INTRODUCTION

Today, the memoir is a very common form of literature. Celebrities of all sorts—performers, athletes, novelists—write accounts of their lives before and after gaining fame. Aspiring politicians write about their lives to introduce themselves to potential supporters. Those who complete terms as president generally write memoirs of their time in high office and how they managed crises and opportunities. Those who served under them also often write about their experiences, evidence that facts are slippery—people remember the same event differently, even when they were in the same room, and readers must always consider the possibility of self-serving distortions. Today even relatively unknown people write about their lives, knowing that there are readers interested in compelling stories written in the first person, especially if they bring them into worlds quite different from their own. Humorists, too, often draw extensively on their own experiences, making fun not of families or workplaces in general but the family or workplace they had to put up with. Memoirs today are often book-length, but magazines and newspapers regularly publish shorter pieces that are written in the first person. Reporters, for instance, when covering wars or catastrophes, regularly put themselves in the story, reporting where they were, what they saw, whom they talked to, trying to convey the moment they lived through. The popularity of this sort of writing, which draws attention to the author as a person, reflects modern notions of the self and authenticity but also draws on Western literary traditions going back centuries. Early examples include such works as the Letters of Pliny the Younger and the Confessions of Saint Augustine.

In China before modern times, it was less common for authors to write book-length memoirs or even to write shorter pieces that center on their own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. But the personal accounts that were written are well worth reading. They differ in many regards from modern memoirs and have their own history of conventions, but they share some of the immediacy of personal testimony that we expect from memoirs. They help us understand notions of self, interpersonal relations, and historical events. Of course, like memoirs today, they need to be read critically. Not every piece that presents itself as a person’s own account should be taken at face value, and people writing about themselves are not always fully honest.

Many excellent examples of Chinese autobiographical writing have already been translated into English and are widely available (a list is included as an appendix). The central goal of this volume is to make more such personal accounts accessible to readers of English. The pieces selected for translation belong to many literary genres—poetry, letters, diaries, brief anecdotes, reports, confessions, prefaces or postfaces to books, self-written funerary biographies, not to mention a few works explicitly identified as autobiographies. In choosing pieces to translate, we looked above all for engaging works that draw us into the past or provide vivid details of life as it was lived. Some focus on a person’s entire life, others on a specific moment. Some have an element of humor; others are entirely serious. In our choices we put a priority on capturing the diversity of what survives: pieces from different periods, different genres, by both men and women, by more obscure people as well as more famous ones. We also looked for pieces that would help illuminate the history and conventions of writing about oneself in the Chinese tradition. For the earliest period, we retranslated pieces that already were available in English in order to illustrate key facets of the development of ways of writing about oneself, many of them relatively short, but for later periods, with more works available, we have chosen pieces not previously translated, some of them substantially longer.

In this book, each selection begins by introducing the author and the piece. Readers will want to keep in mind the circumstances of the author and his or her purposes in writing. To help readers place it within the larger Chinese tradition of writing about oneself, basic features of that tradition are sketched below. Key developments took place in the Zhou and Han periods, but much more survives from later periods, as rising literacy, the expansion of the printing industry, and the flourishing of literati culture encouraged more people to write about their personal experiences and made preservation of their writings more likely.

Writing about Oneself in Verse

Perhaps the most common way to express one’s innermost thoughts was through poetry. Many of the poems in The Classic of Poetry (Shijing) can be read as expressions of personal feelings or experiences, but we rarely know anything about the author outside the poem itself. A new stage was reached with the poems traditionally attributed to Qu Yuan (ca. 340–278 BCE), an aristocrat in the state of Chu who lost the favor of his king and eventually killed himself. “Sorrow” (Lisao) is taken to represent his laments about his fate, his defense of his virtues, and his attacks on those who defamed him. Whether or not actually written by Qu Yuan, the poem is ranked as a masterpiece and read as an expression of personal feelings. Among its best-known lines are “Long did I sigh and wipe away tears, sad that men’s lives lay in such peril” and “On and on stretched my road, long it was and far, I would go high and go low, in this search that I made.”¹ Both have been understood as the poet’s passionate expression of his lofty aspirations.

Poetry remained a dominant genre for writing about oneself well into the nineteenth century. Many examples could be cited, among them quite a few by women writers, beginning with three in the Han period (202 BCE–220 CE), Ban Zhao (45–117), Ban Jieyu (Consort Ban, 48 BCE–2 CE), and Cai Yan (Cai Wenji, ca. 177–ca. 249). Ban Zhao was born to one of the most prominent scholarly families of the Eastern Han (25–220). She is best known for serving as adviser to the palace ladies; helping her father, Ban Biao (3–54), and brother Ban Gu (32–92) finish History of the Han (Hanshu); and authoring Lessons for Women (Nüjie), one of the most important texts for women’s education in imperial times. In the history of autobiographical writing, Ban Zhao’s Rhapsody on a Journey to the East (Dongzheng fu) occupies an important place. The rhapsody (fu) depicts a trip she took with her son in 113 when he was assuming a position in Henan. Ban wrote:

Now, in the seventh year of Eternal Renewal
I accompanied my son on his eastern journey.
On an auspicious day in the first month of spring
We chose a good time and set out on our way.
I then lifted my foot and climbed into the carriage
And that night we lodged in the town of Yanshi.
Leaving our friends there, we headed for strangers,
My mind was disturbed and my heart full of grief.
By the time dawn broke, I’d still not been able to sleep,
And my lingering heart still refused to obey.

After describing her reluctance to leave the capital, Ban describes the changes of scenery, the hardships she endured, and the sufferings of the common people that she witnessed. Ban Zhao recalls Confucius’s misfortunes on the road and declares that “great virtue will never decay.” At the end of the rhapsody, she adds, “The Classics and Canons teach only one thing: The Way and its virtue, humanity and wisdom.”²

Ban Zhao perhaps wanted to avoid seeming to feel too sorry for herself. Her great-aunt, Consort Ban, a century earlier, had shown no such reluctance. Once favored by Emperor Cheng (r. 32–7 BCE), she became the target of other consorts. Afraid that she might be framed through palace politics, she asked to serve the empress dowager instead of the emperor. Her “Self-Mourning Rhapsody” (Zishang fu) starts with her entrance into the palace and selection as the emperor’s favorite, then depicts her determination to follow the examples of the virtuous women in the past and her grief over losing a son. The focus of her writing, however, is on her sad, solitary life after demotion:

My mind dissolves in this place so silent,
If you do not grace me, who is my glory?
I gaze down at the vermilion steps,
And imagine Your embroidered shoes.
I gaze up at Your mist-covered house,
And tears course down my cheeks.³

Consort Ban’s rhapsody is one of the earliest pieces in the tradition of the lament of the neglected woman (often, in later times, written by men in the voice of a woman). Another Han woman, Zhuo Wenjun, the wife of the famous scholar Sima Xiangru, was credited with contributing to this topic in her own words. Years after Zhuo, a widow, eloped with Sima, an event that made them celebrities, Sima decided to take a concubine. Disheartened by her husband’s “betrayal,” Zhuo composed “White Hair Lament” (Baitou yin), in which she bemoaned:

As brilliant as the snow on yonder mountain,
As splendid as the moon amidst the clouds—
I have been told that you now love another,
And so I’ve come to say goodbye forever.
.….….….….….….….….….….….
How sad and lonely, oh, how sad and lonely!
When one gets married, there’s no need to cry:
Just hope to find a man who’ll always love you,
And will not leave you when your hair turns white.⁴

Several of our selections build on this tradition of using poetry to narrate defining moments or dramatic events in women’s lives. Selection 7 includes two poems attributed to Cai Wenji, a woman captured by the Xiongnu and later able to return but without her sons. Selections 9 and 23 are by neglected consorts, Zuo Fen in the Western Jin and Consort Zhong in the Ming. Men were just as active. Among the works of Tang and Song poets are thousands of works with “self” (zi) in the title (such as laughing at myself, warning myself, pitying myself, and so on). Su Song (1020–1101) offers a good example. One of his autobiographical poems has a long title: “For many years, my request for retirement was refused, but a recent imperial edict granted me a sinecure position and I returned home. Living in leisure and having little to do, I thought back over my whole life and was moved to write a hundred-line poem. I have done this to enable my sons and grandsons to understand what I have lived through. I also intend this poem to serve as family instructions. For this reason, I have chosen to use plain language.” Three-fourths (74 out of 100 lines) of the poem recollects Su’s life from boyhood to retirement, touching on his studies, travels, official appointments, mourning his parents, and imperial favors.

Many other Tang and Song poets used verse to depict their daily life, joy and grief, family and friends, travels and spiritual life, and career and pursuits. They muse over the most personal, private, enjoyable, embarrassing, or regretful moments of their lives and sometimes address weighty topics such as poverty, career setbacks, death, and old age (see selection 15).

Recounting One’s Life as a Preface or Postface to a Book

The earliest autobiography presented as a supplement to a book was written by China’s first great historian, Sima Qian (145–ca. 86 BCE). The last chapter of his monumental Historical Records (Shiji) recounts his own story. He starts with his family’s glorious past, rich traditions of scholarship, and his own early education. Sima then details his extensive travels to different parts of China in his twenties and later as an official during Emperor Wu’s (r. 141–87 BCE) reign. Above all, Sima Qian highlights his role and that of his father, Sima Tan, as court historians; their ambition to write a general history of China; and the structure of The Historical Records. One episode of Sima’s self-narration has remained powerful and memorable. It features a conversation between the father and son at the father’s deathbed, when Sima Tan entrusted Sima Qian with his writing project. Sima Qian wrote, “I bowed my head and wept, saying, ‘I, your son, am ignorant and unworthy, but I shall endeavor to set forth in full the reports of antiquity that have come down from our ancestors. I dare not be remiss.’”⁵ Both the father and son understood this undertaking as a filial gesture from a son to his father and the duty of a historian.

Later authors often took advantage of the precedent set by Sima Qian to write about themselves at the beginning or end of a book they wrote. Many are included in this book (selections 5, 8, 10, 18, 20, 22, and 27). Clearly, taking advantage of the completion of a book to write about oneself remained attractive to writers throughout the imperial period. We do not include perhaps the most famous example, Li Qingzhao’s (1084–ca. 1115) “Afterword to Records on Metal and Stone,” as it is already available in multiple excellent translations (see the appendix). Today it is often cited in discussion of female talent and marital relations.

Adapting Conventions of Biography

Chinese autobiographical writing also is heavily indebted to the biography tradition. Here the great figure is once again Sima Qian, who established biographical accounts (zhuan) as a legitimate and powerful form of historical writing. Seventy of the 130 chapters of Historical Records contain biographies of about 150 individuals, some just a few lines long, others dozens of pages in length. Although the majority of Sima’s subjects were rulers and their ministers, he compiled biographies of men and women notable for other achievements, ranging from philosophers and businessmen to assassins and private advisers. Biographical accounts in this tradition became standard features of dynastic histories and gazetteers in subsequent centuries.

From early on, this form was adapted by writers who wrote about themselves, often in an ironic or mocking tone. Here the most influential early work was by the Eastern Jin poet Tao Qian (Yuanming, ca. 365–427). Written in the last year of his life, Tao’s “Biography of Master Five Willows” begins with the following sentences: “We don’t know what age the master lived in, and we aren’t certain of his real name. Beside his cottage were five willow trees, so he took his name from them.”⁶ It then lists the three things that were central to Tao’s life: reading, drinking, and writing. In contrast to Sima Qian’s commitment to politics, morality, family obligations, and scholarly achievements, Tao Qian focused on the individual and private life. Using plain language, he claimed to be contented with a simple life and indifferent to tangible gains and losses. Many of Tao’s poems similarly projected himself as a wine-loving, carefree person in perfect harmony with his surroundings, nature, and the Way. Tao Qian also composed his own eulogy, writing as though he was already dead, in which he declared that, after a life following the Way, he left this world with no regrets. After imagining his own death and funeral, he concluded, “Life was truly difficult. I wonder how death will be?”⁷

Self-written biographies that followed in Tao Qian’s tradition tended to avoid the author’s real name and were customarily written in the third person. The use of the third person gave the author important narrative freedom. It also drew on the custom of acquiring multiple names: in addition to their given and courtesy names, traditional Chinese scholars often acquired one or more hao (sobriquets) at different stages of their lives. Tao Yuanming became known as Master Five Willows because of the willow trees next to his residence. Bai Juyi (772–846) entitled his autobiography “Biography of Master Drunken Poet” and Liu Kai “Biography of the Country Fellow of the Eastern Suburb” (selections 11 and 13). In the Song and later, some authors centered their accounts on their studio or residence, describing not only the physical structures but also their symbolic meanings. These accounts often highlighted the author’s family and educational background as well as philosophical affiliations and spiritual life (selection 19).

Chinese biographical writing continued to develop and grow richer in later centuries, and these new developments continued to also shape autobiographical writing. Two important developments were the prominence of funerary biographies (especially funerary inscriptions, muzhiming) in Tang and Song times and the development of a form of book-long biographies organized year by year (nianpu) in the Song period. As writing funerary biographies for friends, relatives, and acquaintances became common among literati, some men, often in a humorous vein, drafted ones for themselves. An example included in this volume is Xu Wei’s (1521–1593) “Self-Authored Funerary Biography” (selection 21).

In the Song period the first book-length biographies were written. These annalistic biographies were at first done for important Tang men of letters in an effort to associate their writings with what was going on in their lives when they wrote the piece, listing both events and literary works in chronological order, year by year. By the end of the Song period one prominent figure (Wen Tianxiang) wrote an autobiography using the year-by-year style. This became more common in the late Ming and especially the Qing periods. By then the authors did not have to be major writers and the events listed for each year could be relatively ordinary ones (see selection 26 for Wang Huizu’s autobiography in this style).

Letters and Diaries

Personal letters afford authors opportunities to write about key events in their lives in a revealing manner. Sima Qian once again provided a model for later writers. In 98 BCE, Sima was imprisoned and later endured castration for defending the general Li Ling (134–74 BCE) following Li’s defeat by and surrender to the Xiongnu, the Han’s most formidable enemy. In a personal letter to Ren An, Sima Qian wrote:

A man has only one death. That death may be as weighty as Mount Tai, or it may be as light as a goose feather. It all depends on the way he uses it.… It is the nature of every man to love life and hate death, to think of his relatives and take care of his wife and children. Only when a man is moved by principle is this not so. Then there are things he must do.… The brave man does not always die for honor, while even the coward may fulfill his duty. Each takes a different way to exert himself. Though I might be weak and cowardly and seek shamefully to prolong my life, yet I know full well the difference between what ought to be followed and what rejected.… The reason I have not refused to bear these ills and have continued to live, dwelling among this filth, is that I grieve that I have things in my heart that I have not been able to express fully, and I am ashamed to think that after I am gone my writings will not be known to posterity.⁸

In order to achieve great things in life, Sima asserted, one should be ready to make large sacrifices.

In this volume, some of the earliest pieces included are letters that have been accidently preserved, dating to Qin and Han times (selection 4). These do not have the high drama of Sima Qian’s letter, but do show that even ordinary letters help us imagine daily life in the past. We also have a letter from a prominent Confucian teacher and scholar, Zheng Xuan (127–200), to his son (selection 6). With the survival from late Tang on of individual authors’ collected works, personal letters exist in great abundance. The literary giant Su Shi (1037–1101) left behind more than two thousand letters. They allow us to appreciate, among other things, the many gifts that he sent to relatives, his favorite foods, his coming to terms with living in exile, and his circle of friends. Another voluminous-letter writer, the Qing (1644–1911) statesman Zeng Guofan (1811–1872), wrote thousands of letters to family members, friends, and colleagues (selection 29).

The emergence of diary or journal writing provided another literary form for writing about one’s experiences. Most of the earliest extant diaries were written to record observations made during trips and stress the author’s firsthand knowledge. Several have been translated in full, among them Lu You’s (1125–1210) A Journey into Shu (Ru Shu ji) and Fan Chengda’s (1126–1293) Diary of a Boat Trip to Wu (Wuchuan lu). Here we have excerpts from Lou Yue’s (1137–1213) diary of his trip to the Jin court (selection 16).

The Song period also witnessed the beginning of private journal writing. The historian and statesman Sima Guang (1021–1086), for example, kept a journal in the late 1060s and 1070s. His focus was on the major events at Emperor Shenzong’s (r. 1067–1085) court, including announcements, appointments, promotions, examinations, and so on. Many of his contemporaries claimed to have maintained regular journal entries to help them remember more casual yet memorable aspects of daily life, such as gathering with friends, hearing an amusing story, or trying a new fruit. In Ming times, individuals committed to Confucian moral cultivation also often kept diaries full of self-reflection. They wrote of the temptations they faced, their thoughts and efforts to act in a right and responsible manner, aiming to monitor their shortcomings and their efforts to avoid them in the future. An early example is that of Wu Yubi (1392–1469), whose diary covers much of his adult life and records not just his efforts to improve himself but also his struggles to make ends meet as a teacher in a rural community.

The Testimony of Witnesses

There are many reasons people may bear witness. Sometimes they have observed a crime and report what they saw to the authorities. The authorities, in turn, can compel those accused of the crime to account for their own actions. The ones that are extant today usually began as oral statements, transcribed by government clerks. Here we include a few from the Qin, Han, and Tang periods that survived by accident (selection 2). Thousands more survive in the Qing government archives and have proven a rich source for historians doing research on rebellions, legal practice, marriage customs, and similar issues. These are usually fairly straightforward, perhaps reflecting the government clerk’s editing. Normally, of course, the person testifying tries to make the best case for him or herself. Consider the 1748 confession of a tenant farmer charged with murdering a monk named Chengyuan who lived nearby.

I’m from Lijiayuan of Xiaogan County and am fifty-five years old. My parents and my wife died a long time ago. I have only one son named Li Yifei and he left home to be a laborer in the seventh month of last year. The house I rented was returned to the original owner and since I had no place to live, I lived by myself in my brother Li Mingzhi’s place. I made a living on my own. My brother is a trader and doesn’t live at home. In his family, there’s only my sister-in-law and nobody else.
Originally I rented two dou of land from Chengyuan. We split the grain equally and I never owed him anything. In 1745, he suddenly refused to let me rent the land. I asked him several times but he wouldn’t give in and I began to hate him. In the fall of 1746, I again begged him to be able to rent but he would not agree and said I was no good. I was really angry and had a quarrel with him but still never expressed my anger. In the spring of 1747, he dug soil from my land to build up his paddy dike. We had another quarrel then. And so I hated him for a long time. Later he bought a few catties of wine to sell to others. I asked him if I could buy wine but he deliberately said he was sold out. Even though he had it, he refused to sell it to me. He was a monk! But he was an old, cunning, wicked man. He had no sense of compassion. He always insulted and bullied me. I really hated him and wanted to teach him a lesson. But I never had a chance, I couldn’t do anything until the evening of the 26th day of the 8th month of 1747. I had had some drinks and ran into Chengyuan who was coming home from drinking. I saw he was a little drunk and then remembered all the mean things he’d done to me in the past. I got furious and under the influence of the wine wanted to hurt him. I figured that since he was an old man, was drunk and slept by himself, he would go to bed early that night and would not have any protection. I tied a rope made of bark around my waist and intended to strangle him in his sleep.

His confession then narrates many grizzly details of his hitting the monk with a club and an ax and trying to cover up his crime.⁹ In this case it is easy to imagine that the tenant farmer did not say all of this as a monologue, but rather that the scribe made a single tale by stringing together his responses to the questions he was asked. For instance, to make it easier to convict him of premeditated murder, the investigator may well have repeatedly tried to get him to admit long-standing enmity between him and his victim.

Here we include a confession in a case that did not involve violence, but rather a type of fraud. An unsuccessful teacher dressed as an official and was able to get many people to offer him aid when they heard his hard-luck story (selection 25).

Another type of testimony is written accounts of what the author observed during times of disorder, especially war and natural calamities. Believing that there should be some record of the suffering or harrowing experiences they witnessed or learned about, they tried to get the basic facts down on paper. A well-known example is Wang Xiuchu’s (17th c.) account of the slaughter of the population of Yangzhou during the Manchu invasion, “Ten Days in Yangzhou” (Yangzhou shiri). We include here writing by two key witnesses to the Mongol conquests of the Jin and the Song (selection 18). Their accounts are not as graphic, but they do help us imagine what living through these invasions could mean. In the case of Wen Tianxiang, he was an active player in the drama who had devoted himself to the probably impossible task of stopping the Mongols from conquering the Song.

Perceived social ills could also motivate men to write about what they learned, bearing witness against miscarriage of justice or inhumane treatment. An eighteenth-century example is Fang Bao’s account of what he learned about the spread of disease in a Beijing prison. Natural disasters and the hardships they created also motivated some to put on paper what they had observed. The two authors whose records are included in selection 24 tried to appear as objective witnesses, recording what the larger population in their home region suffered during weather-induced famines without drawing attention to how the disaster impacted their own lives. We also have the account of a young man captured by rebels who recorded his experiences and what he learned of the rebels (selection 28).

Writing for Heirs

When an author wrote about himself in a book that he expected to circulate widely—either before or after the spread of printing—he was anticipating an audience for his words that included people he did not know. In daily life, of course, people are most likely to talk about themselves with people they are close to, especially, perhaps, their own family members. Fathers in China, as elsewhere, drew on their own experience when giving advice to their sons and grandsons, and some of them took to writing this down, a genre referred to in Chinese as “family instructions” (jiaxun). They could do this briefly in the form of a letter (such as the letter by Zheng Xuan included here, selection 6). In the sixth century, Yan Zhitui (531–591) wrote a full book directed to his descendants that provided advice on such subjects as avoiding political dangers and cultivating both Confucian and Buddhist virtues. He often supported his arguments with examples from his own eventful life. Here are a few examples:

Some people let books pile up on their desk or allow the scrolls to scatter all over the place; their young children, maids, or concubines often get the books dirty; wind, rain, dogs, and mice may spoil them. This is truly a blemish on their virtue. When I read the writings of the sages, I have always treated them with solemn respect. If an old piece of paper happens to contain phrases and principles of the Five Classics or the names of worthy men, I would not dare use it for irreverent purposes.…
In our family, as you boys have seen, we do not ever speak of praying and making pleas to the gods through male or female spirit-mediums, nor do we ever resort to Daoist talismans and sacrifices. Do not waste your time on such ridiculous superstitions.…
Education must be carried out early so as not to lose the opportunity. When I was seven sui, I memorized the “Rhapsody on the Hall of Numinous Brilliance,” and even today I can still recite it if I review it once every ten years. As for the classics I read after turning twenty, I will forget them if I put them aside only for one month.…
I once suffered from a loose tooth that was about to fall out; any cold or hot food or drink made it ache. I read about the method of preserving teeth in Master of Embracing Simplicity, that one should click one’s teeth three hundred times every morning. I did it for a number of days and my tooth was healed. Now I do it constantly. Such minor techniques are completely innocuous and you may very well try them.…
The sons and daughters of my family, even during their early childhood, are drilled and corrected little by little. If they ever pronounce one thing wrong, I consider it my fault. As for objects and vessels made in our household, I will not presume to name them arbitrarily without consulting books and records first, as you boys know well.…
You should pay some attention to the formal script and the draft script.… Since my early childhood I have followed our family tradition [in calligraphy]; in addition, I am fond of the art and value it. Thus I have seen many model calligraphies and also spent considerable time on appreciation and practice. Even though in the end I am unable to achieve excellence, it is simply because I have no talent for it.¹⁰

As there are two full translations of this important book, we do not include any extracts from it here. But we do have a set of letters from the leading nineteenth-century political figure Zeng Guofan (1811–1872) (selection 29) to his son that while filled with details of what was happening in the military campaigns clearly keeps in mind that he is addressing a family member he hopes to have an influence on. He brings in his own experience that he sees as most relevant to his son’s moral and intellectual development.

Recounting Relations with Loved Ones

The individual self does not develop in isolation but rather is fashioned within a nexus of personal relations: relations to parents, siblings, other relatives, friends, teachers, colleagues, lovers, and even sometimes enemies. Thus, authors who wrote about their relationships with people they were close to might reveal as much about themselves as about the subjects of their essays. Poetry provides us with the richest material about intimate relations between loved ones. A good example is the numerous exchanges between the most famous brothers in Chinese history, Su Shi (1037–1101) and Su Zhe (1039–1112). In a poem entitled “In Response to Ziyou’s [Su Zhe] Poem on Suffering from Cold Weather,” Su Shi describes the closeness he felt toward his younger brother and Su Zhe’s unrivaled place in his heart, even though the two spent most of their adult lives away from each other.

Human beings live less than a hundred years.
You and I have spent three years apart.
How many more three years do I have?
Once gone, I’ll never get them back.
I fear that our separation
Is speeding up the aging of my face and hair.
In the past, I loved to write letters,
Ever since we parted, I haven’t finished anything.
Thinking back on all the fun we had together,
I realize today’s sorrow was inevitable.
Socializing with the leading talents in the world,
Means less to me than sharing a good time with you.
I am envious of your long period without official duties,
Having spent so much time reading, lice live in your felt rug.¹¹

Many elegies and funerary biographies can be read as personal accounts in addition to accounts of others. In this volume we have an elegy by Han Yu for his nephew and two by Han Qi for friends that can be read this way (selection 12). We also have a tribute a woman wrote for her husband and one a man did for his elder sister (selection 27). These are all relatively short. Better known are two considerably longer works written by men in the seventeenth and eighteenth century for women they were very close to. The first is Mao Xiang’s (1611–1693) Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Convent (Yingmei an yiyu), about his relationship with the courtesan Dong Bai, who died at the age of twenty-eight. The other memoir that can be read as a love story is Shen Fu’s (1763–1808?) Six Records of a Life Adrift (Fusheng liuji), in which he describes his life with his wife Yun and their many trials and tribulations, including estrangement from his parents.

Altogether, this book contains works by fifty authors grouped into twenty-nine selections. The earliest, dated to the Western Zhou (1046–771 BCE), is a short bronze inscription, and the last, from the 1850s and 1860s, is a set of letters by the Qing statesman and scholar Zeng Guofan. Less than half of the authors were people of national stature based on their political, literary, or scholarly credentials; at the other end, a few of the authors are known solely from the piece we translate. Only nine pieces were written by women, which reflects the reality of literacy, education, and publishing. The three of us did all of the translations with four exceptions: selection 23, which was translated for this book by Zeyuan Wu; and three that had been previously published, selections 7, by Beata Grant and Wilt Idema; 9, by David Knechtges; and 25, by Mark McNicholas. Our own translations were fully collaborative, each of us going over the others’ drafts and offering corrections and suggestions.

We invite readers to peruse these personal accounts in any order, as each can stand on its own. There is also an argument for reading them in chronological order, as that conveys a picture of Chinese history with individuals at the center and highlights cultural change by showing how people kept exploring ways to represent themselves in writing.

Notes

1. Translated in Stephen Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 165, 169.
2. Wilt L. Idema and Beata Grant, The Red Brush: Writing Women of Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 23–25.
3. Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 82.
4. Idema and Grant, The Red Brush, 111–12.
5. William T. de Bary and Irene Bloom, eds., Sources of Chinese Tradition, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 370.
6. Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 314–15.
7. Owen, An Anthology of Chinese Literature, 616.
8. De Bary and Bloom, Sources of Chinese Tradition, 371–72. For more on this letter, see Stephen Durrant, Wai-yee Li, Michael Nylan, and Hans van Ess, The Letter to Ren An and Sima Qian’s Legacy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018).
9. Pei-kai Cheng, Michael Lestz, and Jonathan D. Spence, The Search of Modern China: A Documentary Collection (New York: Norton, 1999), 82–85.
10. Yan Zhitui, Family Instructions for the Yan Clan and Other Works by Yan Zhitui (531–90s), trans. Xiaofei Tian (Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2021), 49, 51, 135, 279, 401, 415.
11. Beijing Daxue Guwenxian Yanjiusuo, ed., Quan Song shi (Beijing: Beijing Daxue Chubanshe, 1986–1998), 14:788.9132.

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INTRODUCTION

Writing about Oneself in Verse

Recounting One’s Life as a Preface or Postface to a Book

Adapting Conventions of Biography

Letters and Diaries

The Testimony of Witnesses

Writing for Heirs

Recounting Relations with Loved Ones

Notes

Further Reading

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