MINGQING

YANJIUXVII

ISSN 1724-8574

Dipartimento Asia, Africa e MediterraneoUniversità degli Studi di Napoli

“L’Orientale”

Istituto Italianoper l’Africa e l’Oriente

Roma

2012

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MING QING YANJIU

Dipartimento Asia, Africa e MediterraneoUniversità degli Studi di Napoli“L’Orientale”

Napoli, 2012

Istituto Italianoper l’Africa e l’OrienteRoma

XVII

MING QING YANJIU XVII ISSN 1724-8574 Published by the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

Editorial Board

Lucia Caterina, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

Francesco D’Arelli, Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente, Roma

Marion Eggert, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Maram Epstein, University of Oregon

Lionello Lanciotti, Emeritus Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

Lin Meicun 林梅村, Beijing University

Luo Shiping 罗世平, Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing

Christine Moll-Murata, Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Roderich Ptak, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München

Saerji 萨尔吉, Beijing University

Angela Schottenhammer, Gent University

Luca Stirpe, Università degli Studi di Chieti-Pescara

Giovanni Vitiello, University of Hawai’i at Manoa

Geoffrey Wade, Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre at ISEAS, Singapore

Editor

Donatella Guida, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

Executive Editor

Sandra M. Carletti, Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

Redazione: Emanuela Gaudino, Heddi R. Goodrich, Lesa McLeod, Agostino Sepe,

Peter Starace, Tian Huiting

Depositato presso il Tribunale di Napoli il 28 sett. 2009, n.57.

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DYNASTIC CRISIS IN LATE IMPERIAL CHINA

CONTENTS

Political Drama in the Ming-Qing Transition: A Study of Four Plays

Alison Hardie 1

Other Voices for the Conflict: Three Spanish Texts about the Manchus and Their Conquest of China

Anna Busquets

i Alemany

35

An Individual’s Endeavour to Save Sino-Japanese Relations. A Discussion of Wang Tao’s (1828-1897) Travel to Japan based on his Travel Diary

Wai Tsui 徐瑋 65

主体间性和主权想像——1895 年傅

兰雅时新小说征文和中国现代小说

的兴起

Inter-Subjectivity and Imagined Sovereignty: John Fryer’s New-Age Novel Contest in 1895 and the Rise of the Modern Chinese Novel

Dadui Yao 姚达兑

95

Traditional Thought and Utopian

Egalitarianism in the Tianyi bao 天義報: the Rise of an Anarchist Ideal among Chinese Communities in Tokyo

Emanuela Gaudino 121

Self-government and 1911 in China: Revolution or Continuity in the Political Participation in Sichuan Province?

Monica De Togni 165

MING QING YANJIU XVII (2012) ISSN 1724-8574

© Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

Alison Hardie

POLITICAL DRAMA IN THE MING-QING TRANSITION: A STUDY OF FOUR PLAYS

ABSTRACT

In the late Ming dynasty, a new genre of drama arose, which presented on stage

recent political events, featuring real historical persons; this genre continued across

the Ming-Qing transition. The earliest and one of the best known examples is The

Cry of the Phoenix (Ming feng ji), dramatising the conflict between corrupt minister Yan

Song (1481-1568) and upright official Yang Jisheng (1516-1555), and probably

written by someone in the literary circle of Wang Shizhen (1526-1590). The genre

reached its apogee in Kong Shangren’s (1648-1718) The Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua

shan). Around the Ming-Qing transition, in the Chongzhen and Shunzhi reigns, a

considerable number of plays focused on the conflict during the preceding Tianqi

reign between the Eastern Grove (Donglin) faction and the chief eunuch Wei

Zhongxian (1568-1627). Eleven plays on this subject are known, of which three

survive: Fan Shiyan’s Eunuch Wei Grinds Down the Loyal (Wei jian mo zhong ji), the

Clear-Whistling Scholar’s (Qingxiaosheng) A Happy Encounter with Spring (Xi feng

chun), and Li Yu’s 李玉 A Roster of the Pure and Loyal (Qing zhong pu). Basing my

argument on an examination of these plays and of another play by Li Yu, Reunion

across Ten Thousand Miles (Wan li yuan), also based on contemporary events, I suggest

that the lively version of events given by these political dramas both reflected and

helped to develop and spread the popularly accepted view of late-Ming and

Southern Ming factional conflict leading to the fall of the Ming dynasty. According

to this view, broadly following the Eastern Grove and Revival Society (Fushe)

narrative, the decline and fall of the Ming dynasty was the fault of corrupt officials

and evil palace eunuchs who misled the Emperor and were bravely resisted by

righteous and incorruptible officials who fell as martyrs to their unprincipled

opponents. This simplistic view, endorsed to a great extent in the official Ming

Alison Hardie

2

History (Ming shi), which was mostly written by former Eastern Grove and Revival

Society adherents, has persisted in the popular mind to the present day. I also argue

that, after the establishment of the Qing, political drama could serve as a vehicle for

the covert expression of Ming loyalism.

Introduction

This paper is a preliminary study of ‘political drama’ in the Ming-Qing transition, examined through the lens of four specific plays of this type. This is a genre which has been scarcely noticed in Western scholarship, and discussed only on a fairly superficial level in Chinese scholarship, as I will outline below. I define the genre as plays dealing with contemporary or very recent political events, involving the representation on stage of real historical individuals. My interest in these plays derives from my research on Ruan Dacheng 阮大鋮 (1587-1646). I have been struck by the way that the events first of the Tianqi 天啓 reign (1620-1627), specifically the Eastern Grove (Donglin 東林 ) – Eunuch Party conflict, and then of the Southern Ming Hongguang 弘光 reign (1644-1645) – in both of which Ruan had a part – were very rapidly fictionalised and mythologised, so that things which did not happen at all, such as Ruan Dacheng becoming an adopted son of Wei Zhongxian 魏忠賢 (1568-1627), quickly became established ‘facts’.1 I suggest that the lively version of events given by these political dramas helped to develop and spread the popularly accepted view of late-Ming and Southern Ming factional conflict. By ‘popularly accepted’ I mean generally accepted among the reading or theatre-going public, which would include both the lower levels of the élite – the upper levels could draw on their personal knowledge of events rather than on dramatic representations of them – and the upper levels of the merchant and artisan classes.

According to this view, broadly following the Eastern Grove and

Revival Society (Fushe 復社) narrative, the decline and fall of the Ming dynasty was the fault of corrupt officials and evil palace eunuchs who

1 There are several references in Kong Shangren’s The Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua

shan) to Ruan Dacheng as Wei’s adopted son. See Kong Shangren 1988: 24-25, 30,

33.

Ming Qing Political Drama

3

misled the Emperor and were bravely resisted by righteous and incorruptible officials who fell as martyrs to their unprincipled opponents. C.H. Wang notes that “there was, by the time K’ung Shang-jen [Kong Shangren] is assumed to have written the play [The Peach Blossom Fan; i.e. by the 1680s], a definite consensus among literate and illiterate alike concerning how one should pass judgment on these persons [the historical figures who are the dramatis personae of the play]” and that Kong “adher[ed] closely to the standard evaluation of historical figures”.2 The simplistic popular view, endorsed to a great

extent in the official Ming History (Ming shi 明史), which was mostly written by former Eastern Grove and Revival Society adherents,3 has persisted in the popular mind to the present day, and even affects professional historians, as shown by, for example, the still almost

entirely negative view of Ruan Dacheng. Even Hu Jinwang 胡金望, the leading scholar working on Ruan Dacheng in China, takes quite a hostile attitude towards him in his monograph on Ruan’s life and work, describing him, for example, as “a vicious literary man of great

talent but low morals (才优品劣的无行文人)”.4 Historians in China itself still find it very difficult to be critical of the Eastern Grove, though historians in the West are more likely to question whether their actions were in fact in the interests of the state or simply actuated by partisan spirit and as destructive as those of their factional rivals.5 I

2 C.H. Wang 1990: 12. 3 Several of the compilers were associated with the Revival Society leader Huang

Zongxi 黄宗羲; see Hummel 1943: 351-354 (Huang Zongxi); 801-803 (Wan Sitong);

804 (Wan Yan). 4 See Hu Jinwang 2004: 66. There is no doubt that Ruan behaved appallingly

during the Southern Ming, but it is quite clear that he was regarded by most people

outside the Eastern Grove and Revival Society as relatively blameless during the

Tianqi reign, and it is arguable that his enemies, out of sheer malice, drove him into

a position where he had to be ruthless towards them or be doomed himself. This is

discussed in more detail in Alison Hardie, The Life and Work of Ruan Dacheng (1587-

1646): Identity and Authenticity in Seventeenth-Century China (forthcoming). 5 See, for example, Atwell 1988: 605-608. However, even John Dardess, in his

detailed study of the Tianqi-era conflicts, seems to take it for granted that the

Donglin were in some sense ‘right’, describing them as “uncompromising

Alison Hardie

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also suggest that, after the establishment of the Qing, political drama could serve as a vehicle for the covert expression of Ming loyalism. I base my argument on the study of four such plays, introduced below; there is plenty of scope for further research in the examination of similar plays from this period. My focus here, since I am not a historian, is on the plays themselves, rather than on the later historiography of the Ming-Qing transition, although the actual extent to which this was influenced by the literature of the transition era would undoubtedly be an interesting study.

Political drama

During the late Ming dynasty, in the second half of the 16th century, a genre of drama developed which seems to have been unprecedented in China: the presentation on stage of recent political events, featuring real historical individuals. Perhaps the best-known early example of this genre is the 16th-century play The Cry of the Phoenix (Ming feng ji鳴鳳記), traditionally attributed to Wang Shizhen 王世貞 (1526-1590) and probably written by a member of his literary circle. The play dramatized the conflict between corrupt minister Yan Song 嚴嵩 (1481-1568) and upright official Yang Jisheng 楊繼盛 (1516-1555), an associate of Wang Shizhen’s father Wang Yu 王忬 (1507-1560).6 The Cry of the Phoenix is usually regarded, in Chinese scholarship, as the progenitor of the genre known in Chinese as shishiju 時事劇 or ‘current affairs drama’,7 although, as the Taiwan scholar Wu Renshu 巫仁恕 points out, the presentation on stage of more or less contemporary events and persons was not unknown in earlier times.8

In the late XVII century, half a century after the Qing conquest, the genre reached its apogee in Kong Shangren’s孔尚任 (1648-1718) great drama The Peach Blossom Fan (Taohua shan桃花扇), completed in

champions of a moral point of view, a national ethical vanguard”. See Dardess 2002:

5. 6 Wang Shizhen 1954. On Yang Jisheng’s life and his conflict with Yan Song, see

Hammond 2007, ch. 2 & 3. 7 See, for example, Guo Yingde 2011: 151-158. 8 Wu Renshu 1999: 1-48.

Ming Qing Political Drama

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1699. It is often regarded as a historical play, but many of the participants were still alive when Kong Shangren was researching and writing it, so it can equally well be regarded as a ‘current affairs drama’. It dramatizes the fall of the Ming through the love story of the real historical persons Hou Fangyu 侯方域 (1618-1655) and Li Xiangjun 李香君 (1624-1653?), played out against the background of factional conflict and dynastic collapse.9

In between these two well-known plays, however, we also have a substantial number of less well-known dramas which present recent events on stage. Qi Biaojia 祁彪佳 (1603-1645), in Yuanshantang qupin 遠山堂曲品, lists about forty such plays.10 Following on from The Cry of the Phoenix, the evil deeds of Yan Song and his son Yan Shifan 嚴世蕃 (?-1565) continued to be a popular topic. Another villain whom late-Ming audiences loved to hate was the chief eunuch of the Tianqi court, Wei Zhongxian. At least eleven plays in which he plays a central role are known, of which three survive: Fan Shiyan’s 范世彥 Eunuch Wei Grinds Down the Loyal (Wei jian mo zhong ji魏監磨忠記, also known simply as Mo zhong ji 磨忠記), the Clear-Whistling Scholar’s (Qingxiao sheng 清嘯生) A Happy Encounter with Spring (Xi feng chun 喜逢春), and Li Yu’s 李玉 A Roster of the Pure and Loyal (Qing zhong pu 清忠譜). The first two plays appear to date from the Chongzhen 崇禎 period, in the immediate aftermath of the events they recount; the last seems to date from the Shunzhi 順治 period, so was written in the wake of the Ming collapse.11

In addition to overtly political plays such as these, there are also plays based on more or less contemporary events with no political elements, such as Shen Zijin’s 沈自晉 (1583-1665) The Pavilion Overlooking the Lake (Wang hu ting 望湖亭 ), a story of love and

9 Kong Shangren 1988. There are many studies of the historical basis to this great

work; see for example Struve 1980; Wai-yee Li 1995. In his discussion of ‘the

historical consciousness of The Peach Blossom Fan’ (Taohua shan de lishi yishi 桃花扇的歷史意識 ), Guo Yingde points out that despite Kong Shangren’s claims of

historical accuracy he takes considerable liberties with historical fact and that

historicity is not the point of the drama. See Guo Yingde 2011: 551-563. 10 Li Xiusheng 1997: 370. 11 Ibid. 341, 366-367, 396-397.

Alison Hardie

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examination success, with supernatural elements, which is said to have occurred in the author’s home town in the Wanli 萬曆 reign, or plays with a fictional plot but a real historical background and involving some historical figures, such as Zhu Kuixin’s 朱葵心 The Return of Spring (Hui chun ji 回春記), written in autumn 1644; this appears to be a fictional story of late-Ming factionalism, but involves the rebel leader Li Zicheng 李自成 (1605?-1645) and the Ming general Shi Kefa 史可法 (1602-1645), both of whom were still living at the time of writing..12

Another, similar category of plays is those which have entirely fictional plots and characters but reflect contemporary events in some way. An example is Ruan Dacheng’s Spring Lantern Riddles or Ten Cases of Mistaken Identity (Shi cuo ren chun deng mi ji 十錯認春燈謎記) of 1633.13 Set in the Tang dynasty, the elaborate plot, with its series of mishaps befalling the hero due to mistakes about his identity, was seen by contemporaries as reflecting the author’s view of his unjust (as he saw it) dismissal from office in the wake of Wei Zhongxian’s downfall and the Eastern Grove – Eunuch Party conflict. Another element in the plot, the Chinese defeat of an attempted Mongol invasion, reflects current concerns about security on the northern border (a field in which Ruan Dacheng made ill-founded claims of expertise). Other plays by Ruan have also been interpreted as having a contemporary significance.14 Ruan Dacheng himself, of course, achieved a dramatic afterlife as one of the chief villains in The Peach Blossom Fan.

We should also note that the development of political drama at this time was paralleled by that of political or current affairs fiction; several novels castigating the iniquities of Wei Zhongxian or defending the reputation of Mao Wenlong 毛文龍 (1576-1629) appeared very shortly after the deaths of the eunuch and the general respectively. 15 In Chinese scholarship, ‘current affairs fiction’ (shishi xiaoshuo 時事小説 ) and ‘current affairs drama’ are very often

12 Li Xiusheng 1997: 319-320, 327. 13 Ruan Dacheng 1993: 1-170. 14 See Huang Wenyang et al.1992:493-496; Wu Mei's 吴梅 colophon in Ruan

Dacheng 1993: 479-480. 15 Han Li 2012: 56-57.

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discussed in tandem, but in this paper I will consider drama alone.16 It is only in recent years that Chinese scholarship has started to examine ‘current affairs drama and fiction’ as a genre. This is no doubt because of the political risks, in the Maoist and early Reform eras, of discussing a topic so directly related to the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist interpretation of China’s late imperial history. With greater academic freedom recently, the number of journal articles on the topic has grown, but discussion is still at a relatively superficial or elementary stage, focusing, for example, on compiling statistics on the number of ‘current affairs dramas’ or categorising their types, or on putting them in a modern context by discussing their value as disseminators of ‘news’. 17 More sophisticated and thorough discussion of the genre appears within Guo Yingde’s 郭英德 recent history of Ming and Qing chuanqi 傳奇 drama,18 but on the whole I would say that Chinese scholarship is not much ahead of English-language scholarship in getting to grips with this genre, an interesting one from both a literary and a historical perspective.

The genre of political drama developed, as I have indicated, against the unstable background of the Ming-Qing transition. It may indeed have been the relative intellectual and cultural freedom resulting from the weakness of government in the late Ming – and visible also in the field of philosophy in the ‘radical’ ideas of Li Zhi 李贄 (1527-1602) and in literature in the innovative poetry and prose of the Gongan 公安 school19 – which made this development possible. At any rate we can see that it disappears towards the end of the Kangxi 康熙 reign, by which time the Qing dynasty’s rule had become firmly established and widely accepted in China; it would certainly have been impossible for new plays of this type to be created in the politically and intellectually repressive atmosphere of the Qianlong 乾隆 period.20

It is not easy to assess the extent to which the production of drama was drawn into the factional conflict of the late Ming (and the

16 See, for example, Zhu Hengfu 2002: 15-36. 17 Dong Yunlong 2008; Zhang Pingren 2003: 130-134. 18 Guo Yingde 2011: 351-358. 19 Chih-p’ing Chou 1988. 20 See Goodrich 1966.

Alison Hardie

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battles which were fought retrospectively from the standpoint of the early Qing over who did what to whom). We know that a very large number of plays from the late Ming and early Qing have been lost, and it is hard to say whether it is the pro-Eastern-Grove political dramas that have survived because the majority of what was written was pro-Eastern-Grove anyway, or because the post-Ming climate of opinion favoured the pro-Eastern-Grove standpoint. Ruan Dacheng’s plays (of which four survive) are sometimes cited as anti-Eastern-Grove, but careful reading of the plays does not really support this (Ruan’s attempts to defend his own reputation are not in themselves anti-Eastern-Grove), and in any case they are not overtly concerned with current affairs. We therefore do not really know whether there was at one time a corpus of plays which would have given a very different picture of the factional conflicts.

I have described this genre of plays on current or very recent

events as entirely new in Chinese writing, but of course China had an extremely long-established tradition of commenting in literature on current events by means of allegory, as well as of interpreting non-political literature in an allegorical way, as is the case with interpretations of the folk-songs preserved in the Classic of Poetry (Shijing 詩經).21 This tradition of political allegory, and the readiness of Chinese readers to understand apparently innocuous writings in political terms, perhaps supplied a basis for the development of overtly ‘political’ drama, at a time when the weakness of the state may have made overt political comment less risky.

However, in a popular art-form such as drama, political messages could only be conveyed through plays which attracted an audience. They would be unlikely to achieve this by pedantic adherence to proven historical fact. So we can see that playwrights needed to emphasise the striking and entertaining, not to say sensational, aspects of their stories in order to appeal to the imagination of their audience, and we can understand that such a version of history would be more memorable than a more soberly factual account.

21 See Waley 1937: 335-337 for a rather sardonic account.

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In this paper I will examine four plays: the three surviving dramas featuring Wei Zhongxian, by Fan Shiyan (Eunuch Wei Grinds Down the Loyal),22 the Clear-Whistling Scholar (A Happy Encounter with Spring)23 and Li Yu (A Roster of the Pure and Loyal),24 and – by way of comparison – another play by Li Yu, Reunion across Ten Thousand Miles (Wanli yuan 萬里圓),25 based on real events in the early Qing and featuring some scenes involving the Southern Ming court, to see how they develop their stories from the historical events and how this might have helped to establish, or at least reinforce, a particular view of the history of the Ming-Qing transition. I have selected the three Wei Zhongxian plays on the basis that an examination of three plays on the same topic – and a highly political topic at that – is likely to be more illuminating about the nature of the genre and the possible approaches taken by different authors than a group of unrelated plays, and I have added Li Yu’s Reunion as a way of throwing further light on the technique and interests of a dramatist who is far and away the best of the three writers on Wei Zhongxian, by studying a play which, although concerned with political events, is not overtly ‘about’ politics.

Fan Shiyan’s Eunuch Wei

Eunuch Wei Grinds Down the Loyal, by Fan Shiyan (dates unknown), about whom nothing is known beyond his name and place of origin (Xiushui 秀水 in Zhejiang 浙江), is said to be the earliest of the surviving Wei Zhongxian plays. It appears to have been written in the very early Chongzhen period, possibly even before 1629 (see below). It is the only play known to have been written by Fan.26 In brief, the plot covers the rise and fall of Wei Zhongxian, focusing on the conflict between the eunuch, with his supporters Cui Chengxiu 崔呈秀 (?-1627) and Tian Ergeng 田爾耕 (?-1628), and Yang Lian 楊漣 (1571-1625), with his associates Wei Dazhong 魏大中 (1575-1625) and Zhou Shunchang 周順昌 (1584-1626). A sub-plot involves a

22 Fan Shiyan 1955. 23 Qingxiaosheng 1955. 24 Li Yu 2004: 1288-1403. 25 Ibid. 1570-1789. 26 Li Xiusheng 1997: 341.

Alison Hardie

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‘barbarian’ uprising led by Nurhaci 奴兒哈赤 (1559-1626), which subsides when the virtue of the Chongzhen Emperor inspires the barbarians to submit (this confirms that the play was written before the Manchu conquest). There is a strong supernatural element throughout the play: in scene 3 (which is actually the second substantive scene, coming after a summary prologue and a scene introducing the members of the Yang family), divine emissaries announce the incarnation of a comet as Nurhaci and a demon as Wei Zhongxian to punish mortal ill-doings. After the death under torture of Yang Lian in scene 16 and of Zhou Shunchang and Wei Dazhong in scene 23 (there are 38 scenes in all), they are appointed as officials in the other world; when they report to the Jade Emperor on Wei Zhongxian’s crimes, the Jade Emperor orders Wei to be brought in for questioning, which naturally requires Wei’s death. The play ends with the posthumous pardon or the release from detention or exile of Wei’s victims, the punishment of Wei, Cui and Tian in the other world, Manchu submission to the Ming, and general rejoicing.

Qi Biaojia, who lists the play in Yuanshantang qupin (and had served as a local official during the Tianqi reign, so he had personal knowledge of the conditions of government at the time), had a very low opinion of Fan’s work:

The author did not know much about the events of the Cui [Chengxiu] and Wei [Zhongxian] regime in the first place, and just cobbled a story together out of ignorant rumours; his focus on the supernatural takes it even further away from actuality. The tunes are mostly inaccurate; how can it be called an opera!

作者于崔、魏時事，聞見原寡，止從草野傳聞，雜成一記，即說神說鬼，去本色愈遠矣．調多不明，何以稱曲！27

The basic plot (setting aside the supernatural element) is fairly faithful to historical fact, but many details are fictionalised to provide a more satisfactory theatrical experience: for example, Wei Zhongxian’s death by suicide is altered to execution by slow slicing, though this is reported rather than shown on stage. In fact his corpse did undergo

27 Qi Biaojia 1959:109 quoted (with minor variants) in Li Xiusheng 1997: 341.

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slow slicing, and his arrest by infernal guards in scene 33 could be taken as representing suicide (that would rather depend on how it was performed on stage). Mme Ke 客氏, on the other hand, was indeed beaten to death by her interrogator, as dramatised in scene 32. The recovery of Liaodong 遼東 by General Mao Wenlong at the end is of course entirely fictional, although it was no doubt inspired by the real-life Mao Wenlong’s repeated forays into Liaodong from Korea between 1622 and 1627. This optimistic note suggests that the play may have been written in the very early Chongzhen period, before the death of Mao Wenlong in 1629, especially as the official responsible for Mao’s death, Yuan Chonghuan 袁崇煥 (1584-1630), is mentioned as one of those dismissed from office under Wei Zhongxian, and is therefore a positive character within the play.

The supernatural theme is clearly an attempt to jazz things up and make the play more entertaining, not to say sensational, at the same time as it (rather crudely) attempts to give the events a wider, cosmic significance. The author claims in his preface to the play that if people are reminded that the spirits are watching over their every word and deed, it may encourage them to behave better, but that this is subordinate to the main aim of the play, which is to excoriate Wei Zhongxian and praise the [Chongzhen] Emperor’s virtue. 28 This comment does suggest that the audience Fan had in mind was not highly educated. (The Ming edition is quite lavishly illustrated with twelve woodblock prints, but their quality is rather poor, again suggesting that the play is aimed at a not very sophisticated audience.) The other-worldly scenes would give an opportunity for the appearance on stage of demonic figures, accompanied by the acrobatics of minor demons. But this sort of physical entertainment fits very poorly with what is supposed to be the serious theme of the conflict between Wei Zhongxian and the Eastern Grove faction.

Another feature of the play which clearly derives from an attempt to make it more dramatic and entertaining is the major part played in it by women, whereas in the history books, the factional conflict appears as an all-male sequence of events (apart from the role played by Mme Ke). The first main scene, scene 2, presents a birthday celebration for

28 Fan Shiyan 1955: xu 2b.

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Yang Lian’s mother, in which we meet the Yang family: Yang Lian himself, his mother, his wife, and his young son (actually he had five sons).29 After Yang’s death, his wife is sent into exile, as are the wives of Wei Dazhong and Zhou Shunchang. Beyond the frontier, they are protected by the local god (tudi wang 土地王 ) of Datong 大同 , disguised as a nun. In fact Mrs Yang was not sent into exile, but she was made homeless by the confiscation of all Yang Lian’s property; however, local officials in the Yangs’ hometown seem to have taken care of the family and she certainly did not have to leave Chinese territory.30

Mrs Yang also plays an important part in scene 13, when Yang decides to submit his famous memorial listing Wei Zhongxian’s twenty-four great crimes. Although she is opposed to this action, she finally submits to his wishes and goes to get his court costume ready. Her opposition in this scene naturally allows Yang Lian to be very specific about his reasons for submitting the memorial. Mrs Yang, a dan 旦 role, is the main female character throughout (Mrs Yang senior and Mrs Wei Dazhong are laodan 老旦; Mrs Zhou Shunchang is a xiaodan小旦, as is the villainess Mme Ke). Mrs Yang even has a whole scene to herself in scene 15, when she reflects on her husband’s character and his probable fate.

The presence of women on stage through much of the play certainly provides more variety – visually, aurally and emotionally – than would be possible from a plot focusing solely on the actions of the male protagonists. The presence of women emphasises the personal and familial aspects of the tragedy of the Eastern Grove martyrs. We see the effects of their resolute opposition to Wei Zhongxian not only in their own suffering and death but in the suffering of their immediate families. This puts the political events into a much more personal context and helps to gloss over the question of whether the Eastern Grove martyrs’ actions were really in the best interests of the state. As John Dardess points out, Yang’s submission of his memorial was an extremely reckless action which

29 Dardess 2002: 99. 30 Ibid. 98-99.

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people at the time could see would do more harm than good.31 But as they are presented in the play, Yang’s actions are motivated only by selfless concern for the common good.

Even the presence of Mme Ke serves to emphasise the familial aspects of the story. She and Wei Zhongxian – allies in name but secretly ‘married’, according to scene 10 – together with Wei’s nephew Wei Liangqing 魏良卿 (also a real person) form a ghastly parody of the familial relations in the families of Yang Lian, Wei Dazhong and Zhou Shunchang. This is pointed up by the fact that, after their deaths, the wife of Wei Liangqing is sent into exile just as the wives of the Eastern Grove martyrs are recalled, and has the misfortune to run into them at the border crossing, where they mercilessly mock her.

While the emphasis on the family lives of the heroes (and to some extent the villains also) makes their experiences seem personal and individual, the supernatural element is designed to show the wider significance of their actions. Wei Zhongxian, in a sense, is not even humanly responsible for his misdeeds, since we are told that he is really a demon in human form.

Yang’s action in deciding to submit his memorial is supernaturally endorsed when he falls asleep (after drafting the memorial but before submitting it the next morning) and dreams that the Jade Emperor has appointed him as city god of the capital (du chenghuang 都城隍) and that he must take up his appointment within three days (which clearly foreshadows his death – though in fact Yang’s death occurred more than a year after his memorial was submitted). Thus we see that Yang’s actions are in tune with the wider cosmos. After his death and apotheosis, he goes to investigate whether Wei Zhongxian has any redeeming features which might mitigate his ultimate punishment, but finds that Wei is completely remorseless. It is Yang’s report back to the celestial court which results in Wei’s death, and a subsequent judicial examination by himself, Wei Dazhong and Zhou Shunchang (hardly likely to be impartial judges) which results in Wei Zhongxian’s eternal destruction, as his spirit is blasted into smithereens by the Thunder God.

31 Ibid. 73-74.

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A politically interesting feature of the play is that when Yang Lian’s spirit visits Wei’s mansion in scene 25, we hear Wei exulting in his triumph over all his enemies (with the sole exception of General Mao Wenlong). He enumerates a long list of people who have been either killed or dismissed from office, name-checking almost everyone who was anyone in the late Ming, many of whom would still have been alive when the play was written. If we assume the play was written in 1629, before the death of Mao Wenlong, there would be at least twenty survivors, including Wen Zhenmeng 文震孟 (1574-1636), his fellow-graduate Chen Renxi 陳仁錫 (1581-1636) and his relative Yao Ximeng 姚希孟 (1579-1636), Zheng Man 鄭鄤 (1594-1638), Chen Yuting 陳于庭 (1565-1635), father of the Revival Society leader Chen Zhenhui 陳貞慧 (1604-1656), Qian Qianyi 錢謙益 (1582-1664), Jiang Yueguang 姜曰廣 (d.1649), and Huang Daozhou 黃道周 (1585-1646), to name only the most notable. (One of those mentioned, Geng Ruqi 耿如杞, was publicly executed in 1631 for military failure, so the play must surely have been written before then.) It is likely also that the wives of Yang Lian, Wei Dazhong and Zhou Shunchang were still alive when the play was written; it is interesting that it was apparently acceptable to present on the stage living, upper-class women, who would not normally be visible to the general public in real life. One wonders what they thought about themselves and their families being represented in the theatre.

We can see, then, that Fan Shiyan’s play, written very shortly after the events it describes, was primarily an attempt to capitalise on the notoriety of Wei Zhongxian and the fame of the Eastern Grove martyrs in order to provide popular entertainment of a sensational nature. Although it drew its plot from real-life political events, the supernatural twist given to them meant that it was far from realistic and it did not probe into the deeper causes of what had happened, presenting the conflict as an elemental clash of good and evil, with little or no subtlety in the depiction of character.

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The Clear-Whistling Scholar’s Encounter

The pseudonymous author of A Happy Encounter with Spring (the title refers to the new start represented by the Chongzhen Emperor’s accession to the throne towards the end of the play) takes a rather different approach to the story from Fan Shiyan. His central character is Mao Shilong 毛士龍 (zi Bogao 伯高, hao Yumen 禹門, ?-1644), an official whose name is less prominent in later history than those of the Tianqi-era ‘martyrs’. Wei Zhongxian and Cui Chengxiu play almost equal roles as villains, and Mme Ke also has a prominent part. Nothing is known of the author other than that he was from Nanjing南京, and the play does not indicate any attachment to a particular locality.

The plot follows Wei Zhongxian’s rise to power within the imperial palace, while members of the Eastern Grove faction (which is never actually named as such) oppose corrupt officials as represented by Cui Chengxiu. Mao Shilong incurs Cui’s particular hostility, and then Wei’s also. Cui and Wei gang up to attack the righteous officials, notably Yang Lian and Mao Shilong. Mao is sent into internal exile, but then Cui and Wei plot to recall him to the capital, with the intention of finally disposing of him. He and his faithful concubine both evade capture; when the Tianqi Emperor dies and Wei and his associates come to their well-deserved end, Mao is rehabilitated and reunited with his concubine, amid rejoicing at the benevolence and wisdom of the Chongzhen Emperor.

A very different slant is given to the story in this play, as compared with both Eunuch Wei and the later Roster, by the focus on the figure of Mao Shilong, who in the eyes of posterity is much less well-known than, for example, Yang Lian or Zhou Shunchang. Mao is not even mentioned in the extensive list of Wei Zhongxian’s victims, living and dead, in scene 25 of Eunuch Wei. Unlike so many of the Eastern Grove heroes, including Yang and Zhou, Mao actually survived the Tianqi reign, yet did so with his honour and integrity intact; he was in fact still alive at the time when Encounter was written in the Chongzhen reign, and did not die until after the Manchu conquest. The ending of this play is therefore much more joyful than those of either Eunuch

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Wei or Roster, where all the main heroes have died and the only rejoicing can be over their posthumous rehabilitation.

Compared with Eunuch Wei, the supernatural is a very minor element in Encounter: Wei Zhongxian is struck down by Lord Guan (Guan di 關帝) when he tries sitting on the imperial throne (scene 29), and after the death of the villains, Yang Lian, now city god of Zhuozhou 涿州 (rather an inferior appointment to his enfeoffment as city god of the capital in Eunuch Wei), appears in a dream to Mao Shilong and punishes Wei, Cui and Ke, applying the same tortures as they used on others (scene 32). The Clear-Whistling Scholar prefers sex and violence to the supernatural as a means of attracting an audience: almost the first thing we learn about Wei Zhongxian, when he appears in scene 3, is that he is having an affair with his sister-in-law, who supplies him with funds for gambling, and when his brother discovers this, he forces Wei to castrate himself (on stage) as the condition for not turning him over to the law. Later we meet a minor character in the story, the singing girl Xiao Lingxi 蕭靈犀 , who becomes the concubine of Cui Chengxiu and is obliged by him to ‘entertain’ both Wei Zhongxian and Wei Liangqing (but at least not at the same time); Cui himself has sex on one occasion with Mme Ke (scene 15). It looks as though the play’s author thought his audience would believe Wei, Cui and Ke capable of any licentiousness. As for violence, in scene 8, Wei’s benefactor, the chief eunuch Wang An 王安, is strangled on stage on Wei’s orders; in scene 10 Wei’s sidekick Xu Xianchun 許顯純 (?-1628) has an official from the Ministry of Works severely beaten and in scene 16 he has Yang Lian, Wei Dazhong and Zhou Zongjian 周宗建 (1582-1626) horribly tortured on stage (this is the torture for which Wei suffers retribution in the afterlife). Violence is also used against the hero Mao Shilong: when he is in internal exile, a local army officer, acting on Wei’s and Cui’s orders, tries to have him shot and also tries to poison him, but thanks to the vigilance of his attendant and his concubine he is unharmed. There is also a revolting scene in which Wei Zhongxian’s and Mme Ke’s exhumed bodies are dismembered by vengeful members of the Yang and Gao clans, and a messenger from Mao Shilong takes a spare leg away to demonstrate to him that the villains have been duly punished (scene 31). Curiously, though, despite the author’s fondness

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for scenes of violence, we are told (in scene 30) that Mme Ke has ended her life by suicide, rather than seeing her dying under interrogation as we do in Eunuch Wei.

Although there are some striking individual scenes, the plot of Encounter is very diffuse and rambling; it actually makes Fan Shiyan’s plot look quite organised. Mao Shilong is supposed to be the central character, but the author does not maintain the focus on him, and we also see a lot of Yang Lian, Gao Panlong 高攀龍 (1562-1626) and Zhou Zongjian. (Zhou Zongjian, like Mao Shilong himself, is an official who is relatively little known to history in comparison with the famous Yang Lian and Gao Panlong.) Gao Panlong’s suicide, in anticipation of his arrest, forms the climax of one scene (scene 18). Various unimportant characters appear and disappear in the story without really contributing to the plot development. The singing-girl Xiao Lingxi looks as though she is going to be a significant character but is under-used. Part of Mao Shilong’s true story, as related in his biography in the Ming History, is highly dramatic: in 1626, two years after he had been sent into internal exile:

…the censor Liu Hui revived Fuzhong’s memorial [Shao Fuzhong 邵輔忠 (jinshi 進士 1605) was a long-standing enemy of Mao], accusing Shilong of accepting 10,000 taels from criminals under investigation, and the case was passed to the Judicial Office to arrest and punish him. Shilong knew that [Wei] Zhongxian was bound to kill him, so in the night he climbed over a wall and escaped; his concubine, not knowing of this, thought that officials had killed him, and with dishevelled hair she howled and wept in the street. The officials could do nothing with her. Shilong surreptitiously reached home, and taking his wife and children he drifted on the Great Lake to avoid [death].

…御史劉徽復摭輔忠前奏，刻士龍納訪犯万金，下法司逮治。士龍知忠賢必殺己，夜中逾墻遁，其妾不知也，謂有司殺之，被髮號泣於道，有司無如之何。士龍乃潛至家，載妻子浮太湖以免。32

In the play, the story of Mao’s disappearance is handled very disappointingly: on his way back from internal exile to the capital to

32 Mingshi 1974: 6387.

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face a further and more serious charge, Mao happens to meet a former army officer (Chen Dajue 陳大爵 or Tianjue 天爵, a historical person) to whom he had been a benefactor in the past, and this man offers him shelter (scene 27), but we see nothing more of them until a few scenes later when the Chongzhen Emperor is on the throne and Mao is on the way to Peking 北京 to clear his name. Meanwhile Mao’s concubine, Ms Zhang 張氏, far from becoming hysterical in the street, has been harboured by a kindly inn-keeper and his wife who were also beneficiaries of Mao’s administration of justice in the past, but again we see nothing more of them until the penultimate scene, when the danger is over. The fact that so little is made of this sequence of events makes one wonder why Mao has been selected as the central character at all.

The play seems to have been written in the early Chongzhen reign, perhaps even as early as Fan Shiyan’s. There is a reference in scene 23 to Geng Ruqi as someone who has refused to participate in the promotion of temples to Wei Zhongxian; as noted in the case of Fan Shiyan’s play, such a complimentary reference must pre-date Geng’s execution in 1631. The many references to the enlightened rule of the newly enthroned Chongzhen Emperor might even suggest that the play was performed to celebrate the inauguration of the new reign, and the hasty composition required by this would help to explain the ramshackle construction of the plot. As reproduced in Guben xiqu congkan, the printing blocks of the Chongzhen edition are extremely worn – so much so as to be often illegible – which suggests that despite its deficiencies the play enjoyed a period of great popularity.

The text of the play is preceded by four good-quality illustrations accompanied by short poems in different hands. The illustrations show (1) the end of scene 15, when Wei Zhongxian goes off with Xiao Lingxi and Cui Chengxiu with Mme Ke; (2) Mao Shilong’s arrival, on his way into internal exile, at a post-station crowded with applicants to erect temples to Wei Zhongxian (scene 19); (3) Mao Shilong, in exile, cursing and beating a straw effigy of Wei Zhongxian (scene 21); (4) Lord Guan, accompanied by a supernatural standard-bearer, using the butt-end of his halberd to knock Wei Zhongxian off the imperial throne, in the presence of Cui and Ke (scene 29). Their quality, like the condition of the text blocks, suggests that the play was

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sufficiently in demand to make it worth the trouble and expense of providing fine illustrations. One might expect, then, that the play would have imprinted the achievements of Mao Shilong on the popular imagination, but if this was its aim, it evidently did not succeed to any great extent.

Li Yu’s Roster

Very different from Fan Shiyan’s and the Clear-Whistling Scholar’s plays, the dramas of Li Yu provide some more substantial examples of how serious ideas can be conveyed in the form of popular entertainment. Li Yù (zi Xuanyu 玄玉 , 1591?-1671?) – not to be confused with the much better known (at least in the West) playwright and fiction writer Li Yú 李漁 (1610/11-1680) – was a popular and successful playwright from Suzhou 蘇州, and a leading member of the ‘Suzhou school’ of drama writers; thirty plays by him are known, of which nineteen survive, all chuanqi. Little is known about his life, except that he gained the Elevated Person (juren 舉人) degree at the end of the Ming; he did not attempt to follow an official career thereafter, but worked as a professional dramatist and wrote on drama theory.33 His earliest surviving plays date from the early Chongzhen reign, and he probably went on writing into the Kangxi reign. His best-known plays were still being performed and republished in the late eighteenth century,34 and indeed some scenes from them are still performed to the present day; some have been adapted to other types of drama such as Peking opera. Qi Biaojia, who had such a low opinion of Fan Shiyan’s work, evidently admired Li Yu: performances of Li’s play Eternal Union (Yong tuanyuan 永團圓, a fictional romance) were staged at Qi’s home (in fulfilment of a vow, probably related to family illness) on the 13th and 14th days of the 4th month of 1645, less than three months before Qi’s death, and in 1643 Qi had noted the performance in Suzhou of another of Li’s most popular plays, A Handful of Snow (Yi peng xue 一捧雪, written sometime before 1637;

33 Li Xiusheng 1997: 392. Li Yu’s work, and that of the Suzhou school, is

discussed at some length in Guo Yingde 2011: 410-447. 34 Zhang Huijian 2008: 1255, 1268.

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this was one of the plays about the misdeeds of Yan Song and Yan Shifan).35

As we might expect from the author’s reputation, Li Yu’s A Roster of the Pure and Loyal is greatly superior to Eunuch Wei Grinds Down the Loyal or A Happy Encounter with Spring. Unlike Eunuch Wei or Encounter, Li Yu’s play does not attempt to tell the whole story of the rise and fall of Wei Zhongxian, but focuses on one specific sequence of events, thus achieving a much more tightly integrated plot. The subject of the play is the arrest and death of Zhou Shunchang for opposition to Wei Zhongxian, and the riot which took place when citizens of Suzhou attempted to prevent his arrest; this was followed by the arrest and execution of the alleged ringleaders of the riot, known as the Five Men 五人. The play ends with the accession of the Chongzhen Emperor, the death of Wei Zhongxian, and the rehabilitation of the Eastern Grove martyrs. The play is something of a celebration of Suzhou’s status as a city with a great tradition of producing not just loyal officials but also concerned and upright citizens. The characters are very lifelike and convincing, especially by contrast with the standardised goodies and baddies in Eunuch Wei. One reason may simply be that it was written in less of a hurry after the event than Fan Shiyan’s play, but a more important reason must be that Li Yu, being from Suzhou (Wu 吳 County) himself, presumably knew some of the people involved, or at least had the opportunity to talk to those who did. Wu Weiye 吳偉業 (1609-1672), who was also from Suzhou prefecture (Taicang 太倉) and must have known Li Yu personally, comments in his preface to the play on its accuracy and realism compared to other plays on the same topic, observing that ‘Although it is called a lyric drama, it can be regarded as a truthful history.’ 雖云填詞，目之信史可也. 36 In the Shunzhi edition of the play, Wu’s preface is reproduced in handsome regular script (kaishu 楷書 ), evidently Wu’s own handwriting, though there are no illustrations.37

35 Jiang Xingyu, Qi Senhua & Zhao Shanlin 2004. Qi Biaojia 1937. 36 Li Yu 2004: 1791. This preface does not seem to appear in Wu Weiye’s

collected works. 37 Li Yu 1955.

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The central character, Zhou Shunchang, comes across as a prickly, difficult individual whose obsessive determination to do the right thing makes him treat his wife and children very harshly. The dramatis personae include a number of people who remained in office during the Wei Zhongxian era, and therefore must have been to some extent compromised, such as Chen Wenrui 陳文瑞 (dates unknown), the magistrate of Wu County, and Kou Shen 寇慎 (jinshi 1616), the prefect of Suzhou; they are realistically shown trying to hold the balance between obeying instructions and acting with humanity. The Five Men, particularly Yan Peiwei 顏佩韋 and Zhou Wenyuan 周文元, also come across vividly, although they seem to be stock haohan 好漢 types more than distinct individuals. Guo Yingde points out that the Suzhou school of dramatists, of which Li Yu was a leading member, were very interested in the representation on stage of the lower strata of society and their everyday life; he relates this to the traditional concept that ‘every individual has a responsibility for the rise and decline of the empire’ (天下興亡，匹夫有責).38 We can certainly see a reflection of this idea in the positive parts played by the Five Men in this drama.

The structure of Roster is impressive, in comparison to Fan Shiyan’s ‘one damn thing after another’ approach to historical narrative or the Clear-Whistling Scholar’s wavering focus. An interesting point is that, although many historical people feature in the play, Wei Zhongxian himself never actually appears on stage, except as a figure in Zhou Shunchang’s dream. It is possible that Wei is visible in scene 15, the scene of Zhou’s trial – Zhou seems to be able to see him – but he does not speak or participate in the action in any way. This creates a powerful sense of the extent of Wei’s power, as he seems effortlessly to control the whole of officialdom; it also means that his sinister aura is not endangered by appearing ridiculous on stage. The supernatural plays an even more minor role in A Roster of the Pure and Loyal than it does in Encounter; there is only one scene (Scene 20) in which Zhou Shunchang and the Five Men appear after their deaths: Zhou predicts that Wei Zhongxian’s days are numbered, and he is enfeoffed by order of the Jade Emperor as city god of

38 Guo Yingde 2011: 422.

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Nanjing, with the Five Men as his subordinates. Zhou Shunchang’s dream in Scene 8, in which he denounces Wei Zhongxian to the Emperor and Wei is executed, is presented as simple wish-fulfilment rather than being supernaturally inspired.

Despite what Wu Weiye says about its accuracy, the play does make some adjustments to the actual course of events to enhance its dramatic impact. By the time that Zhou Shunchang was arrested, in April 1626, Yang Lian, Zuo Guangdou 左光斗 (1575-1625) and Wei Dazhong had all been killed (they died in 1625), so Zhou could not have witnessed the deaths of the other three in Peking, as he does in scene 15 of the play. However, this makes a very effective, indeed harrowing, scene, and helps to integrate the plot, since it was the arrests of the other three which had originally inspired Zhou Shunchang’s own open opposition to Wei Zhongxian.

This drama presents on stage, perhaps mainly for the benefit of the people of Suzhou, a compelling story of recent events in and beyond the city, with believably flawed participants, demonstrating the impact of their political choices and consequent actions on the empire as a whole. It ends on a positive note, as justice is done, the martyrs are rehabilitated, and the survivors look forward to the reign of a just emperor.

Li Yu’s Reunion

Another play by Li Yu, Reunion across Ten Thousand Miles, has a less overt political message. It is based on the true story of a Suzhou man who went off in search of his father who had been stranded at his official post in Yunnan 雲南 by the upheavals attendant on the fall of the Ming and the Manchu conquest; eventually, thanks to the persistence and devotion of the son, the family were reunited. An interesting link between these two plays by Li Yu is that Huang Kongzhao 黄孔昭, father of the hero of Reunion, was in real life a student of Zhou Shunchang, the hero of Roster.39 The true story of the

39 Zhou Danling 周旦齡, colophon to Huang Xiangjian’s album of paintings ‘A

record of the journey in search of my parents’ 尋親紀程圖 , Suzhou Museum,

quoted in Kindall 2006: 401-402.

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‘reunion across ten thousand miles’ was told by the filial son himself, Huang Xiangjian 黄向坚 (1609-1673), in An Account of my Journey in Search of my Parents 尋親紀程 and An Account of a Journey back from Yunnan滇還日記.40 The well-known Suzhou writer Gui Zhuang 歸莊 (1613-1673) also wrote A Biography of Filial Son Huang 黄孝子傳 , which was probably first published together with Huang’s own accounts in 1655. 41 Huang Xiangjian left home in early 1652 and returned with his parents and cousin in mid-1653. The play must therefore have been written sometime between Huang’s return in 1653 and Li Yu’s death in (probably) 1671, most likely in the mid-late 1650s, after the publication of Huang’s story in 1655, while the events were still topical and Huang was a local celebrity.

As in Li’s A Roster of the Pure and Loyal, the city and citizens of Suzhou play a significant role in Reunion across Ten Thousand Miles. During the absence of Huang Xiangjian, the filial son who has gone to find his father in Yunnan, his wife and young son, who have remained at home in Suzhou, are pestered for tax payments and for the whereabouts of their husband and father (his absence is suspected to indicate disloyalty to the new Qing regime). The absent Huang Xiangjian’s cousin finds the streets of Suzhou in an uproar over the matter when he goes to inquire about the family’s well-being, and he himself staunchly defends his cousin-in-law and nephew, conciliating the local yamen runner who has been sent to arrest them, and beating up and driving away the two officers who have been sent from Nanjing, the provincial capital, to inquire into the case. The local yamen runner, a comic ‘clown’ role, is quite sympathetic towards his fellow Suzhou natives, and thoroughly hostile to the officers from distant Nanjing, whom he refers to as ‘savages’ (manzi 蠻子), although it is not clear whether this is intended just as an insult applicable to anyone not from Suzhou or means they are actually Manchus (most likely the former; the latter seems too risky). Before the Nanjing officers beat a retreat, the junior officer complains, ‘I’m from Nanjing; how was I to know what Suzhou would be like?’ 我在南京，曉得蘇州怎麽一個

40 Gao Si 1983-1984: 256-270. Partial translation in Struve 1993: 162-178; full

translation (with some minor inaccuracies) in Kindall 2006. 41 Gui Zhuang 1984: 409-414.

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意思的？ 42 Clearly he never expected such forceful resistance to oppressive authority. The audience is thus presented with an image of Suzhou as a city whose inhabitants – and I think it is appropriate to use the loaded term ‘citizens’ here – are concerned with righteousness and have a strong sense of civic identity and civic duty (as in the earlier and more serious play, A Roster of the Pure and Loyal). Li Yu, himself from Suzhou, was presumably writing for a local audience, who would be only too happy to have their sense of identity reinforced in this way. At the same time, the new regime, represented by the officers from Nanjing, is shown as unjust and oppressive (evidence of Ming loyalist sentiments on the part of Li Yu).

Li Yu’s play combines a story with a serious moral – the value of family devotion in turbulent times – with different types of entertainment. First of all, the story of Huang Xiangjian’s adventurous journey is simply exciting: he makes an epic journey over mountains and rivers, nearly drowns, is attacked by a highwayman and robbed of everything save his trusty umbrella, almost freezes to death in a snowstorm, is captured by soldiers, but ultimately attains his goal. What makes the whole thing so engaging is Huang’s essential ordinariness, for which the umbrella is an objective correlative.43 He finds the whole journey quite terrifying; indeed, even before setting out he is convinced that he will never return. He depends on the advice of chance-met travellers to ford two dangerous rivers, and faints when attacked by the highwayman, but nevertheless he persists in struggling on, almost against his own better judgment. In this way he appears as quite a different type from the determinedly heroic characters in Roster, and one much easier for the audience to identify with. This characterisation is closely based on Huang’s persona as presented in his own narrative, in which he emphasises how unsuited

42 Li Yu 2004: 1654. 43 The umbrella is not simply there as the conventional theatrical prop to indicate

distant travel, but has a firm basis in historical fact: in his own narrative, Huang

constantly refers to the umbrella, and it appears in almost every one of his numerous

paintings of his journey. Kindall plausibly suggests that it substitutes for a pilgrimage

staff. See Kindall 2006: 82.

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he is to travel (he gets terrible blisters on his feet, and a stiff arm from holding up his umbrella) and how terrified he is most of the time.

The scenes of Huang’s adventures clearly offer great scope for dramatic performance: the fording of the rivers has to be mimed without any use of scenery, requiring a high degree of skill from the actor (and probably a starring role for the umbrella), and the highwayman’s attack, disguised as a tiger, requires athletic feats from this actor as well as a very physical performance (probably including the ability to fall flat on his back) from the actor playing Huang Xiangjian.

Despite the serious theme, there are also many comic scenes to sustain the interest of younger or less well-educated members of the audience: in scene 7, when Huang Kongzhao leaves his post in Dayao 大姚 county, Yunnan, to tender his resignation at the prefectural capital, there is much comic business over official procedure among the minor officials of his yamen (largely performed in Wu dialect); in scene 13, amusement is provided by a comic old couple of servants who come with Mrs Huang’s daughter-in-law Mrs Yin 殷 to help the family out at the Lantern Festival, and a comical fortune-teller as well; in scene 17, the exhausted Huang Xiangjian lies down to sleep in a temple, and this leads to some comic misunderstandings between himself, the priest, and the officials who arrive for a ceremony (who turn out to be former colleagues of his father); in scene 22, the hostility between the Suzhou yamen runner and the officers from Nanjing also provides both verbal and physical comedy. There is also a certain amount of comedy, as well as serious intent, in the way that repeatedly, whenever Huang Xiangjian is able to explain his mission to those he meets – sometimes only after they have threatened or arrested him – they immediately respond ‘A filial son, a filial son!’ 孝子，孝子! before helping him on his way. In fact, just about the only person with whom this does not happen is the highwayman, Fake Tiger Jia 贾老虎, with whom he has no conversation at all (apart from Fake Tiger’s cry of ‘Here comes the tiger!’ 老虎來了).

Another type of entertainment in the drama is a ‘play within the play’ performed as a New Year celebration at an inn where Huang Xiangjian stays near the beginning of his journey; this is performed by the three fellow-guests whom he meets there and who also give him

Alison Hardie

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useful advice for the journey. It is on the topic of a filial son and is therefore directly relevant to Huang’s quest. We might recall in this context the frequency of plays, or at least performances, within the play in the dramas of Ruan Dacheng, such as the dragon dances in Spring Lantern Riddles, the performing horses in The Sakyamuni Pearls (Mouni he 牟尼合), the alchemical ceremony and wedding ceremony (with singing) in Double Examination Success (Shuang jinbang 雙金榜), and the performances of ‘The Persians Presenting Treasure’ and other scenes at the end of The Swallow Messenger (Yanzi jian 燕子箋).44 (I would suggest – though I cannot argue the point here – that Li Yu was strongly influenced by Ruan’s work.)

Another type of ‘performance’ within Li Yu’s Reunion comes in scene 23, when Huang Kongzhao, living in retirement in Yunnan, reads in Li Zhi’s A Book to Be Concealed Continued (Xu cangshu 續藏書) the story of a filial son in the early Ming who spent ten years searching for his missing father. (According to Huang Xiangjian’s narrative, Huang Kongzhao really had read this story and thought that ‘Never in the world would that happen again’ 今世不復有此.)45 Huang ‘reads’ the story aloud and laments that this cannot happen to him because his son and family have (as he believes) perished in the sack of Suzhou by the Manchus. Little does he know that in the very next scene Huang Xiangjian will reach Yao’an 姚安 prefecture and be reunited with his parents. The obvious point of the reference to Li Zhi – apart from the fact that this ‘omen’ really occurred – is that Li actually served as governor of Yao’an prefecture (1578-1581) and thus provides a link between this remote area and China’s cultural heartland, but there seems to be more to it than this: Li Yu makes Huang express the highest admiration for Li (‘the greatest man of his generation, the dharma eye of our millennium’ 一代偉人，千秋法眼) despite Li’s controversial reputation. 46 Since Li’s ideas were often considered to be typical of the loose thinking that characterised the

44 See Ruan Dacheng 1993: 25, 31, 185, 385-387, 399-402, 616-618. 45 Gao Si 1983-84: 261. 46 Li Yu 2004: 1657. Huang’s account makes no mention of any special admiration

for Li Zhi on the part of his father; he seems to have read the book because it

happened to be at hand.

Ming Qing Political Drama

27

late Ming and led directly to its downfall, Huang’s regard for him is perhaps intended to show that Huang is truly a man of the Ming, and – since Huang is an entirely positive character – perhaps also implies persistent loyalty to the fallen Ming on the part of the author Li Yu himself, as is also suggested by the hostile depiction of the officers from Nanjing in scene 22. As we have noted, Li Yu held a Ming examination degree and never attempted to gain office under the Qing; other plays of his also appear to have Ming loyalist themes.

A more explicit type of comment on the fall of the Ming comes in the two scenes in Reunion which specifically dramatize events in and around the Southern Ming court; it is these scenes which qualify Reunion as ‘political drama’ as well as ‘current affairs drama’. These events are not particularly closely integrated with the story of the Huang family, but provide historical background to set the scene for the main plot-line. They come near the beginning of the play, just after scene 1 (the Prologue, providing a summary of the plot) and scene 2 (in which Huang Kongzhao and his wife set off from Suzhou for his new post as magistrate of Dayao county in Yunnan, taking their orphaned nephew with them, but leaving behind their son, daughter-in-law, and grandson in Suzhou). The Southern Ming scenes thus form scenes 3 and 4 of the play and are important in positioning the action in its chronological context, and in showing the corruption of the court officials, contrasted with the loyalty of Ming military leaders.

In scene 3, the loyalist Ming general Shi Kefa informs us of the loss of Peking, the death of the Chongzhen Emperor, and the establishment of a government in Nanjing. He laments the factional conflict at court and the lack of response to his urgent memorials on the military situation; since his written communications are being ignored, he plans to appeal in person to the new emperor. Commander Huang Degong 黄得功 (?-1645) then appears; his military supplies are being blocked by hostile officials at court and he also plans to confront the emperor. The two men meet and decide to proceed to Nanjing together.

In the following scene, the location shifts to Nanjing, where Ma Shiying 馬士英 (1591?-1646) boasts of his power at court. He and his supporter Jin Tan 晉彈, a senior official in the Ministry of War (not, as far as I can see, a historical person), are determined to keep Shi

Alison Hardie

28

Kefa and Huang Degong from speaking to the emperor. When Shi and Huang arrive, Ma Shiying tries to fob them off, but the urgency of the military situation, with the approach both of Zuo Liangyu’s 左良玉 (1598-1645) army and of the Manchus, means that Huang is allowed to draw grain supplies before the two commanders leave to deal with these threats. Ma and Jin calmly go off to watch an opera performance at Jin’s house, demonstrating their neglect of duty and irresponsibility.47

The following scene returns to Huang Kongzhao, who has now reached the prefectural capital of Yao’an in Yunnan; he has heard of the fall of Peking and the establishment of the Southern Ming in Nanjing, and is aware that the advance of the Manchus threatens even remote Yunnan. After this, though, we hear little of the wider political situation as the focus turns to upheavals in Yunnan, with uprisings by local chieftains wreaking destruction in the area, which suffered a long period of instability during the Ming-Qing transition. We hear more of historical events in scene 10 when a Sichuan 四川 army officer comes across the Huang parents in Yunnan; he is a former subordinate of Shi Kefa, and is now trying to make his way back home from Jiangnan 江南 by a very roundabout route. He tells the Huangs that he was in Suzhou in the summer of 1645 and describes unsuccessful resistance there and a massacre, from which the Huangs conclude that their

47

I suspect that the non-historical Jin Tan is intended to represent Ruan Dacheng,

Ma’s usual companion in this kind of scene (see The Peach Blossom Fan). Ruan, who

held high office in the Ministry of War under the Southern Ming, sometimes gave

his native place as Jinxi 晉熙, an old name for Huaining 懷寧 county, with the same

‘Jin’ as Jin Tan’s surname, while tan 彈, as in Jin Tan’s personal name, means to play

a musical instrument, thus by extension to be a dramatist, as Ruan was. Li Yu had a

collegial relationship with the son of one of Ruan Dacheng’s dearest friends: in 1647

Li and Pan Lu 潘陸, the son of Pan Yigui 潘一桂 (c.1590-c.1635), were co-editors,

along with several others, of A New Catalogue of Southern Lyrics (Nanci xinpu 南詞新譜), see Zhang Huijian 張慧劍 2008:620-621. It would be understandable that Li Yu

should want to avoid offending his former colleague by openly caricaturing his late

father’s friend, with whom Pan Lu had also been acquainted. Li Yu had also been on

friendly terms with Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574-1646), another friend of Ruan

(though not nearly so close as Pan Yigui), but Feng had been dead for some years by

the time Reunion was written.

Ming Qing Political Drama

29

home has been destroyed and their family killed. In fact the city of Suzhou itself did not suffer very badly in the Manchu invasion, although the cities of Kunshan 崐山 and Songjiang 松江 , within Suzhou prefecture, were the sites of great suffering.48 However, no doubt the citizens of Suzhou – as the audience for this play – wanted to believe that they had suffered as much as anyone and had resisted as boldly.

Towards the end of the play, when Huang Xiangjian has made his way to Yunnan, we see his wife and son, back in Suzhou, being harassed by officers of the new regime who believe that Huang’s absence is indicative of disloyalty to the Qing. However, these events are all presented at a very personal, grass-roots level and there is little indication of the wider political context, other than that the Qing authorities are now firmly in control in China proper, although it is made clear later that their writ still does not run as far as Yunnan: in scene 26 (the penultimate scene) some emphasis is placed on the Huangs’ arrival at the border of Qing territory on their way back to Suzhou from Yunnan, and we are specifically told that they will have to ‘shave their hair and change their clothing’ 剃髪改妝 at this point.49 Once they reach Suzhou, though, and the whole family is reunited, the focus of this final scene is on the family and their emotions, and the virtue of filial devotion, rather than on any political context or implications.

Huang Xiangjian’s own narrative, likewise, has little to say about the wider political context of his experiences, though he does say a lot about his own personal observations of and encounters with military activity en route, as well as outlining the course of the ethnic upheavals in Yunnan itself. The biography by Gui Zhuang, who was himself a Ming loyalist, puts more emphasis on the political context of Huang’s story, explaining, for example, the strategic background to the military manoeuvres which endangered his journey.

Although Li Yu based his play fairly closely on Huang Xiangjian’s narrative – and probably also on Gui Zhuang’s biography – he

48 Kunshan and Songjiang were two of the cities tha9999t unsuccessfully resisted

the Qing imposition of Manchu hairstyle and dress: see Struve 1984: 65-66. 49 Li Yu 2004: 1670.

Alison Hardie

30

employs considerable dramatic licence. Many events on the journey to Yunnan are invented or significantly embroidered: Huang was never attacked and robbed by a highwayman disguised as a tiger, although he did see the tracks of real tigers, and his party had a close encounter with one on the journey home (though the tiger was probably as alarmed as they were). Remarkably enough, he was not robbed at all – not that he had much to be robbed of. (On the way home, the Huangs had an encounter with bandits, but they had nothing worth stealing and came off unscathed.) Huang’s encounter with the helpful fellow-guests at an inn at New Year is a conflation of two actual events: a solitary New Year’s Day at an inn and an encounter at a farmhouse with two men who gave him advice and accompanied him (perhaps as paid guides) for part of his journey. Huang himself has a good deal to say about the non-Chinese people inhabiting south-west China, but the dramatic possibilities of their appearance evidently did not interest Li Yu.

It seems clear, as I have already suggested, that there is a strong Ming loyalist element to Reunion, shown in Huang Kongzhao’s integrity as a Ming official who resigns when he can no longer serve the dynasty, in his professed admiration for Li Zhi, in the glorification of the loyal generals Shi Kefa and Huang Degong and the condemnation of Ma Shiying and ‘Jin Tan’ (who I suggest may represent Ruan Dacheng). This allocation of praise and blame follows the Eastern Grove and Revival Society line, and since the Suzhou area was the power base of the Eastern Grove faction, this is also an aspect of the Suzhou localism which we have already remarked. In fact I would suggest that the Suzhou localism of this play (and of Roster) is a sort of substitute for or sublimation of patriotism towards the Ming state on the part of Li Yu, and may well have appealed in this way to members of his audience also.

Conclusion

There is certainly scope for a great deal more research on political drama at this period, and its relation to social change in general as well as to the political conflict of the late Ming. For the moment we can only draw some preliminary conclusions. The existence of the plays

Ming Qing Political Drama

31

discussed above, and others like them, does suggest that there was a ready market in the Ming-Qing transition both for plays which would give dramatic expression to, and draw a moral from, recent political events, and, at the same time, for plays which would reflect the survival of the human spirit in turbulent times.

For those members of the audience who had no inside knowledge of official life at the time, such plays would provide a memorable – if not necessarily accurate – account of what had happened and how things had all gone so wrong. Whether or not anyone really believed that Nurhaci and Wei Zhongxian were demons in human form, the heroes and villains as they appeared on stage evidently became fixed in the popular imagination as believable representations of the historical persons, and contributed to, or at least strongly reflected, a popularly accepted account of the fall of the Ming. In this account the Ming collapsed not for abstruse and impersonal reasons like the inadequate structure of leadership bequeathed by its founding emperor, or the government’s inability to extract sufficient tax revenue from a rapidly changing economy, but because of the individual villainy of people like Wei Zhongxian, Cui Chengxiu or Ma Shiying, who were able by their evil machinations to suppress or destroy heroic figures like Yang Lian, Zhou Shunchang or Shi Kefa. Such a simplistic explanation allows one not just to disregard the fact that by the late 16th century the Ming was already beyond saving, but also to discount the possibility that the actions taken by the Tianqi-era martyrs and the other Eastern Grove and Revival Society partisans were not just futile but actually counter-productive. However, a story of the clash of good and evil embodied in distinct individuals is always more gripping than the movement of abstract historical trends, and it is not surprising that – even when the genre of contemporary political drama was no longer being written – the legacy of these entertaining if not downright sensational plays lived on in the popular imagination and has even affected historians’ understanding of the late Ming into the present day.

Alison Hardie

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MING QING YANJIU XVII (2012) ISSN 1724-8574

© Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”

LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Alison Hardie is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University

of Leeds, UK. After degrees in Classics at Oxford and Chinese at Edinburgh,

she worked in China trade for 16 years before undertaking doctoral research

at the University of Sussex (DPhil awarded 2001) and becoming an academic.

Her research focuses on the cultural history of the XVI-XVII centuries; she

is the translator of the XVII century treatise on garden design, Yuanye (The

Craft of Gardens, 1988, repr. 2012), and has published a number of articles on

Chinese gardens and their social uses. She is currently completing a

monograph on the poet, playwright and politican Ruan Dacheng.

a.m.hardie@leeds.ac.uk

Anna Busquets i Alemany (PhD Pompeu Fabra University 2008) is a Professor at the Department of Arts and Humanities of the Open University of Catalonia (UOC), and Adjunt to the Vice Rectorate of Academic Affaires at the same university. She has published several essays concerning the Ming-Qing transition and XVII century Spanish sources on China. abusquetsa@uoc.edu

Wai Tsui 徐瑋 (PhD University of Edinburgh 2010) is an Assistant

Professor at the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, The

Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her main field of research include travel

literature and late Qing literary criticism. Her recent publications include:

“The Depiction of Food in the Collection of Songling by Pi Rixiu and Lu

Guimeng”( 論皮陸唱和詩中的飲食題材 ), Journal of Oriental Studies

(Stanford), 2013, “Tan Ying’s Reception of and Reaction to the Zhexi

School” (論譚瑩對浙派的接受和反撥). Theoretical Studies in Literature and

Art (Shanghai: East China Normal University) 2012, “The Expressions of

Self in Wang Tao’s 王韜 (1828-2897) Manyou suilu 漫遊隨錄”, Journal of

Chinese Studies (Hong Kong), 2009. wtsui@cuhk.edu.hk

Dadui Yao 姚达兑 (PhD SunYat-sen University 2013) is currently a

post-doc research fellow at the National Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies, Fudan University, Shanghai. He was a Visiting Fellow at Harvard-Yenching Institute (2011-2013), a visiting graduate student at Macau

192

University (2010). His dissertation discusses the rise of Chinese Protestant literature in 19th and early 20th century, its feature and evolution with three focuses: the clash of Canons, the literary agents and the religious indigenization. Besides, he has published two books (Chinese) about classical Chinese poetry in modern period (Guangzhou, 2011) yaodadui@gmail.com

姚达兑，现为复旦大学文史研究院博士后研究员。他于 2013 年从中山大学

获得博士学位，也曾是哈佛燕京学社访问研究员（2011-2013）和澳门大学

访问研究生（2010）。他的博士论文研究十九世纪至二十世纪初年的汉语

基督教新教文学，以其产生、特征和演变为主题，具体聚焦在“典律的碰

撞”、“文学的推动者”和“宗教的本色化”三方面讨论。此外，他曾出

版有两本书，关于现代时期的汉语古典诗词（《现代十家词精萃》和《现

代十家旧体诗精萃》，广州花城出版社，2011 年）。

Emanuela Gaudino obtained her MA at Università degli Studi di

Napoli “L’Orientale” in 2012. Presently, she teaches Chinese language and

culture at the high school level. elagaud@gmail.com

Monica De Togni (PhD University of Venice 2001) is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Humanities - University of Turin (Italy), lecturing on Asia history. Her main field of research concerns the self-government institutions from the end of the Qing dynasty to the beginning of the Republican period, and nonviolence in China during the XXth century. Her publications include: Governo locale e socializzazione politica in Cina. L'autogoverno locale nel Sichuan tra fine impero e inizio Repubblica, Alessandria, 2007; “The Books on Mohandas K. Gandhi in the Chinese press of the Republican period”, Kervan, 15 (2012). monica.detogni@unito.it

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annas@unior.it – www.daam.pubblicazioni.unior.it

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Comitato di Redazione:

Silvana De Maio, Anna Filigenzi, Roberta Giunta, Giancarlo Lacerenza, Gianfrancesco Lusini, Natalia L.

Tornesello, Patrizia Zotti (segretaria di redazione)

Consiglio Scientifico:

Marilina Betrò (Università di Pisa), Salem Chaker (Aix-Marseille Université – INALCO, Paris), Riccardo

Contini (Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”), Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (Freie Universität Berlin),

Birgit Kellner (Universität Heidelberg), Rudolf Leger (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main), Ulrich Pagel

(SOAS, London), Robert Rollinger (Universität Innsbruck), Adriano Rossi (Università degli studi di Napoli

“L’Orientale”), Irmela Hijiya-Kirschnereit (Freie Universität Berlin), Birgit Kellner (Universität Heidelberg),

Rudolf Leger (Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main), Ulrich Pagel (SOAS, London), Robert Rollinger

(Universität Innsbruck), Adriano Rossi (Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”), Maurizio Tosi

(Università di Bologna), Roberto Tottoli (Università degli studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”), Wang Xiaoming

(Shanghai University – East China Normal University, Shanghai).

VOLUME 71, 2011

ARTICOLI: FRANCESCA BELLINO, Manoscritti e testimonianze orali del Nord Africa: la spedizione contro il

re al-Ġiṭrīf nel Wādī al-Saysabān; KHALID SINDAWI, The Abbasid Vizier ‘Alī b. Yaqṭīn (124-182/741-798). The

Man and His Role in Early Šī‘ite History; PELIN ŞAHIN TEKINALP, Mount Vesuvius in Ottoman Wall

Paintings in the Context of Ottoman-Italian Relations; MARIA RITA CASTALDI, La valenza in accadico ed ebraico biblico: alternanza sintattica e derivazione causativa; GIANCARLO TOLONI, Ahiqar nel libro di Tobia; DORIS METH SRINIVASAN, Childbirth, Childhood and the Magico-Religious World of Transformations; ANNA

MARIA QUAGLIOTTI, Siddhārtha’s Cutting of his Hair: Interpretations and its Meaning; GIULIA RAMPOLLA, Figli della globalizzazione: gli scrittori cinesi post-Ottanta tra web, seduzioni commerciali e aspirazioni letterarie.

NOTE E DISCUSSIONI: KRISHNA DEL TOSO, The Wolf’s Footprints: Indian Materialism in Perspective. An Annotated Conversation with Ramkrishna Bhattacharya; A proposito di una recente interpretazione di

Pramāṇasamuccaya 5.46; UBALDO IACCARINO, Le attività marittimo-commerciali di Cina e Giappone nei secoli XVI-XIX. A proposito di tre libri recenti.

RECENSIONI

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ISSN 0393-3180

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