if one is mostly clueless about China. The Plum in the Golden Vase, on the other hand, is significantly more erudite and sophisticated and it just needs to be placed into a context to be fully appreciated. Thankfully, my edition came richly annotated, and I would strongly advise against trying to tackle this in an edition without explanatory notes.

In fact, just getting into this book was somewhat exasperating: first there is a lengthy preface by the editor, followed by an even lengthier cast of characters. As the novel starts, it doesn’t, but we get a preface, followed by another preface, a set of poems and yet another set of poems. Once past all this, the – obviously rather naïve – reader thinks that the novel is finally going to start – and it again does not really, but instead presents yet another poem and a lengthy exegesis of it. Then, at last, we finally get to the novel proper – except, that is isn’t really this novel, i.e. The Plum in the Golden Vase, that we’re reading: its basic plot is spun out of an episode from another of the Classic Chinese Novels, Outlaws of the Marshes, and the beginning of the later novel was apparently lifted to a large part pretty much verbatim from the earlier one.

Eventually however, things get going and we get to meet Hsi-men Ch’ing, the novel’s protagonist. He, we very soon find out, is a man utterly without scruples and with no recognisable conscience – he places his own pleasure above everything, cheating on his wives and concubines, then lying to cover it up, cheating his business partners every time he can get away with it, bribing officials for his own advantage and letting himself be bribed after he has become an official himself. Pretty much the only good thing to be said about him is that he is generous towards his friends and allies (but even then, one is never quite sure whether he is not doing it to make them favourably inclined towards him, with an eye towards possible later profit) – friends and allies who are just as unprincipled and dissolute as he is. In fact, almost every single character showing up in The Plum in the Golden Vase is thoroughly corrupt; they lie, steal, cheat and some even resort to murder if it serves to further their interest or increase their pleasure.

This also puts the rampant, even brutal misogyny of the novel into perspective: if almost every woman is painted as scheming and devious, they are not different from the men. And if they have to be even more ruthless than men to achieve their aims, it is because their starting position is by far worse – while, for example, male servants enter and leave service freely, female ones are bought and sold on a whim, as are wives and concubines – in the world of Chin P’ing Mei, once any female, whatever her original social status, moves in a with a man, she effectively becomes his property and turns into little more (or, in the case of servants, not more) than a slave. The novel’s misogyny then, originates with the society described rather than with the author describing it. And even as it shows its female characters in such a bad light, The Plum in the Golden Vase also gives a lot (and I do mean a lot – at least half the novel seems to take place exclusively among women, and it would easily pass the Bechdel test a hundred times over) of space to the sphere of women and the female experience, more than in any novel of the period I have read – so much in fact, that I’m strongly suspecting that the author must have been female herself. Of course, I never read a Chinese novel of that period before, so I may be imposing Western cultural standards here, but I think it is unlikely. Even so, of course, this is pure speculation on my part and untainted by any form of competence or actual knowledge, therefore it is most likely nothing but a fiction. But as it is a fiction I like and as it fits my reading experience of The Plum in the Golden Vase, I’m still going to stick with it, but please do take it with a pound of salt.

And talking about reading experience: the Chin P’ing Mei offers something quite unique in that regard, a layering of its narrative and an interweaving of those layers into a very complex dynamics which I don’t think I have ever encountered before in another book. On the ground level, so to speak, there is the narration of the basic plot, recounting the story of Hsi-men Ch’ing, his friends and business relations, his concubines and love affairs but also of the many, many intrigues inside of his household, the concubines vying for his attention or plotting against a rival, and the way all of this is mirrored among the servants. While The Scholars presented readers with a big picture on which was painted a broad canvas of Chinese society, the author of The Plum in the Golden Vase goes the opposite way: she focuses her narrative on a single household, but uses that to represent society at large. Editor and translator David Roy Tod argues that Hsi-men Ch’ing is meant to represent the Emperor and his household the court and the general decay of morals, which seems very convincing to me. What is most striking about this base narrative, however, is its utterly deadpan delivery: No matter how crass the corruption or how excessive the debauchery, the tone of the novel on this level remains detached and serene as if the unhindered pursuit of greed and lust, the cheating and the backstabbing were the most normal things in the world.

But there is a second level to the novel, and this is where things start to get really interesting. Because on top of that first level the author has placed a second one, one that was not written by herself but only compiled and which consists of references to and quotations from other sources: proverbs, poetry, stories, lyrics of popular songs, in short a whole plethora of different texts are woven into the fabric of the novel. All of which are not only meticulously identified by David Tod Roy, but he also had the brilliant idea to make those parts immediately identifiable even for ignorant Western readers by indenting them (for prose) or giving them a smaller font size (for poetry and song lyrics). This makes the layered structure of Chin P’ing Mei visible at a glance and to some degree substitutes for the easy recognition of the sources quoted which educated readers in 16th century China must have had. And this dense network of references and allusions keeps up a running commentary on events throughout and gives the novel its moral foundation. The relationship of this commentary to the events it comments on are not always simple either, but comes basically in three variants: first, we get the direct pronouncement of how the novel’s characters and their actions fall short of moral standards; second, we get irony and sarcasm, the quote praising some ideal or positive trait which the characters blatantly did not follow (i.e., Hsi-men Ch’ing cheats a business partner, which is followed by a proverb lauding honesty). And thirdly, we get the cases where something like a song lyrics is quoted apparently in extenso, but with one small bit left out; and when the omitted bit is restored it regularly turns out that the quoted passage means quite the contrary of what it appeared to say, usually condemning what it first seemed to praise. This latter textual strategy in particular is very, very clever, and subtly handled by the author – and of course goes completely over the head of every reader who is not deeply familiar with ancient Chinese literature (and proverbs, and song lyrics, and religious text, and quite a lot more).

And this is where I need to say a few words about the translator and editor of this English version of Chin P’ing Mei, David Tod Roy. I do not think it exaggerated to say that Roy (who sadly passed away earlier this year) dedicated his life to this novel: he spent twenty years teaching it, and then another thirty years translating and editing it. Thirty years may seem a lot, even for a novel of several thousand pages, but what I have written above maybe has given you a small impression of the huge task Roy was facing with this. A very small impression, because you really need to experience it yourself to get a feeling for just how much work must have gone into this: Roy identifies almost every single reference or allusion in this massive work (there are a few instances where he was not able to trace something, but they are even rarer than the pornographic scenes), in the vast majority citing a multitude of instances where they are likely derived from. There are explanatory notes, too – maybe not as much as I wanted, or only pointing the reader to where more information is available, but then this is emphatically a scholarly edition of the novel, which means that it is not designed for reading comfort. There also is an index at the end of each volume (again, something which will most likely be more useful to scholars) and an index of characters at their beginning – which I scoffed at it in the first volume, was grateful for in the second and found utterly indispensable in the remaining volumes. To call the work Roy has done here impressive would be a gross understatement, it is a monument to what dedicated scholarship is capable of.

David Tod Roy’s insanely detailed footnotes do their best to close the gap between the average Western reader’s ignorance and the vast amount of erudition required to fully understand what is happening both on and underneath the surface narrative of The Plum in the Golden Vase. It is pretty much a losing battle of course, at least in the case of non-scholarly readers like me, but it remains an awe-inducing effort. And without Roy’s work, Chin P’ing Mei would be if not unreadable then completely inaccessible for most contemporary Western readers. Literally so, in fact – it is probably just possible to get through the whole novel without ever referring to the notes but whatever you will have read then, it won’t have been Chin P’ing Mei. In addition, this also produces the unexpected – and almost certainly unintended – side effect of putting another layer of meta-narrative on top of the two I mentioned before as inherent in the Chinese text, this one telling of one man’s enthusiasm for, even obsession with the novel. David Tod Roy, in editing Chin P’ing Mei has become co-author of The Plum in the Golden Vase It makes one think of Pale Fire (with Roy as something like an inverted Kinbote, whose commentary, even as it proliferates beyond measure, always remains in the service of the text rather than overwriting with its own story), and in the light of this Roy’s repeated name dropping of Nabokov in his introduction to the novel takes on an entirely new significance.

In conclusion, then: This is by no means an easy to read novel, it is not even necessarily an enjoyable one. Not will Western readers have to struggle with comprehending the cultural background it is set in, it also can be very repetitive and in parts even tedious – the middle part of volume four in particular seemed to me to drag on interminably, with party following feast following party where nothing happens but people eating, drinking and having songs sung to them. At the same time, however, The Plum in the Golden Vase is one of the most fascinating novels I have ever read, particularly in the utterly unique way it treats and incorporates pre-existent texts and uses them to illuminate its own story. Not something I’d recommend for everyone, but without doubt worthwhile for readers with an adventurous spirit.

[Alice Poon · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Note: I read the entire Chinese version 金瓶梅 (in two volumes) of this novel between March and June in 2019 and reviewed it on June 18, 2019. I've copied and pasted my full review below.]

It took me over three months to finish reading this 1,332-page Chinese classic novel. There are apparently several popular editions that are based on abridged versions published under the Chongzhen reign (1627 – 1644). The edition I read is one based on the 1617 unabridged version published during the Wanli reign (1573 – 1620). This version has a preface written by 欣欣子, who claimed to be a friend of the author’s, and who stated therein the author’s motive for writing the novel. He also confirmed that the author was from the Lanling County of Shandong Province, which explains why the novel was written in the Lanling vernacular. (The direct translation of the author’s pen name is “The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling”.)

The story is a spin-off of one of the sub-stories in Water Margin (one of the four great Chinese classic novels) about Pan Jinlian who murders her husband when her adultery with wealthy merchant Ximen Qing is discovered, and who is subsequently killed by her husband’s brother, the tiger-slayer Wu Song. Outside of this particular episode, Jin Ping Mei has an entirely different plot and cast of characters. It is about the libertine life of middle-class merchant Ximen Qing and his concubine Pan Jinlian, and how their vices lead to self-destruction.

As for the title name, each character represents the given name of one of the three female protagonists: “Jin” is “Pan Jinlian” (a concubine of Ximen Qing’s); Ping is “Li Ping’er” (another of his concubines); Mei is “Pang Chunmei” (a housemaid who rises in status). On a deeper level, the character "Jin" is a symbol for money, "Ping" is a symbol for alcohol, and "Mei" symbolizes sex.

The major difficulty in reading this classic is the vernacular. It takes a little getting used to. The story is set in Northern Song dynasty (960 – 1127), but the contents reflect the decadent and corrupt gentry lifestyle of the Ming Dynasty.

The novel’s greatest strength lies in the detailed description of day-to-day living of people in the middle-class as well as those in lower classes, from food, to clothes, to etiquette, to traditional customs. It is true there are also graphic descriptions of sex, which was the reason why the novel was officially banned most of the time. It is also true that the novel is much more than about sex. The whole novel is premised on a “karma” theme: that retribution will be exacted on those who embrace lust, greed and doing harm to others.

In my view, this novel should be categorized as realism fiction. A society that tries to ban such a novel is a hypocritical society.

I’m giving this classic 3.8 stars, rounded up.

[Jessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Jin Ping Mei is possibly the best thing I have ever read in my entire life. I wish I had studied more classical Chinese lit at UM.

[H is for Hydraulics · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a long-term goal of mine to read the 6 Chinese classic novels in translation. I considered starting with Romance of the Three Kingdoms until I saw Jin Ping Mei (JPM) described as "Jane Austen meets hardcore pornography" and "a study of the simple mechanics of corruption." in a 2013 LA Review of Books by Stephen Marche (https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a...). As a fan of Jane Austen and a sometime fan of pornography, obviously I had to see for myself.

For context: JPM, also known as The Plum in the Golden Vase, is a 100-chapter classic novel of manners, set during the end of the Song dynasty and written during the late Ming dynasty (1600s), or so Wikipedia tells me. This review is for all 5 volumes of the David Tod Roy English translation. Chinese is not my first language but I am ABC and might have more context or tolerance for getting through this than your average reader.

My thoughts: JPM is alternately beautiful, disgusting, funny, boring, and educational with respect to day to day life of the time period. This is a tough read due to the length and the character list alone. Early on, there were also some major plot points and motivations I didn't quite pick up on (Hsimen Ching needed to bribe someone to change a name so he wouldn't be executed) because sometimes the book is narrated in a "he did X, she did Y" sort of way that expects you to follow along and understand why these actions are being taken. I think I missed these or forgot because there were so many people to keep track of, though there is a very detailed cast list in each volume. There also were probably portions of the book where I was just reading but not following along too closely just due to the sheer length of this book. Overall, it took me about 2.5 years, on and off, to finish all 5 volumes (Sept 2016 - April 2019).

JPM is funny and surprisingly readable for a translated 16th century book. Thankfully, pompous, obtuse faux-orientalist formality that you see in some older translations of Chinese works is kept to a minimum and the language is pretty straightfoward. It seems that early translations of many classic Chinese novels were done by early missionaries who felt the need to censor all the dirty and violent parts (i.e., the good stuff) or over-localize for an English-speaking audience (J. H. Jackson's "Go tell that to the marines!" in his translation of Outlaws of the Marsh). DTR prefers to give us some of the flavor of the original by translating things like insults both more literally (e.g., oily mouth, short-life) and explicitly (Chapter 27: "He continued to thrust until her vaginal secretions flowed uninterruptedly, making a sound like a school of loaches plunging through the mud"). The translation maintains a lot of Chinese idioms as well, with the overall effect of language that is colorful, creative, and sometimes kind of disgusting!

Knowing that JPM was pornographic did not prepare me for how graphic something written in the early 1600s could be. JPM will show you three-ways and piss play and then immediately follow it up with a beautiful but filthy poem full of historical allusions (carefully footnoted) and hilariously gross metaphors. You will learn something about Chinese classical or historical references and also learn Chinese slang terms or creative metaphors for anal sex (plucking the flower in the rear courtyard), penises (jade chowrie handle) and ejaculation (turtles vomiting money). Oh and the poem will be moralizing about how all that graphic sex represents the downfall of empires or corruption of bureaucrats or something. JPM will also teach you all sorts of creative and obscene insults for every type of person and situation, many of them involving cunts ("what are you pissing those tears out of your cunt for?").

As for other, non-sex related topics, JPM is an immersive look at upper class Chinese life in a certain time period - though I'm not sure how much of it pertains to the Song (when it's set) vs the Ming (when it was written). I learned that JPM is the subject of a lot of academic work and apparently also a good resource for things like how much things cost, appropriate social behavior, what people ate or wore, etc. Curious about matchmaking, Chinese medicine, funeral customs, weddings, licensed prostitutes, the status of legal wives vs concubines, or the legal system? Or appropriate clothing for men and women of every class in every social situation? It's all here. As Stephen Marche says in his review, "How do you buy off a salt official? A very precise description is provided." For example, it costs 10 taels of silver to buy a local militia job for yourself, but 1000 taels if you've committed a murderer and need to pay off 2 magistrates to get off scott free. A great show of deference and polite refusal of "gifts" before accepting the bribe is also required.

Some light Googling and seeing the range of academic work out there on JPM also gave me a better appreciation for how detailed and multilayered this work is, and also helped understand the context for some of the events. For example, "Sexuality, Politics, and Sorrow: Reading the Rear Courtyard in Jin Ping Mei" by Dr. Qing Ye explains that the "rear courtyard" where the concubines live is a metaphor for buttsecks and corruption. Entertaining, but enlightening.

At the end of the day, this is really a story about massive corruption at every level of bureaucracy, with the rise and fall of Hsimen Ching's house analagous to the fall of a dynasty. If you know what JPM is you are probably already thinking about reading the Chinese classics and already know what this will entail. This is a long-ass book. It's not always enjoyable. There are way too many characters, with names that are difficult to keep track of for an English speaker. It is packed full of poetry, footnotes, and boring details. However, the world it describes, the people, and its customs still shine through 400 years later in multiple recensions and in translation. Even now, it can still be funny and engaging. If you're already interested in the classic Chinese novels and ready to tackle them, JPM seems like a good place to start.

[carlageek]

This is only the first volume in the five-volume extravaganza that is The Plum in the Golden Vase, a sixteenth-century behemoth of Chinese literature whose masterful translation into English took two decades to complete. And it’s a boatload of fun. It’s full of the kind of historical detail, the minutia of life (at least for the classes of people it depicts) and society, for which I read historical fiction. (It is both an old work and a historical one, as it purports to relate events that date back to the 11th century.) As a novel of manners, criss-crossed by love affairs, scheming manipulators, and petty government bureaucracy, it reminds me acutely of Trollope’s vaster works, like The Way We Live Now. It’s like Trollope, with sex scenes.

The story (thus far) mostly centers on the wealthy, strapping businessman Hsi-Men Ch’ing and his voracious appetites. I said to a friend that I was envious of Hsi-Men Ch’ing because when he sees a girl he thinks is attractive, he snaps his fingers, and within moments a sumptuous spread of delicious Chinese food appears, the wine starts pouring, and the girl’s clothes melt off. In this idiom Hsi-Men Ch’ing, who already has a bustling household full of wives and concubines when the story begins, wins the passion of the two central women (again, so far), P’an Chin-lien and Li Ping-erh.

That same friend and I analyzed Chin-lien as a kind of Becky Sharp type, calculating and manipulative, but in a way that is rather sympathetic and forgivable because of the bum deal that life has dealt her. Passed around early in life from man to man and then married off to a much older, humble and uninteresting man, P’an Chin-lien doesn’t have a ton of agency before she meets Hsi-Men Ch’ing, and she sees in him an opportunity to win for herself the kind of life to which she would like to become accustomed. Sure, it means killing off her husband, but, you know, small price to pay.

As for Li Ping-erh, she seems a bit more innocent than Chin-lien, a bit more abject and desperate in her devotion to Hsi-Men Ch’ing. Her attempts at schemes do not play out very well. Still, Chin-lien sees her as a prime rival, and I look forward to see what the next volume holds of their rising and falling fortunes.

Structurally, the book takes the form of a sort of chronicle, apparently replete with references too and quotations from a slightly earlier work of Chinese literature. It breaks frequently into poetry, claiming after most significant events that “There is a poem that testifies to this,” and thereafter quoting some allegedly popular song that immortalizes the events of the story. This conceit irritated me at first, but I grew to enjoy it and some of the narrative’s other stylized catch-phrases, like the conclusion of each chapter: “If you want to know the outcome of these events, pray consult the story related in the following chapter.” And of course, you want to know. How can you not?

[Nick]

The first 25 chapters of the least well known (and, at the same time, most notorious) of the four masterworks 四大奇书 of Ming dynasty vernacular fiction. David Roy's translation project is the stuff of legends: after teaching the novel for 20 years he took another 30 years to complete an unabridged translation. Suffice it to say, this is a very dense novel, with many layers of meaning. Roy has done his utmost to translate (and annotate) every pun, allusion, song, and poem. At the same time there is a incredible level of detail regarding the material culture of Ming dynasty China -- with a particular focus on food and clothing.

The graphic sexual content of the novel frustrates the above reading somewhat. Despite Roy's very convincing arguments as to the moralizing purpose of the author in preface, and those of Andrew Plaks laid out in his monograph, _The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel_, (both of which rely heavily on the classical commentator Zhang Zhupo) I would highly recommend reading Ding Naifei's _Obscene Things: Sexual Politics in Jin Ping Mei_ as a companion text which, without discounting the moral argument introduce a much needed critical analysis of the violent misogyny with which the moral message is conveyed.

[Aroa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book covers pretty much every aspect of the Chinese culture. Whenever people refer to it, they just say that it is an "erotic" book, but it's far more than that. Being categorized as such, it usually gets overlooked. The story deals with the stains of society: political corruption, nepotism, vices, immorality...; but for me, its great value lies in the extensive amount of cultural information that I learned from it: religious rituals, customs, how to translate certain terms...
Speaking of the translation, I think it's brilliant. It's easy to regard this book as a masterpiece thanks to the carefully crafted narrative and the consistency of both the terminology and the translator's notes.
It was an extremely useful resource for me right now, and I can say, with no doubt, that if you want to get a closer look to Chinese culture, you must read this book.

[Ferris · Rating 4 out of 5]

This tale is significant for a number of reasons. It is a scathing social commentary and a wild romp of sex, lies, manipulations and more. What I find intellectually interesting are the similarities between the 12th century as written about in the 16th century and current times. Human flaws haven't changed much over time. I am not sure what that means for humanity! Although this is a lengthy book, the action moves it along quickly. An excellent combination of literary romp and Chinese social history.

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

So far this is the one of the best novels I've read in a long time. Extremely skillfully constructed, great pacing, and an irresistible combination of high poetry and vulgar vernacular. No idea if the translation is accurate, but the translator's got a fantastic ear. Really enjoying this.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Crazy Rich Asians, the Ming Dynasty Edition." Considering this book was written 500 years ago, and is set in China circa 1100AD, it's pretty darn readable. No mistake, it is a challenging read, though not the most difficult book I've read (that distinction goes to "Mason and Dixon," which I had to put down after I couldn't remember why I wanted to read it in the first place).

The society, as depicted by the author, was so darn corrupt. There was only one redeeming character in the whole narrative, and he was banished to a foreign land early on in the story. If you appreciate layer upon layer of conniving characters, this story will appeal to you. The jokes aren't bad either.

There is a lot of wicked behavior in this story, but amazing and mind-bending detail about life in ancient China. Get ready for a cast of hundreds of characters. While there are no iPhones or even indoor plumbing for that matter, people don't seem to have changed much in 1,000 years.

At first I was put off by the poetry and songs, but I came to eventually enjoy them. The illustrations are pretty good also. Though they look like generic Chinese art, you realize they help tell the story. Of course, translator Dr. Roy tries to give some context with the footnotes, but it's really impossible to appreciate all the nuances as he does.

The story was a little repetitive, in that the main character, whom I thought of as "Simon" Ching, lusts after ladies in the town. He manages to marry two wives in the span of 200 pages, including his next-door neighbor, and a hero's sister-in-law. Oh, my! We have numerous scenes of banquets, drinking, carousing, carrying on, backstabbing, scheming, plotting, bribery, payoffs, outright stealing, threats, and intimidation.

Though the book is written as a cautionary tale to explain to the reader why this bad behavior is so reprehensible, there are few consequences to the wicked, at least in this first volume.

The story behind the story is fascinating. Dr. David Tod Roy discovered the text when he was a teenager, 70 years ago. He has spent basically his entire life studying this book! That he was able to even complete the translation, with thousands of notes, is an amazing accomplishment. I would agree that this book has enough rich cultural relevance to make it a worthwhile lifetime project.

If you were at all intrigued by the write-up in the LA Review of Books, go for it.

[Pengsheng Chiu · Rating 5 out of 5]

an adult but very popular novel published and read since sixteenth-century China.

[Mariann · Rating 2 out of 5]

http://www.hyperebaaktiivne.ee/2018/0...

Raamatust "Kuldlootos ehk Seiklusrikas lugu Hsi Menist ja tema kuuest naisest" kuulsin esmakordselt Facebookis lugemise väljakutse grupis, kui mitmed seda eelmisel aastal erootilise romaani teema alla lugesid. Nägin seda juhuslikult sõbranna riiulis ja tekkis soov see ka ise läbi lugeda. Tegu on hiina klassikaga, mis on pärit 17. sajandist ning selle autor Naerja Lanlingist on pseudonüümi taha peituv autor, kelle tegelikku isikut pole suudetud sajaprotsendiliselt tõestada. Väljakutse teema: 5. Raamat, mille lugemissoovituse oled sa saanud Lugemise väljakutse grupist.

12. sajand, Sungi dünastia, Schantung, Tung ping fu prefektuur. Hsi Menil on rikas majapidamine ja palju naisi. Talle ei piisa kolmest abikaasast ja nii ta võtab neljanda, viienda ja ka kuuenda. Ka neist ei ole küllalt ja mees hullab vahelduseks nii teenijate, lõbutüdrukute kui ka teiste meeste naistega. Tema viies naine Kuldlootos on eriti salkaval. Viletsusest pääsemiseks laseb ta Hsi Menil end võrgutada ning mõrvab siis oma vaese pasteedimüüjast abikaasa, et rikkam mees teda kosida saaks. Ka edaspidi üritab naine Hsi Meni enda soovide järgi käituma panna, kuid mees on nagu tuulelipp ning laseb end tihti ka teistel ära rääkida.

Õis mõtleb, kui ojasse kukub,
las kannab mind vool - on tore see.
Kuid oja see ainult tukub
ja seda rõõmu talle ei tee.

"Kuldlootos" on üks omapärasemaid raamatuid, mida ma lugenud olen. Võib lausa öelda, et sain kultuurišoki. XII sajandi hiina kultuur erineb tänasest maailmast väga. Eriti hämmastas mind, kui äraostetavad olid kõik kõrgemad ametnikud. Raamatus kirjeldatud tegelased on samuti ebatavalised. Mäletan, kui kunagi kirjutasin kirjanduse kontrolltöös ühe tegelase iseloomujooneks liiderlik ning kui piinlik oli, kui õpetaja hiljem klassi ees selle sõna tähendust seletas. Hsi Meni kohta võib aga südamerahuga liiderlik öelda ja mul ei tule ühtki teist kandidaati ka pähe, kellele see iseloomustus paremini klapiks. Lisaks liiderlikkusele oli mees veel ka selgrootu ning varmas altkäemaksu võtma ja andma, ühesõnaga üpriski ebameeldiv tüüp. Tema halvast iseloomust oli tegelikult lõbus lugeda, kuidas ta aina uusi naisi leidis, keda meelitada. Üks tegelanegi ütleb Hsi Meni kohta, et too on nii nõme, et ei suuda köögi- ja teraviljal vahet teha. Samas oli raamatus tegelasi, kelle käitumine mulle isegi veel rohkem vastukarva käis. Eriti hull oli Kuldlootos.

Lugupeetud lugeja, leskedele on olemas kolme liiki itke: nutmine ja selle juures karjumine, see tähendab halisemine, nutmine ilma karjumiseta, see on märg kurtmine, ja viimaks säärane, kus ei valata pisaraid ega paisata õhku karjeid, see on kuiv kurtmine.

Mainisin juba, et tegu on erootilise romaaniga. Erootilisi stseene on seega uhkesti. Saab lugeda Hsi Meni lustimisest kõigi tema erinevate naistega - nii abikaasade kui ka armukestega. Neid oli nii palju ja nimed olid sedavõrd sarnased, et kaotasin vahepeal järje, kelle mees parajasti vallutanud on. Igatahes, toimub agar purpurflöödi puhumine ja lillevarre peenrasse istutamine ning muud sellised toredad läbi lillede kirjutatud tegevused. Raamatus on ka päris palju värsse, mis teksti toetavad.

Pehme, kui tihke! - lootosõienupp on tema lõhnav suu.
Nii siidine, nii nõtke! - ei kiidusõnu leia suu.
Ja õndsalikus tujus end ta avab naeratades ruttu.
Kui kurvana, end pressind vastu reit, jääb kohe tuttu.
Kus mujal tema kodu on kui püksikus nii laias?
Ja hõre rohust ring on seal veel ümber tema koduaia.
Kui kohtab teda ihar, julge noormees, kes pakkuda võib mõnu,
siis ootab tema rahulikult lahingut, ent ta ei oota sõnu.

Raamatu eessõnas on kirja pandud põnev legend raamatu sündimise kohta. Autoriks peetakse luuletajat Wang Schi Tschong ning romaan on tema kättemaks isa hukkamise eest. Kirjanikult küsiti kord, mis teose kallal ta töötab ning ta pilk langes sel hetkel kuldsele vaasile, kus olid ploomiõitega oksad. Ta vastas "Kin Ping Meh, mis tõlkes tähendab ploomiõied kuldses vaasis". Peategelasena kujutas Wang oma suguvõsa vaenlast Yen Schi Fani, kes oli tuntud bordellikülastaja. Legendi teine pool väidab, et sellega kättemaks ei piirdunud, vaid Wang suutis vaenlase mürgitatud käsikirja abil ka tappa.

"Kuldlootos" on iseäralik erootiline romaan. Kuna ma polenud varem midagi sarnast lugenud, siis oli algus huvitav ning ülepaisutatult liiderlikud tegelased ajasid muigama. Lõpuks väsitas kogu see armumäng, valskus ja vassimine ära. Soovitan lugeda, kui tahta veidi teistsugust lugemiselamust!

[Preili Pipar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ma ausalt öeldes ei teadnud üldse, mida sellelt raamatult oodata. Erootiline romaan … et mis see siis ikkagi endast kujutab :D
Need nö erootiliste stseenide kirjeldused on kohati nii läbi sünonüümide antud, et ega täpselt aru saa, kes mida ikkagi teeb :D Pirniõied ja ploomiõied ja melonid ja virsikud :D
Pean ütlema, et täitsa teistmoodi lugemine oli. Ning kuna raamat jäi nii huvitava koha pealt pooleli, siis tuleb ka osa 2 läbi lugeda, et saada teada, mis siis raamatukangelasest ja tema kuuest ametlikust naisest (armukestest rääkimata) saab.

Üks tsitaat ka - mulle nii meeldis, kui delikaatselt küsiti naistelt nende vanust:
“Kui palju rohelisi kevadeid on daam juba näinud?”

[Jackson Cyril · Rating 5 out of 5]

On to part 2.

[Gaige Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the seclusion of the nuptial chamber the pillow and mat are cool;
The man of talent and woman of beauty approach the climax of their game.
No sooner have they embarked on "dipping the red candle upside down";
Than they suddenly switch to "punting the boat by night."
Rifling its fragrance, "the butterfly nibbles at the calyx of the flower";
Sporting with the water, "the dragonfly darts, now high, now low."
When pleasure reaches its height passions are intense, and feelings know no bounds...

[Pablo Hernández · Rating 4 out of 5]

Primera parte leída no puedo parar. Cuéntame chino demoníaco dinastía Song. Quiero hacer un ketow con la corrección con la que se inserta una vela, calentar una jarra de vino de Jihuan, cantar al aire de Preludio de las cejas pintadas, pesar medio tael de plata y una sarta de sapecas y llamarte un palanquín. Goza de bonitas ilustraciones

[Helmut · Rating 5 out of 5]

Großartige Neuübersetzung mit neuen Einblicken

Nun bin ich also endlich bei einem weiteren der großen chinesischen Klassiker gelandet, dem Jin Ping Mei. Wurde es früher zu den "Großen 4" gezählt, hat es seinen Platz heutzutage an das Hongloumeng verloren. Wieso es nur 4 große und nicht 5 große Romane geben darf, kann man sich nur durch die typisch chinesische Abscheu vor Traditionsbrüchen erklären, denn zweifellos gehört das Jin Ping Mei qualitätsmäßig in die gleiche Riege wie das Sanguoyanyi, Xiyouji, Hongloumeng und Shuihuzhuan. Letzteres wird auch als Vorlagengeber genutzt: Die Handlung und viele Personen sind ein Abzweiger, oder wie man heute sagt, "spin-off", aus der Wu-Song-Episode, einem der beliebtesten und besten Teile des Shuihuzhuan.

Seinen Ruhm zieht es hauptsächlich wohl aus seinem leicht anrüchigen Charakter: Ein erotischer Roman, in dem es um die amourösen Verwicklungen eines reichen Lebemanns mit seiner Frau und seinen 5 Konkubinen, sowie diversen Prostituierten und Dienstmägden geht, hat genug Sprengkraft, um sogar heutzutage im prüden kommunistischen China nicht wirklich gern gesehen zu werden. Dabei ist er für heutige, "Feuchtgebiete"-gestählte Leser doch äußerst zahm; und die erotischen Stellen sind auch, trotz des Themas, eher dünn gesät. In Wahrheit ist dieser Roman nämlich ein handwerkliches Kunstwerk, das auf praktisch jeder Seite mindestens ein Zitat, direkt oder indirekt, aus anderen Werken enthält. Es ist also das "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" der Ming-Zeit.

Dieser Aspekt des Romans wird erst durch die neue Übersetzung David Tod Roys für den Leser erkennbar: die Einrückung der direkten und indirekten Zitate werfen ein ganz neues Licht auf den Text. Durch Kenntnismachung der Zitate ist auch das Leseerlebnis ein völlig anderes, viel intellektuelleres, denn die Metastruktur des Texts gehört nun deutlich mit zur Rezeption, so wie es im Original für einen gebildeten Chinesen auch gewesen wäre. In der ansonsten sehr gelungenen deutschen Übertragung der Gebrüder Kibat (Djin Ping Meh. Schlehenblüten in goldener Vase) fehlt dieses Element, und der Roman fühlt sich dort entsprechend auch mehr an wie einfach ein weiterer Sittenroman der Ming-Zeit (der trotzdem immer noch begeisternd zu lesen ist). Von der unsäglichen Kuhn-Nachdichtung will ich gar nicht erst anfangen.

Allein schon deshalb ist die englische Übersetzung der deutschen klar vorzuziehen: Erst diese Fassung zeigt den Roman, wie er wirklich ist. Dass der englischen Übersetzung darüber hinaus die bisher älteste Originalfassung, die erst 1932 entdeckt wurde, zugrundliegt, und nicht, wie bei der deutschen Kibat-Übersetzung, eine nachträglich veränderte Fassung, lässt dem an textnahen, möglichst authentischen Übersetzungen interessierten Leser schließlich vollends keine andere Wahl mehr.

In diesem ersten Band finden sich die Kapitel 1-20 von 100; aktuell sind 4 von geplanten 5 B��nden bereits erschienen. Fast die Hälfte des dicken Wälzers sind Apparat (Einführung, Namensregister, Index, Anmerkungen) - das mag manchem zuviel des Guten sein, doch man muss die Akribie des Übersetzers bewundern, der unzählige der Querverweise und Zitate aufgespürt und belegt hat. Papier und Bindung sind gut, wenn auch das Papier etwas grob geschnitten ist, Druckfehler habe ich keinen einzigen gefunden. Die Reproduktion der Holzschnitte, die einzelne Szenen illustrieren, ist gut gelungen. Lediglich mit der Romanisierung in Wade-Giles hadere ich: eine so neue Übersetzung hätte sich von diesem veralteten System trennen müssen.

[David Paradis · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the way that it interweaves prose and poetry, the anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel Chin P’ing Mei is unlike any other novel I’ve read. For the most part, the prose is straightforward objective narrative from the point of view of an omniscient narrator. It is in a style similar to the style used in 19th and 20th century realism. The poetry (which the translator indicates by indenting it from the narrative-prose portion of the text) is sometimes narrative, sometimes lyrical, and it gives the entire novel a delightful poetic resonance. I gather from the introduction, and the copious annotations, that much of the indented material consists of borrowings from popular songs, proverbs, quotations from earlier poetry and folklore, and other sources. The rest, presumably, was composed by the anonymous author himself. It is often playful, humorous, and quirky—especially when it is about sex. Here is an example:
There is an object that has always been
about six inches long;
Sometimes it is soft and at other times
it is hard.
When soft, like a drunkard, it falls down,
either to the east or the west;
At other times the poetic material expresses the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters. It frequently relates to the events that have just been described in the realistic prose narrative. As such it adds texture, color, symbolism, and varying perspectives to the novel.
Presumably the fictional world of this novel is to some degree representative of the customs, practices, and values of the society in China at the time. As such, it is very much a critique of that society. The characters in the novel are driven mainly by self-interest and almost all of them are completely devoid of any moral center. Their main interests are money and sex and power. Their world is rife with bribery, toadyism, conspiracy, graft, deceit, avarice, abuse of power and position, drunkenness, favoritism, cover-ups—the parade of evils seems endless. And it makes for interesting reading. There is a huge array of characters of varying social types and they are caught up in numerous human dramas—a delightful concatenation of sub-plots. All of these dramas relate in some way to the central character, Hsi-men Ch’ing, a wealthy merchant who has six wives, spends a fair portion of his time getting drunk with his cronies in the pleasure quarter, and is completely unscrupulous in the pursuit of his ends. The various wives all live together in a single compound of dwellings and one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is the representation of how they all relate to each other.
Chin P’ing Mei is also of historical interest for the picture it gives of sixteenth-century China. It portrays the political hierarchy, social stratification, protocols and formalities of politeness at the time.
While in its larger philosophical and moral context Chin P’ing Mei is an indictment of the corruption in the society of its time, the anonymous author clearly delights in the various antics of the characters in his novel—especially their sexual exploits—and it’s a pleasure to share in his delight.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I look forward to reading the subsequent volumes.

[Zadignose]

I'm promoting my note to a "review," as I'm not likely to return to this for a while. My summarized complaint, at the moment, is:

-The hype about it being a scandalous book has probably been a dishonest marketing ploy at least since the 17th century!
-It's part of a long Chinese tradition of cliche collage-work
-If today's marketing were more honest, instead of saying banned and censored for centuries because it's obscene, they would instead say ignored for centuries because it's derivative.

However, I didn't actually read far enough into the book for a fair appraisal. Still, if you want to know what I'm getting at with this reference to cliche, check out my recent "review" of Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals: Eleven Early Chinese Plays, which I'm also unqualified to review because I didn't finish.

Now, here's my earlier note, which was ported from a forum post:

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I've started reading The Plum in the Golden Vase or Chin P'ing Mei, since I have volume one sitting on my shelf and I know I'll read it eventually, but I'm not sure I want to go all the way with another book that will take me months to complete. I thought I'd take it up here in case anyone here has read it, as I don't know where else it's being discussed (well, okay, it isn't).

First impressions (based on chapter 1 of 100):

-I've already read this. Well, I haven't, but the story at least begins with a story and characters straight out of my epic read of last year, Outlaws of the Marsh. Being already familiar with this story, I don't feel (so far) the same reading pleasure I got from the other version. I know that this is only a fraction of this novel, and the intersection may be very superficial, but it invited me to compare the "new" to the familiar.

-It's chock full of quotes, poems, literary homage, etc. So much so, that it seems like a scholar's composition, and I'm wondering to what degree this book is a collage more than a novel!

-Where's the obscenity? With all the buildup of how this "fifth Chinese classic" has lived somewhat in the shadows because its erotic content, and all of the contemporary and near-contemporary prefatory apologies for an obscene book which, really, we promise you, is actually redeemed by its inherent moral character... it seems possibly rather restrained and tepid compared to the other four classics. Strange!

But, of course, there could be nine hundred and fifty pages describing sexual organs somewhere in the middle of the "book" (meaning in another volume I don't yet possess), so what do I know?
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Besides this, I think I posted some long comment to Alex somewhere, but can't find it... hmmm... anyway, just trying to pull together some notes on early reflections.
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I followed this by browsing into about 100 pages of the book, never finding anything except for a retelling of what had already been told in Outlaws, plus various unoriginal poems, songs, and quotes, pulled from other sources presumably familiar to the intended audience. And then I stopped.

[Peter Wibaux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chin P'ing Mei brought back memories of my many trips to China over the past fifteen years.

The book is billed as explicit, even pornographic, but it doesn't even come close to scenes you might read in a Ken Follett novel, or even in one of my own books such as Atmos Fear. And neither of those have anything to do with pornography.

The translation by David Tod Roy is superb; the book describes the life, and with it the love, conflict, betrayal, and general (dis)function of the household of an affluent Chinese, Hsi Men Ch'ing.

I suppose by Chinese standards, where even a hint of a breast on TV is a no-no, it might well be considered rather risqué. For the Western reader, euphemisms for fellatio such as 'playing the flute', and the comment by Hsi Men Ch'ing that he had grown a 'giant turtle', to explain he was well-endowed, just add to the fun of the narrative.

The stories of constant eating and drinking are exactly my image of what affluent Chinese do today—although friends tell me that due to the current anti-corruption drive, coupled with the enthusiastic use of cellphone pics and social media, banquets are very much on the back foot.

Wine is constantly mentioned, and very occasionally qualified as 'grape wine'. I am extremely curious to know if the regular fare in the sixteenth century was maotai, the fearsome sorghum distillate which many Chinese so enjoy, to the horror of their Western guests.

The pastiche of Chinese society is wonderful, with choice references to visits to the 'licensed quarter', another aspect of Chinese society which is now the target of the authorities.

All in all, a fun book, where you can see how the China of the emperors mirrors the China of today. Just what you'd expect from an author who calls himself 'the scoffing scholar of Lanling.'

Read more on my blog

[Víctor Sampayo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leer este libro es casi como vivir una existencia paralela: está compuesto por dos voluminosos tomos (al menos en la edición de Atalanta), el primero de 1180 páginas y el segundo de 1620. Pero más allá de su monolítica extensión (a mí me llevó medio año leerlos) es un libro que quedará resonando en la mente del lector por mucho tiempo. El autor, que sólo es conocido por el seudónimo de Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng o El erudito de las carcajadas, nos ofrece un relato descarnado que describe con minucia realista los actos sexuales, la corrupción y los más variopintos vicios de la sociedad China durante algunos años del reinado de la dinastía Song (siglo XII), por lo que se le consideró por varios siglos como un texto «maldito». La edición de Alicia Relinque es invaluable por la cantidad de referencias a los juegos de palabras y eufemismo sexuales, sin los cuales el lector poco avezado quedaría huérfano o al menos extraviado de significados.

[Stezsen · Rating 3 out of 5]

saia blom nge rate ini? owowowow
baca repiu2 orang2 jadi pengen baca ulang bukunya :v :v :v

biasanya saia kasih full 5 bintang buat sesuatu yg saia suka banget, tapi karena kadar ero di buku ini terlalu parah, kuturunin satu bintang mwehehehehe

klo bagian ero2nya di skip, ceritanya keren sangat.
karakter2nya epik.
segitu epiknya sampe saia punya char paling dibenci di sini dan char paling favorit di sini jugak

mungkin para penulis sinetron harus baca buku ini supaya bisa bikin char antagonis super jahat tanpa redeem quality tapi tetep epik :v :v :v

[Alfonso de Castro]

El erudito de las carcajadas era el seudónimo pues nadie se quería hacer cargo de una novela tan erótica, satírica y descarnada. Una obra imprescindible para entender algo de la China en tiempos de la dinastía Ming, es según los expertos uno de los libros malditos de la cultura china y la mejor novela china sobre esta dinastía.

[Sasha]

According to Gerard, a fifth great Chinese novel that was banned due to its eroticism. So that sounds intriguing. Although I should maybe get the first four under my belt first.

[Veronica Canciola · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fabuloso!

[Petruccio Hambasket IV · Rating 5 out of 5]

In short, this book is about excess. It speaks on the disastrous outcomes of straying from natural daily rituals/habits, and instead being led astray by common vices. In particular, our anonymous author is concerned with the temptations of the flesh, i.e. greed related to sexual pleasure. But the moral dangers of lust (in and out of the matrimonial home) is not the only excess the author writes about.

As the editor David Tod Roy points out, economic corruption is intricately related to lust in this tale. The poetic and subtle way the author weaves these themes into the narrative is always clever and always requires careful attention. Roy points out just how undetectable these links can be:

"This symbolic correlation is hinted at as early as chapter 6, where one finds a poem describing Hsi-men Ching's sexual intercourse with P’an Chin-lien, the last couplet of which reads:

When pleasure reaches its height passions are
intense, and feelings know no bounds;
As the mouth of the “divine turtle”
disgorges its “silvery stream.”78

The term “divine turtle” is a standard euphemism for the penis. The expression “silvery stream” in the context of this poem refers unmistakably to semen, but it also puns with another compound that means “copper cash.” Taking the pun into consideration, this line could, therefore, be rendered, “The eye of the urethra disgorges copper cash, or filthy lucre.”

The possibility of this interpretation is reinforced by the following line of prose, which tells us that before going home Hsi-men Ch’ing “left behind a few pieces of loose silver.” The verb that I have rendered as “left behind” puns with another meaning “ to dribble” and thus serves to introduce the subliminal impression
that Hsi-men Ching made his departure after having “dribbled a few pieces of loose silver.” "

The tale is jam packed with these nuanced and silent elements, and half the fun of reading it is discovering them. But why are they disguised in the first place? Just for fun? According to scholarship, it's more or less for the same reason the author refrains from identifying himself.

It all comes down to an ancient Chinese idea that "The ruler is the source of order. The officals maintain the regulations; the ruler nurtures the sources. If the water of the source is clear, the lower reaches of the stream will be clear.....". In other words, everytime the author paints a vivid picture of a corrupt or unjust citizen (which is all the time), he is taking a slight satirical jab at the Chinese emperor himself. If the source isn't muddy, society wouldn't be this foul. If the emporer of his day is an excellent role model, the waters of society would be clean all the way from the top to the bottom of the social ladder.

There are so many slight layers and so many allusions in this story that it would take a lifetime to learn them all. The truly brilliant thing is that the authors extremely studied approach isn't the only thing that makes this book great. What makes it great is that the author always has another trick up his sleeve. He manipulates the narrative elements frequently and employs a whole host of original poetic devices that are just wonderful to experience.

If the amusing plot doesn't move you, the beautiful poetry will. If the poetry doesn't move you, the creative structure will. If the structure doesn't move you, the satirical commentary will. If the commentary doesn't move you, the rich historical descriptions will. If the description doesn't move you, the excellent message will. If the message doesn't move you.......well I guess you picked this up to check out the sex scenes??

And if every element moves you at once you may find this to be one of the most original masterpieces in the history of World literature. I think that's worth giving it a shot, don't you think?