Conclusion

In the spirit of looking for information in commentaries, appendices, and supplements, let us consider one last example demonstrating readers’ uses of xiaoshuo that will aid us in imagining just how great the variety of early modern readers was. A healer, making a manuscript for his own use, transcribed passages from a contemporary novel, Quell the Bandits (Dangkou zhi).¹ The author of the manuscript, “Yi of Shanggu” (Shanggu Yi), likely was writing either after the 1871 publication of the novel in Shanghai or after its circulation increased when it was republished by the newspaper publisher Shenbaoguan in 1883. The novel had been published earlier in Suzhou and Guangzhou, but the Taiping general Li Xiucheng (1823–1864) took Suzhou in 1860 and ordered that all copies of Quell the Bandits be confiscated and its printing blocks destroyed.² The author of the medical manuscript observed taboos against writing the name of the emperor, so he probably wrote before 1911, the end of the Qing dynasty, although there were loyalists after the fall who observed written taboos of a prior era.³

Quell the Bandits is a complex and fascinating novel, one that is very much of its time and shocking, in a way, for undoing the point and ethos of an earlier work. Like many of the texts discussed in this book, it is a “sequel” to another work that it seeks to supplement, correct, or complete, in this case the foundational Ming novel Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihu zhuan), to which the author Yu Wanchun (1794–1849) added another seventy chapters.⁴

Outlaws of the Marsh chronicles 108 Robin Hood–like heroes and heroines who, based in the marshes of Liangshan, fought for their cause of romantic fraternity in defiance of the imperial call for law and order. Among the most popular xiaoshuo in early modern China, Outlaws was condemned from time to time for spreading treasonous thought. Quell the Bandits sought to repudiate the “bandit ideology” of Outlaws; its heroes and heroines rise to serve the Song court and succeed in eliminating other rebels and their ethos. Its conservatism aside, Quell the Bandits addresses a range of issues that became the central concerns for politically engaged writers in the twentieth century. In this way, the novel anticipates the rise of the modern Chinese political novel.⁵

In the aftermath of the first Opium War (1839–1842), at a time when world geography, Western scientific information, and military technologies were being introduced to China, Quell the Bandits sought to mix recently acquired Western epistemology with ancient Daoist beliefs, historical saga with supernatural fantasy. Through rewriting Outlaws of the Marsh, Yu sought to create a space where different political beliefs, timelines, and fantastic modes of narrative were brought into play. For these reasons, some scholars have referred to the Quell the Bandits as “science fantasy,” consistent with a major theme of works published by Shenbaoguan.⁶ Hindsight offers another irony to Yu’s novel. On the eve of the Boxer Rebellion (1900), it became patriotic to believe that the Boxers possessed a mysterious power that kept them “bayonet and bullet proof,” a power that would help China win back its dignity and glory after the opium wars and the indignities of their aftermath. This was a moment when Chinese conservatives willingly suspended their disbelief that Chinese magic could win out over Western weaponry. They behaved as if they were determined to reenact the fantastic moments of Quell the Bandits, although Yu’s novel was already an anachronistic summary of historical fantasy. The disastrous consequences of the Boxer Rebellion were the death knell for the Qing dynasty, as well as for the possibility of fantastic solutions to early modern problems.⁷ In many ways, Quell the Bandits was popular, influential, and innovative as a novel of social commentary and fantasy, but the author of the medical manuscript leaves no indication that he was aware of or interested in the novel’s literary or social significance.⁸ The novel’s fantasy did not impugn the veracity of its useful information, with which he supplemented his medical knowledge about ginseng, a common pharmaceutical ingredient.

Our healer was interested in a passage about capturing a “ginseng spirit” (shenxian), with the shape of a man (like the shape of the graph ren 人 in the Chinese word for ginseng, renshen), who, having matured over a thousand years, is able to run around in the moonlight. The novel details the hunt for the “ginseng spirit,” its capture, and its subsequent escape. Given this flight of fancy, we might be inclined to question the sophistication of our (seemingly, at least partially) self-educated healer, who takes information about the ginseng spirit as true, practical information. But that would be ungenerous. Though the “ginseng spirit” seems to be an invention of Quell the Bandits, such stuff was attested to in very important, mainstream, authoritative medical texts. The Systematic Compendium records, “Digging into the earth, they found a ginseng [root] shaped exactly like a human body, with four complete limbs. Everyone fell silent. Considering this, the name ‘spirit of the soil,’ appears to be more than appropriate.… When the root has a human physical appearance, it is endowed with a spirit.”⁹ Readers could be forgiven if the “fantasy” they found in entertainment literature sounded reasonable based on their other readings or experience. Excising almost every literary aspect of a story to capture its essential information was not just the purview of the middlebrow reader, however. In hundreds of passages in the Systematic Compendium, Li Shizhen mentions information obtained from entertainment literature such as stories, poems, and brush notes, from which he edits out the entertaining parts—figurative language, rhyme, dramatic tension, descriptions, and dialogue.¹⁰ Medical texts such as the highbrow Systematic Compendium and the middlebrow manuscript that features Quell the Bandits quote accounts that seem strange but edit them to highlight their perceived useful bits, deleting the art but retaining the “matter.” Li Shizhen and the medical manuscript author essentially turn a short story chuanqi into a record of anomalous data zhiguai. Thus, in early modern China, in practical and entertainment literature, stories codified bits of information, which in turn built on, interrogated, challenged, reified, and evolved common knowledge of the unseen world.

It is not clear if our physician reader is blithely unaware of Quell the Bandits’s social and literary critique or if he simply did not record those thoughts in his manuscript, but his account reveals two things. The first is that he did not read this xiaoshuo as “fiction.” Quell the Bandits was (as many novels were) both banned (by the Taiping Kingdom) and promoted (by the Qing) because of an overwhelming belief that people would imitate what they found there. The affective power of entertainment literature defied its own fictionality—the xiaoshuo may have been constructed, but its effects were real. For the author of the medical manuscript, this novel also contained real, useful information. And second, this reading suggests a belief in the supernatural that coexisted with the notion of realism, that prefigured the Boxers—the waning of “magic” in China—and demonstrates that what we modern scholars often think of as strange was not only not strange but considered preferable to certain kinds of modern technology and science.

Ji Yun was a great reader and scholar, but he also relied on his own experience and eyewitness accounts to evaluate common sense and puzzle out mysteries of the natural world. Writing decades before Quell the Bandits, Ji discusses the nature of souls, divination, gu poison and witchcraft in a single, remarkable passage:

As for the death of a person, according to Confucian discourse, the hun ascends and the po descends; even according to Buddhist discourse, ghosts are taken to the underworld and cannot return to the human realm.… Common practitioners of the vulgar arts even have a book that can predict the day, hour, and direction of departure [of the soul], which seems the utmost in fabrications. However, I once witnessed [a soul] from a distant window departing like a wisp of white smoke emerging from the chimney, slowly drifting southwest and vanishing. It matched the predicted time and direction exactly. I have also twice carefully observed the place where ashes were spread, the handprints and footprints were exactly as if from a living person, recognizable by the deceased’s relatives. What explanation is there for this? Misfortune and fortune are predestined, life and death are numbered. Even sages and wise men cannot contend with creation. Yet in the world, there is gu poison and arts to cause death by witchcraft, clearly recorded in penal codes. I have not seen gu poison, but I have seen witchcraft many times. Those who practice such arts are nothing more than blind fortune-tellers and construction workers. Yet they really can affect disaster and fortune, life and death, with verifiable results. Are the powers of heaven, earth, ghosts, and spirits so unguarded as to be manipulated without restraint? What explanation is there? There must be a principle within, but just beyond human comprehension.¹¹

The conclusion of this passage echoes that of Li Shizhen discussed in the introduction, that the changes and transformations of the world and of humanity are limitless and yet at the same time require investigation using multiple approaches. It may have been this attitude that allowed readers to free information from the constraints of genre as much as it was the amorphous and eclectic nature of certain genres that enticed readers to plumb them.

Authors intended their books to be read by particular groups, but who their readers actually were and what readers actually got out of their books was another matter. As much as it pained the literati, books in early modern China were just as likely to be purchased, or even treasured as objects, by merchants and nouveaux riches who were less sophisticated readers.¹² Readers had diverse abilities, and the proliferation of texts on the market—highbrow to lowbrow—reflected awareness of this diversity on the part of publishers. In prefaces to his story collections, Feng Menglong discusses writing even for those who cannot read, “since villagers, children, ordinary women, and peddlers are easily stirred to joy or wrath by what others do rightly or wrongly, take guidance in their actions from stories about the operations of karma, and gain knowledge from hearsay and gossip, popular historical romances can well serve as supplements where the classics and the histories are found lacking.”¹³

I hope Observing the Unseen appeals to a great variety of readers, just as xiaoshuo did in early modern China. Much of what lies within may seem fantastical, but it was not thought to be just fiction.¹⁴ Xiaoshuo, strange tales, miscellanies, and drama were archives of knowledge.¹⁵ The factor that makes xiaoshuo, or biji xiaoshuo a meaningful category is that it recorded information generally thought to be of lesser importance to serious scholars.¹⁶ A xiaoshuo anthology might include a great range of genres and forms: verse, an inventory of Daoist mountains and rivers, recipes, a ranking list of soups, a tea guide, manuals of calligraphy and painting, and so on.¹⁷ Li Shizhen and Zhao Xuemin filled their authoritative texts on natural history with quotations and citations from xiaoshuo, biji, and other texts created primarily for entertainment. The very long, very complicated, novels of the sixteenth- through nineteenth centuries were created by highly educated, brilliant authors who seem to have written their books largely for their similarly highly educated, brilliant, friends. But once published, these books were fair game for all kinds of readers. At least some, and some very influential, early modern readers and editors considered xiaoshuo and biji sources of reliable information. The importance and influence of mainstream twentieth- and twenty-first-century (May Fourth and post-May Fourth) scholarly interpretations of xiaoshuo regard the genre as primarily literary, but this need not obfuscate our understanding that among the great variety of readers were those who had other uses for xiaoshuo too. They were not primarily interested in constructedness—or even the literary artistry—of xiaoshuo and other entertainment literature. Rather, early modern readers mined them for information. When it came to investigating things that were unseen or rarely seen, these kinds of texts were sources of information even for authors of the most authoritative texts. They did not see biji and xiaoshuo purely as fiction. Literary features and artistry did not obfuscate the ways in which xiaoshuo and other entertainment literature, part of a large ecosystem of texts, contributed to readers’ common understanding of the real world.