Hsiao-p’in of the Late Ming

Periodization and Dominant Forms

The history of Chinese literature and arts has been perennially concerned with the issue of periodization. For each imperial dynasty, an art or literary form has been identified as representing its acme of creative power. Thus the ancient Shang dynasty is remembered for its splendid bronze art; the bombastic and elaborate rhapsody (fu) has been identified with the Western Han; and Chinese literary historians have always taken pride in discussing the superior accomplishments of the shih poetry of the T’ang, the song lyrics (tz’u) of the Sung, the ch’ü—which includes both “northern drama” (tsa-chü) and “individual arias” (san-chü)—of the Yüan, and the vernacular fiction of the Ming and the Ch’ing dynasties. Sometimes such periodization has been carried further to link one art or literary form with a particular period of imperial reign within a dynasty. Not unlike the ways the English have talked about their “Elizabethan poetry,” “Restoration drama,” “Queen Anne architecture,” and “Victorian fiction,” the Chinese have identified, for example, the kind of sensual poetry (yen shih) about love and women with the short-lived dynasties of the Ch’i (479–502) and the Liang (502–57), so that thenceforth such poems have frequently been called “poetry in the Ch’i-Liang style.” The exquisite bronze incense burners and elegant porcelain vessels produced during Emperor Hsüan-tsung’s Hsüan-te reign (1426–35) and the colorful cloisonné blue-glazed enamelware made during Emperor Tai-tsung’s Ching-t’ai reign (1450–57), both of the Ming dynasty, have since been respectively called “Hsüan-te censers,” “Hsüan-te porcelain,” and “Ching-t’ai blue.” Emperor Kao-tsung’s Ch’ien-lung reign (1736–95) and Emperor Jen-tsung’s Chiach’ing reign (1796–1820), both during the Ch’ing dynasty, have always been characterized by the extensive and thorough philological scholarship practiced by leading men of letters of that period, known later as “Ch’ien-Chia scholarship.”

A concept introduced by the Russian Formalist critics may help us to better understand this cultural phenomenon. Culture may be understood as a system that consists of various interacting elements. In such a system, some elements are frequently projected into the foreground and become dominant, while others recede into the background. Roman Jacobson has defined the dominant as the foregrounding of one or a group of elements. In cultural history, the term has been used to refer to different genres of art—visual, musical, or verbal—which became dominant at various stages during the development of Western civilization. According to Jacobson, the dominant does not remain the same, but shifts from age to age. This shifting underscores the tension between canon and artistic novelty—the latter being understood as a deviation that often evolves into a new canon.¹

We may use the concept of the dominant as a lens to examine, for example, the development of Chinese poetry. The rise of new poetic forms—such as regulated verse (lü-shih) in the seventh century, song lyrics in the tenth, and individual arias in the thirteenth—has indeed revealed a tension between the status quo and the pursuit for originality. Dissatisfied with following the prescribed order of their predecessors, some “strong poets” (to use Harold Bloom’s term) experimented with new forms to find the best vehicle for their need for expression. At the hands of great masters, the new form flourished and gradually evolved into a new canon, until in due course it wore out and was superseded by another new form.

The hsiao-p’in, a short belles-lettres prose piece or vignette, usually informal in structure and mostly casual and spontaneous in mood and tone, was established as a literary genre during the last quarter of the sixteenth century. It became a dominant literary form of the late Ming period and flourished for nearly a century, until decades after the demise of the Ming. The hsiao-p’in has always been identified with the late Ming.²

Prototypical Forms and Spiritual Forefathers

Dominant as the hsiao-p’in was in the late Ming, it did not make its appearance on the Chinese literary stage like a thunderbolt from the sky. Compared with that in other civilizations, nonfictional prose enjoyed an honorable, long, and rich history in the Chinese tradition. Of the six ancient classics canonized during the Han dynasty as Confucian scriptures (Ju ching), four were in the form of prose. Prose flourished during the age of “Contention of a Hundred Schools” (4th–3rd cent. B.C.E.) in the sayings and speeches of Chuang-tzu, Mencius, Han-fei-tzu, and the other thinkers. For the lengthy period before drama and fiction emerged on the literary horizon, nonfictional prose (wen) was considered to be the highest literary achievement, along with shih poetry.

Prototypes of the hsiao-p’in may be found in earlier literature. Ch’ien Mu (1895–1990), a leading modern scholar, argued that the form might be traced as far back as The Analects (Lun-yü) of Confucius, the book of Chuang-tzu, the “T’an Kung” chapter in The Book of Rites (Li-chi), and Intrigues of the Warring States (Chan-kuo ts’e)—all pre-Ch’in (before the early 2nd cent. B.C.E.) classics, generally considered to be works with serious moral and ethical significance.³ The passages that Ch’ien Mu cited as examples of early hsiao-p’in are usually short descriptive sketches, such as this autobiographical profile from The Analects: “The Master said: ‘I eat simple food and drink plain water. I lie down and support my head with my elbows. Happiness lies within all this. To enjoy wealth and rank without holding any higher principles—to me that is like a floating cloud’” (VII, 14).

Brief and simple as it is, this snapshot of a self-portrait of the Master preceded the autobiographical hsiao-p’in of the Ming authors. The passage from The Analects that is closest in spirit to the late Ming vignette is, in my opinion, the record of a conversation between Confucius and his disciples, which started like most of the more serious catechisms in the book: the Master asked his disciples to tell him about their ideals, and one by one they talked about their political ambitions. However, the dialogue unexpectedly changed tone when the Master called upon Tseng Tien, who had been playing on a zither (se) while the others were talking. He put the zither aside, sat up straight, and said, “Mine is different from those of the others.” The Master said, “What’s the harm? They were merely expressing what’s on their mind—that’s all.” Feeling encouraged, Tseng Tien opened his mind: “In late spring, when our spring clothes are ready, in a group of five or six young men, and six or seven boys, we shall take a bath in the I River, stay in the breeze at the terrace [where ceremonies to worship Heaven are held], and return home singing all the way.” The Master said, sighing, “I am with Tien” (XI, 24).

Orthodox Neo-Confucian philosophers of the Sung dynasty made laborious but largely irrelevant efforts to explain the Master’s response, not realizing that it is exactly such passages in The Analects that best illustrate the amiable and unassuming personality of the sage. The sense of harmony with Nature, reflected in the Master’s appreciation of Tseng Tien’s spontaneous reply, exemplifies the inherently humanistic nature of Confucian teaching. This humanism was vividly expressed in the hsiao-p’in.

During the Six Dynasties,⁴ literature became distinct from history, philosophy, and so on, and moved into a period of self-consciousness. Literati, who had moved with the Eastern Chin regime to the scenic Chiang-nan area, seem to have for the first time discovered an empathy with Nature and an appreciation of its beauty. During this period short prose pieces (including familiar letters, travel notes, and short life-sketches) were widely written and read. Indeed, in content many of these compositions are hardly distinguishable from late Ming hsiao-p’in pieces. Among the earliest examples of such compositions are, for example, a famous preface to a collection of poems written at a drinking party in celebration of the Bathing Festival at Orchid Pavilion (the occasion itself echoes Tseng Tien’s “ideal” as recounted in The Analects), written by the “Sage of Calligraphy,” Wang Hsi-chih (303?–61?).⁵ Passages from A Commentary on the Water Classic (Shui-ching chu)⁶ by Li Tao-yüan (d. 527) became the model of travel writing for later writers, from the T’ang master Liu Tsung-yüan (773–819) to late Ming hsiao-p’in writers such as Yüan Hung-tao* and Wang Ssu-jen.* A New Account of Tales of the World (Shih-shuo hsin-yü), a fifth-century collection of laconic but vividly drawn descriptions of the sayings and mannerisms of the statesmen, courtiers, and literati of the Wei and Chin dynasties, exerted a major influence on most of late Ming hsiao-p’in writers.⁷ Wang Ssu-jen, with an idiosyncratic sense of humor, compared the passages in the book to “delicate appetizers” that could be taken daily to keep one from getting bored with the heavy “pork roast” of classics, such as Ssu-ma Ch’ien’s (b. 145 or 135 B.C.E.) Historical Records (Shih-chi) and Pan Ku’s (32–92) History of the Han (Han-shu).⁸

The late Ming authors of hsiao-p’in found another spiritual forefather in the versatile Sung writer Su Shih (or Su Tung-po, 1037–1101), whose Memorabilia (Chih-lin), a collection of short sketches, diaries, and miscellaneous random notes, was repeatedly reprinted, widely read, and regarded as a model for prose writing in the late sixteenth century. The following is a frequently anthologized piece from that book, often cited as a precursor text of the late Ming hsiao-p’in:

A Night Jaunt to Ch’eng-t’ien

It was the twelfth day of the tenth month in the sixth year of the Yüanfeng reign [1083]. At night I had already undressed and was about to go to bed, when the moonlight entered my room. Delighted, I got up and walked around. Then it hit upon me that I had no company to have fun with, so I went over to Ch’eng-t’ien Temple to call upon Chang Huai-ming. Huai-ming was not asleep either, so the two of us walked side by side in the middle of the courtyard. The courtyard, in an open sheet of light, looked like a pool with waterweed crisscrossing in it—which was actually the shadow of bamboos and cypress trees. Isn’t the moon up there every night? Bamboos and cypresses—are they not to be found anywhere? What was unusual were just idle fellows like the two of us. (1981, p. 2; 1983, p. 4)⁹

This short piece was written by Su Shih three years after he had moved in his exile to Huang-chou, a remote prefecture in Hupei along the upper reaches of the Yangtze. Unlike the two famous “Rhapsodies on the Red Cliff” he wrote a year earlier, which are longer and more elaborate, this note excels in simplicity and spontaneity—exactly the qualities that characterize most late Ming hsiao-p’in compositions. Su Shih’s prose writings were extremely popular during the late Ming period. The extant records of the hundreds of editions of his works, printed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, are evidence that the Sung author definitely stayed a long time on the best-seller list during that period. Ch’en Wan-i, a leading scholar of the hsiao-p’in in Taiwan, enumerated some fifteen important editions of selections of Su Shih’s prose printed between 1556 and 1644 (1988, pp. 7–10). Two of these were actually entitled The Hsiao-p’in of Su Chang-kung, and many included his shorter prose pieces from Memorabilia. Most major late Ming hsiao-p’in authors were enthusiastic about Su Shih’s writing. Although this was partially due to the emulation of the Eight Prose Masters of the T’ang and Sung (including Su Shih) by sixteenth-century writers of the so-called T’ang-Sung school, what writers from Yüan Hung-tao to Chang Tai* particularly liked was Su Shih’s shorter and less formal writings. Yüan Chung-tao* even observed that without his hsiao-p’in pieces, Su Shih would be “far less lovable.”¹⁰

Despite these precursor texts, however, the hsiao-p’in was not established as an independent literary genre until the late sixteenth century, and it came to its peak only during the late Ming period, when new boundaries were reached, new possibilities were explored, and, last but not least, its own nomenclature was widely accepted.

The Rise of the Hsiao-p’in in the Late Ming

The term hsiao-p’in (lit., “small version” or “lesser type”) has been traced to the beginning of the fifth century, when the Buddhist missionary Kumārajīva (344–413) was invited to settle down in the city of Ch’ang-an by Yao Hsing (366–416), ruler of the northern regime of the Later Ch’in. With the help of his Chinese disciples, Kumārajīva translated many Buddhist sutras into Chinese. He made two versions of the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtra, a collection of Mahayana Buddhist teachings—a longer one in twenty-seven sections (chüan),¹¹ the Ta-p’in Prajñā (Prajñā: The large version); and an abridged one in ten sections, the Hsiao-p’in Prajñā (Prajñā: The small version).¹² A little later in the century, the term hsiao-p’in was also found in A New Account of Tales of the World; its several appearances all referred to Kumārajīva’s Hsiao-p’in Prajñā.¹³ Obviously, the usage of the term was initiated primarily out of a practical categorizing need, and had nothing to do with literary genre.

Late Ming writers probably rediscovered the term from their enthusiastic reading of A New Account of Tales of the World and also out of a similar need to categorize prose—to distinguish the new form from longer and more formal writings, especially those modeled after Western Han prose as promoted by the neoclassicists who had dominated the literary stage. For centuries nonfictional prose had been regarded as “a vehicle for the Tao”—a literary means with a serious purpose. But late Ming authors, in their pursuit of novelty, found in the hsiao-p’in form a way to break away from ideological bondage and thus endowed the term with new meaning. The term came to refer specifically to short, informal belles-lettres prose that primarily served to amuse and entertain its reader. A number of writers of the period used the term in the titling collections of their own such writings, and a number of anthologies of such prose pieces by various authors, bearing the term in the title, are known to have been published in the late Ming period.¹⁴ Ch’en Chi-ju,* a hsiao-p’in master himself, remarked on the rise of the new genre in the preface he wrote for an anthology of hsiao-p’in compiled by his friend Cheng Ch’ao-tsung, which was titled Literary Amusement (Wen yü):

In the past, before the year of 1627, the eunuch’s network of informers spread all around. I told Lord Tung [Ch’i-ch’ang]: “In a time like this, rather than becoming literary stars, you and I would only wish to be the Deaf and the Mute between Heaven and Earth.” When Cheng Ch’ao-tsung heard about this, he laughed and said, “Close your doors, decline all visitors, and amuse yourself with literature. What’s the harm?” In recent years, having more free time while staying in mourning, I have collected miscellaneous hsiao-p’in by contemporaries and made marginal notes of commentary on them. They are all new and fresh as flower buds, and brilliant in their many and various appearances. They have a rule [fa] beyond ordinary rules, a flavor [wei] beyond ordinary flavors, and a charm [yün] beyond ordinary charms. Exquisite diction and new expressions abound in such writings. They seem to represent the emergence of an extraordinary new fashion since the Lung[-ch’ing] and the Wan[-li] reigns.¹⁵

Ch’en Chi-ju was right in dating the rise of the hsiao-p’in to the Lung-ch’ing (1567–72) and the Wan-li (1573–1620) reigns. The “new fashion,” as he called it, took shape as a direct reaction to the domination of the literary stage, starting during the Chia-ching reign (1522–66), by the so-called Later Seven Masters, headed by Li P’an-lung (1514–70) and Wang Shihchen (1526–90). They carried on the neoclassicist torch of the Earlier Seven Masters, headed by Li Meng-yang (1473–1530) and Ho Ching-ming (1483–1521), in promoting the literary slogan “back to the ancients.” Echoing Li Meng-yang’s idea to “exclude anything in prose after the Ch’in and Han,” Wang Shih-chen expressed his retrogressive concept of literary history in the following observation on the development of literary prose:

The prose of the Western Han had substance. The prose of the Eastern Han became weak, but it had not yet deviated from substance. The prose of the Six Dynasties was pompous: it was deviating from substance. The prose of the T’ang was mediocre, but it remained pompous. The prose of the Sung was clumsy: it was not even pompous anymore, and became more inferior. In the Yüan, there was no prose.¹⁶

For nearly a century, under the prevailing influence of these two groups, prose writings were loaded with archaic expressions and devoid of emotion in their pale imitation of pre-Han or Han models. Partially because of the political status of these neoclassicists, most of whom were high-ranking courtiers, the influence was so preponderant that it stifled much of the creativeness and originality of artistic instinct. But such intellectual stultification could not last forever, and resistance began to arise in the middle of the Chia-ching reign. It first emerged within the neoclassicist camp itself, from a group of writers later known as belonging to the T’ang-Sung school because, contrary to the argument of Wang Shih-chen and his allies, they acclaimed the prose of the T’ang and the Sung dynasties as their models. Both T’ang Shun-chih (1507–60) and Wang Sheng-chung (1509–59) started by modeling after the prose of the Ch’in and Han dynasties, following contemporary fashion, but in their middle age they turned to the masters of the Sung dynasty, especially Ou-yang Hsiu (1007–72) and Tseng Kung (1019–83). Their close friend Mao K’un (1512–1601) compiled a prose anthology of works by the Eight Prose Masters of the T’ang and the Sung, which quickly gained influence. All three wrote extensive critical works, trying to justify their choice of new models.

In literary practice, however, it was Kuei Yu-kuang* who, though socially unaffiliated with any of the writers of the T’ang-Sung school, most effectively dealt a blow to the theory of the neoclassicists. This was achieved through Kuei’s widely acclaimed prose writings as well as his half-century-long pedagogical career, which helped to cultivate a new readership and, consequently, a set of new criteria. Though a lonely schoolteacher before he eventually received the degree of Metropolitan Graduate when he was nearly sixty, Kuei had the courage to challenge Wang Shih-chen’s authority. Taking issue with Wang’s retrogressive view of prose, Kuei wrote in a preface to his friend Hsiang Ssu-yao’s prose collection,

It is hard to talk about the so-called prose of our age. Few engage themselves in learning like the ancients, and as soon as they’ve found one or two arrogant and mediocre fellows whom they take to be great masters, they flock around to echo their views disparaging writers of previous ages. As Han Yü says,

The writings of Li [Po] and Tu [Fu] survive

And shine in all splendor, far and wide.

They’d never know the dumbness of those kids

Who in vain try to defame their name.

Like ants trying to topple a huge tree,

So laughable are they in overrating themselves!

In the hands of the masters of the Sung and the Yüan, the force of their prose is strong enough to match that of a thousand years ago, while our contemporaries are trying to belittle them like the ants—how deplorable! The one or two arrogant and mediocre fellows who claim to be great masters—aren’t they responsible for leading these people astray?¹⁷

Although Kuei did not mention names, it was known that his reference to “one or two arrogant and mediocre fellows” targeted Wang Shih-chen, widely honored as the leader among men of arts at the time. According to an account provided by Ch’ien Ch’ien-i (1582–1664), an important seventeenth-century critic, after reading this preface Wang Shih-chen said, “I am indeed arrogant, but I’m not mediocre.” On hearing the feedback, Kuei remarked again, “One is mediocre exactly because one is arrogant. How could anyone who’s arrogant not also be mediocre?”¹⁸ At his death in 1571 Kuei was established as a great prose master of the age. As many of his shorter prose pieces indicate, he was indeed a forerunner of the later hsiao-p’in writers. After Kuei Yu-kuang the authority of the neoclassicists was further challenged by various authors toward the end of the sixteenth century, most notably by the eccentric and versatile man of letters Hsü Wei,* the unorthodox thinker Li Chih,* and the great playwright T’ang Hsien-tsu (1550–1616). All three expressed their impatience with the antiquarian and retrogressive ideas of the Later Seven Masters. Li Chih, in particular, lectured and wrote extensively attacking Li P’an-lung and Wang Shih-chen’s domination of the literary stage and their negative impact on contemporary literature. His iconoclastic essay “On the Mind of a Child,”* which argues that “all that comes from the mind of a child is excellent writing by itself” and that one should not judge literature “by priority in temporal order,” may be considered a raison d’être for the emergence of the new genre.

Under Li Chih’s direct influence, the three Yüan brothers Tsung-tao,* Hung-tao, and Chung-tao, while carrying on a heated theoretical debate with the neoclassicists, turned the literary fashion around by their own practice (Chou; Chaves 1978, 1983, 1985). In fact, the new hsiao-p’in genre, which could already be found in the writings of Kuei Yu-kuang, Hsü Wei, and T’ang Hsien-tsu, was largely established by the Kung-an school, named after the native town of the Yüan brothers, who found in their experimentation with the form new possibilities of self-expression. The form was further developed by those who joined the camp of the Kung-an school in their denial of the neoclassicists’ narrow devotion to pre-Han and Han prose writings as models. Adoption of the new form, which had its prototypes mainly in the prose writings of the Six Dynasties (which Wang Shih-chen had accused of being “pompous” and “deviating from substance”) and in the shorter and more casual writings of Su Shih, should therefore be considered as a serious attempt to get free from the straitjacket of the neoclassicist canon.

The Ching-ling school, led by Chung Hsing* and T’an Yüan-ch’un,* which exerted its influence on the literary scene toward the end of the Wan-li period and especially during the T’ien-ch’i reign (1621–27), has often been misleadingly identified as a mere successor to the Kung-an school. Although Chung and T’an shared common ground with the Yüan brothers in their opposition to the literary theory of the Later Seven Masters, their aesthetics and poetics were in many aspects opposed to those of the Kung-an school. They promoted intricacy and profundity in an attempt to remedy what they regarded as the superficial and vulgar practice of followers of the Yüan brothers. It should be noted here that both the Kung-an and the Ching-ling primarily were schools of poetry and poetics. The hsiao-p’in practice of Chung and T’an, in spite of its labored experimentation with diction and syntax, stayed under the influence of the Kung-an school. So did the works of writers such as Ch’en Chi-ju, Wang Ssu-jen, and Li Liu-fang,* who, though not directly affiliated with either of the two groups in the period, nevertheless shared many of their aesthetic and poetic views. As a matter of fact, even T’u Lung,* an ally of Wang Shih-chen’s (named by the latter, possibly with a sense of the inevitable doom of neoclassicism, as one of the Last Five Masters) and an important neoclassicist critic himself, could not resist the temptation of the Kung-an school in some of his own writings. After all, the inclination to rediscover the charm, comfort, and pleasure in the triviality of civilian life, a major theme of the hsiao-p’in, and the struggle for originality and spontaneity in artistic and literary expression were integral parts of the late Ming zeitgeist.

The rise of the hsiao-p’in, besides being a reaction against the archaism of the neoclassicists, synchronized with the rise of individualism in the sixteenth century, especially under the rapidly growing posthumous influence of Wang Shou-jen (1472–1529), whose advocacy of the unity of knowledge and action found many followers and sympathizers. This great philosopher’s theory of “intuitive knowledge” (liang chih) provided a source of inspiration for Li Chih’s concept of the “mind of a child” and Yüan Hung-tao’s idea of “natural sensibility” (hsing ling). In its casualness and spontaneity the hsiao-p’in was a proper vehicle for conveying the emotions and idiosyncrasies of the individual.

The hsiao-p’in has been accused of being an escapist genre because of its tendency to focus on life’s sensual pleasures and triviality. Such characterization is not without its justification. Indeed, as mentioned in Ch’en Chi-ju’s above-cited preface to Cheng Ch’ao-tsung’s anthology and in the works of quite a few hsiao-p’in authors—notably Ch’en Chi-ju, the Yüan brothers, and Li Liu-fang—the form did provide a cathartic outlet, or at least a temporary refuge, where they were able to turn their backs upon the filthy politics of the Wan-li and T’ien-ch’i periods, when corrupt eunuchs seized power in the central court. The late Ming period was, paradoxically, a relatively liberal age in terms of the freedom of artistic and literary expression. Literary inquisition erupted now and then, but was never carried out on such a scale as under the reigns of the early Ming emperors T’ai-tsu (1368–98) and Ch’eng-tsu (1403–24), or as thoroughly as under the reigns of the Ching emperors Yung-cheng (1723–35) and Ch’ien-lung (Goodrich 1935). As long as one did not get personally involved in political and factional strife, one could still afford to do what one liked. Hsiao-p’in composition—along with the recreational activities of performing and listening to music, playing board games (Chinese chess and wei-ch’i, or go), practicing calligraphy, painting, composing poetry, drinking, and flower-watching—became an integral part of the artistic life of late Ming literati.

Last but not least, an ever-increasing demand for reading material—especially that devoted to entertainment—from a social group that expanded dramatically in late sixteenth-century China also accounted for the popularity of the new genre. This group consisted of government school students (sheng-yüan) who had passed the preliminary civil service examination and were admitted into county schools, but had not yet acquired the advanced degrees necessary for an official career.¹⁹ It was largely in answer to their need that book printing saw an unprecedented prosperity in the period. The popularity of the hsiao-p’in in print accompanied that of other works of popular literature, such as the erotic novel Golden Lotus (Chin p’ing mei), the collections of short fiction compiled by Feng Meng-lung (1574–1646?) and Ling Meng-ch’u (1580–1644), and the plays of T’ang Hsien-tsu. Along with these bright stars on the new literary horizon, the hsiao-p’in reflected the milieu of late Ming society. Like the famous long Sung scroll The Ch’ing-ming Festival along the River, the numerous late Ming hsiao-p’in pieces provide a panorama of the bubbling and colorful urban life of the age.

The Hsiao-p’in as a Literary Genre

It is extremely difficult to define the generic features of the hsiao-p’in. The boundaries of any literary genre can be circumscribed only by the body of works that fall under that generic name, in all their variations and limitations. The hsiao-p’in has been compared to the familiar essay, which started with Montaigne in the Western tradition, but there is a quantitative element in the name itself—the term hsiao (lit., “little” or “small”) prescribes brevity—and most hsiao-p’in pieces are much shorter than the Western essay, even though the two forms do share the same great variety of subject and scope. On the other hand, there was no clear standard of length for a piece of hsiao-p’in. Under the loose generic name hsiao-p’in, all and sundry forms of prose writing were included.

The following groups represent some of the major subjects that were treated in the hsiao-p’in. Each had been previously established as a subgenre of classical Chinese prose with its own history of development. A discussion of how these groups took on new features at the hands of the hsiao-p’in may help us to further understand the characteristics of the new form.

Travel Notes

Prototypes of travel notes may be found in the passages describing the landscape (shan-shui) in Li Tao-yüan’s A Commentary on the Water Classic, in personal letters by literati of the Southern Dynasties describing the beauty of nature, and in the descriptions of travel by the great T’ang master Liu Tsung-yüan. The literati of the Eastern Chin regime discovered the beauty of nature when they settled down in the scenic Chiang-nan area. Liu found an outlet for his indignation and sorrow during his exile in the desolate wilderness of Liu-chou (Hargett, pp. 7–69; Nienhauser 1973; Strassberg, pp. 141–47).

In comparison, late Ming writers seem to have rediscovered the beauty of nature, often as a refuge from the ever-worsening political situation and partisan struggles of the age. Their travel notes often carry vivid descriptions of drinking parties held at scenic spots. Compared to earlier travel literature, much of the late Ming hsiao-p’in in this category is imbued with more emotion and describes human activity in the scene. There is also a strong sense of spontaneity. As illustrated in Lu Shu-sheng’s “A Trip to Wei Village”* and Ch’en Chi-ju’s “Trips to See Peach in Bloom,”* the author often made the trip on the impetus of the moment, and sometimes put his experience on record right after the trip. Many such travel notes, as exemplified in those by Wang Ssu-jen, sparkle with humor and wit.

Prefaces and Colophons

Unlike the more formal ones written by the masters of the T’ang and Sung dynasties, prefaces and colophons by late Ming writers often were composed in a casual style, and frequently were written for popular literature rather than for serious classics. For example, when Kuei Yu-kuang wrote a foreword to his “Reflections on The Book of Documents,”* he chose to give us an intimate account of his experience of playing with his baby daughter rather than to make serious, scholarly observations on the Confucian classic itself. Ch’en Chi-ju wrote a preface and colophon to A History of Flowers,* and Chung Hsing wrote an inscription on A Drinker’s Manual.* The serious scholarly observation in prefaces and colophons by the T’ang and Sung masters yields its place in the hsiao-p’in to description of personal experience or to remarks on life in general.

Life Sketches

Late Ming hsiao-p’in writers tended to write about anonymous, obscure figures or their own kinsmen, rather than on the distinguished statesmen and war heroes who dominated earlier biographical literature. For example, Kuei Yu-kuang wrote about his late wife’s maidservant (“An Epitaph for Chillyposy”*), and Yüan Hung-tao wrote a biography of the four “stupid but efficient” servants of his family.* However, such authors still had in mind the great model of the genre provided by the Grand Historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien, and tried to achieve similar vividness and forcefulness in their writing.

Personal Letters

Epistolary writing was also a major category of classical Chinese prose with a long history. Late Ming hsiao-p’in authors learned from those of the Six Dynasties, but more directly and specifically, they modeled after the informal short epistles of the Sung masters Su Shih and his friend Huang T’ing-chien (1045–1105). Late Ming writers seemed to bear in mind that their letters would probably be further circulated by their addressees to their friends and acquaintances, and possibly would be passed down to future generations, as were the letters of Su and Huang, so they seemed always to try to dazzle with, and to show off, their literary talents as well as their mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. Despite this self-consciousness, these letters often breathe of the charisma of their authors. T’u Lung’s exquisitely beautiful epistles* represent the very best of the period in their lyrical and vivid expression of the author’s personality.

Lin Yutang (1895–1976), who played a crucial role in the recanonization of the hsiao-p’in earlier in this century, has defined the hsiao-p’in wen, the vernacular belles-lettres prose that flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, as a form in which the author “speaks in an unbuttoned mood.” Lin elaborated on this in his essay “The Familiar Style”:

He completely exposes his weakness, and is therefore disarming.

The relationship between writer and reader should not be one between an austere schoolmaster and his pupils, but one between friends. Only in this way can warmth be generated.

He who is afraid to use an “I” in his writing will never make a good writer. (1960: 326–27)

The hsiao-p’in has been identified as a direct source for the modern vernacular hsiao-p’in wen. What Lin said about the latter would appropriately describe the former. In all of the above-mentioned categories, what mark the late Ming hsiao-p’in as different from most of their prototypes are strong subjectivity (the ever-present first person singular—“I”), casualness in attitude (the “unbuttoned mood”), a generally informal tone, and frequent use of lively, vernacular expressions. In seeking the “natural sensibility” (hsingling) that “flows directly from one’s heart,” as Yüan Hung-tao advocated, late Ming authors generally shied away from archaisms and excessive use of literary allusion. Hence their works are usually characterized by ease and succinctness and demonstrate a clear-cut personal (often idiosyncratic) style, which accounts for, in Ch’en Chi-ju’s description, the form’s “flavor beyond ordinary flavors” and “charm beyond ordinary charms.” Among the various forms of Chinese nonfictional prose, the late Ming hsiao-p’in best illustrates Buffon’s famous dictum “le style est l’homme même.”

The writers who resorted to this new form constituted a small world among themselves, as they generally admired or befriended one another almost in a sense of camaraderie. Hsü Wei, one of the earliest admirers of the art of Kuei Yu-kuang’s prose, praised Kuei as “the Master Ou-yang of today.”²⁰ Yüan Hung-tao wrote Hsü Wei’s biography (“A Biography of Hsü Wen-ch’ang”*) in enthusiasm. Ch’en Chi-ju, a central cultural figure of the age, was an ardent admirer and young friend of the neoclassicist master Wang Shih-chen, but he also befriended unorthodox peers in the opposite camp, such as the Yüan brothers and Chung Hsing. Ch’en included the hsiao-p’in of the elder Lu Shu-sheng and that of T’u Lung in his canonmaking big anthology, The Private Library of Pao-yen Hall (Pao-yen-t’ang michi), and in so doing should be credited with the preservation of these literary gems. Chung Hsing wrote a colophon to Yüan Hung-tao’s calligraphy* and spared no effort in acclaiming the latter’s achievement. Wang Ssu-jen admired Hsü Wei and remained a good friend of Yüan Chung-tao’s, and his own travel notes received high praise from Ch’en Chi-ju. T’an Yüan-ch’un, Chung Hsing’s younger fellow-townsman and close ally, was a friend of Yüan Hung-tao’s eldest son and at the latter’s request wrote the preface to Hung-tao’s Collected Works. Late Ming hsiao-p’in authors seem to have thrown in their lot with one another and formed an alliance in their common effort to break away from neoclassicist domination.

Chang Tai: The Great Synthesizer of the Hsiao-p’in

The entries in Chang Tai’s Dream Memories from the T’ao Hut represent the highest achievement of the hsiao-p’in as an independent literary genre. As its most talented author, Chang Tai deserves more recognition in the West, as much as does the hsiao-p’in form itself.²¹

Chang Tai has been glorified by many Chinese literary historians as the genre’s greatest author, especially in terms of his synthetic integration of previous styles (Cheng Chen-to IV: 953; Liu Ta-chieh III: 938–41). Indeed, more than any of his predecessors, Chang Tai explored the generic and thematic possibilities of the hsiao-p’in and expanded its boundaries.

This is first of all found in the variety of themes in Dream Memories, a book that has been glorified as a little classic in its own right ever since the revival of interest in the hsiao-p’in in the 1920s. It is not an easy task to categorize or define Chang Tai’s book. It may fall under the general category of sketches (pi-chi), and probably was influenced by two earlier works, Notes from the Plum Blossoms Thatched Hut (Mei-hua ts’ao-t’ang pi-chi) by Chang Ta-fu (1554–1630) and Notes on Lodge Hill (Yü shan chu) by Chang Tai’s friend and relative by marriage Ch’i Piao-chia (1602–45). However, it differs from most works of its kind in that it overflows with detailed profiles of the author’s own life and is impregnated with his emotion and experiences. Placed together, the 122 entries in the eight sections of the work constitute a single book of memoirs of the author’s life before the downfall of the Ming imperial reign, yet separately, each of these randomly arranged pieces stands on its own. A more careful look reveals that thematically, the entries fall into the following eight groups: travel notes (on places of historical interest or scenic beauty), family estates, gardening and pets, biographical sketches of friends and acquaintances, festivals and customs, private collections (books, inkslabs, rockeries, etc.), episodes of life in the past, and epicurean pleasures (eating, tea and wine drinking).

Before Chang Tai, no writer had attempted to use the hsiao-p’in form to write about such varied themes. In each of these pieces, Chang demonstrates a sharp observation of detail and is always able to present a vivid description of events and objects. Like Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, the network of visual images, sounds, scents, flavors, and thoughts of Chang Tai’s “daydreaming” are interwoven into a fabric of memory and confession. All of the pieces in the book are imbued with a melancholy nostalgia and subtle lyricism that can be found only in the works of writers who had direct personal experience of social upheavals in their lifetime, such as in the later poems of Tu Fu (712–70), written on his exile along the Yangtze in Szechwan after the An Lu-shan rebellion (755), or the song lyrics of loyalist (yi-min) poets after the downfall of the Southern Sung in 1279.²² In Dream Memories, as in those poems, one can always discern a sense of contrast, of the wide span of time and space, between past glory and present misery.

The language of Chang Tai’s hsiao-p’in demonstrates his artistic power in integrating the various styles of his predecessors. The pieces in Dream Memories display a resonant lyricism that matches that found in the best of Kuei Yu-kuang. They claim as much liveliness as do the pieces of Yüan Hung-tao, but never the latter’s frivolity and occasional crudity. Like Chung Hsing and T’an Yüan-ch’un, Chang Tai was able to make use of archaic expressions, but his prose always runs with ease and grace, and is free from the syntactic “jerkiness” and obscurity of the Ching-ling school. Chang’s individual style is closest in spirit to that of his senior friend and fellow Chekiang native Wang Ssu-jen. Both are skillful in integrating vernacular expressions into graceful syntactic structure without ever falling into vulgarity. And it is the same sense of humor and wit, characteristic of Wang Ssu-jen’s hsiao-p’in, that keeps Chang Tai’s sorrowful confessions and memoirs from the pitfall of sentimentality. Above all this, however, shines Chang’s individualism.

In the Chinese tradition, the term “great synthesizer” (chi ta-ch’eng che) has been reserved for the highest achievement in literary art, such as the shih poetry of Tu Fu, the prose of Han Yü (768–824), and (perhaps to a lesser extent) the song lyrics of Chou Pang-yen (1056–1121). To synthesize is to observe, distinguish, choose, absorb, and incorporate various elements and to blend and fuse them into a new unity. It is in this sense that Chang Tai may indeed be ranked as the “great synthesizer” of the late Ming hsiao-p’in.

Study of the Hsiao-p’in: State of the Field

After the establishment of the Ch’ing empire, the Manchu emperors decided to model after the Han dynasty in reaffirming Confucianism, especially the Neo-Confucian theories of Chu Hsi and the Ch’eng brothers, which stressed conventional moral and ethical values as a means for ideological control. The traditional civil service recruitment examination was reinstituted, and the rigid “eight-legged essay” (pa-ku wen) was restored during the early eighteenth century. The perennial literary inquisition silenced intellectuals with an individualist mind and partially accounted for the fact that most leading literati engaged themselves in the study of ancient classics and devoted their entire lives to philological scholarship. The hsiao-p’in, which had flourished in the relatively liberal ideological milieu of the late Ming period, dimmed and all but vanished in the next two centuries. The writings of the Kung-an and the Ching-ling schools were in general depreciated and held in contempt by leading writers, many of whom enjoyed imperial patronage. The works of Li Chih in particular, and some of the writings of Hsü Wei, Yüan Hung-tao, and Ch’en Chi-ju, were officially censored. The T’ung-ch’eng school, which emerged on the literary stage in the early eighteenth century and exerted a lasting influence throughout the Ch’ing reign, advocated principles of writing that were frequently opposite in spirit to the hsiao-p’in.

It was not until the New Cultural Movement swept throughout China after 1918 that the hsiao-p’in was rediscovered and emulated. Chou Tso-jen (1885–1968) identified the late Ming hsiao-p’in, especially the ideas of the Kung-an and Ching-ling schools, as a major source of inspiration for the new generation of writers (Pollard). In the 1930s Lin Yutang, as editor-in-chief of a journal that was ironically titled The Analects (after the Confucian classic), led a literary campaign of rediscovery and reevaluation of the late Ming hsiao-p’in. Volumes of late Ming hsiao-p’in that had been suppressed for more than two centuries were reprinted and became instant best-sellers, and many new anthologies were published. The late Ming hsiao-p’in was confirmed as a direct predecessor of the new form of short vernacular prose composition, the hsiao-p’in-wen (Ch’en Wang-tao).

The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in the late 1930s drastically changed the cultural climate in China. The promotion of the hsiao-p’in, because of its usually apolitical nature and leisurely tone, began to face opposition from writers on the left. The genre’s brief restoration was superseded by another period of suppression during several decades of political cataclysm in China. Lin Yutang came to the United States and introduced the hsiao-p’in to the English-speaking public.

In China, after the Communist Party took power in 1949, Lin Yutang was condemned as a “running dog of the American imperialists,” Chou Tso-jen remained in obscurity because of his political involvement during the Sino-Japanese War, and the hsiao-p’in was branded as a “decadent” and “reactionary” literary form. Not surprisingly in such an atmosphere, scholarship in the field was minimal until the 1980s, when the post-Mao political arena provided a more liberal environment for literary studies. In recent years scholarly books on hsiao-p’in, new annotated anthologies, and carefully edited new editions of individual works of late Ming hsiao-p’in authors have mushroomed as if with a vengeance.²³

Across the Taiwan Straits, living under less ideological control, scholars in Taiwan have been able to devote themselves to more serious studies of the genre for a longer period and have provided some of the leading scholarship in the field.²⁴

Despite Lin Yutang’s pathfinding efforts in introducing the hsiao-p’in to the English reader, few serious studies of the genre followed. This is not so surprising, as even today the study of Chinese nonfictional prose in the West lags far behind that of other literary genres such as poetry, fiction, and drama. Between the publication of G. Margouliès’s Le ku-wen chinois in Paris in 1925 and that of Yu-shih Chen’s study of four T’ang and Sung masters of classical prose in 1988, there was virtually no serious study on Chinese nonfictional prose. One may attribute this phenomenon to the philological as well as cultural difficulties of reading Chinese prose. Jordan D. Paper, lamenting the inaccessibility of Chinese prose to the English-reading public, has made a penetrative observation: “A major reason for this vacuum is the inherent difficulty in translating the taut and highly allusive essays into readable English” (p. 67).

On the other hand, the lack of Western scholarship on the genre may also have something to do with the current condition of the study of non-fictional belles-lettres prose in general, which has yet to come of age in the West. Compared to other genres, particularly fiction and poetry, it is a field that literary scholars, from the structuralist to the deconstructionist and beyond, have generally shied away from.²⁵ Much work is still needed in developing a methodology, a form of critical discourse, in and for this important field.

Individual authors have received more recognition. In 1974 Hung Ming-shui initiated a thorough study of Yüan Hung-tao in his doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. This was followed in 1978 by Jonathan Chaves’s graceful translation, with a fine introduction, of the prose and poems of the three Yüan brothers, which was nominated for the National Book Award in Translation. A few years later, a study of Yüan Hung-tao in French joined the intellectual pursuit.²⁶ The theories of the Yüan brothers, especially Hung-tao, were made even more accessible to Western academia by the publication of Chih-p’ing Chou’s learned monograph in 1988. Studies of Hsü Wei and Li Chih have also appeared in journals and chapters of books, though the former usually concentrate on his artworks, and the latter on his intellectual thought and philosophy.

More recently, three new anthologies—one of travel writing (Strassberg) and two of traditional Chinese literature (Mair; Owen 1996)—have included some hsiao-p’in pieces. Owen’s anthology has even devoted an entire section to “late Ming informal prose” (pp. 807–33).

The hsiao-p’in deserves serious recognition in academia and a wider readership in the West. It should not remain uncharted territory in the ever-growing field of sinological scholarship for too long. It is hoped that this book may make its own little contribution, however modest, toward the further advancement and accessibility of the rich heritage of Chinese nonfictional prose to the Western reader.

1. * Asterisks indicate authors and hsiao-p’in pieces included in this anthology.