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笑林

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Text ID
KR3l0129
Date
180–230
Dynasty
漢-魏

Xiàolín 笑林

Forest of Jokes by 邯鄲淳 (attributed)

About the work

The first Chinese joke-book — a Late-Hàn / early-Wèi collection of comic anecdotes attributed to the CáoWèi wénshì and calligrapher 邯鄲淳 Hándān Chún (c. 132 – after 221). Lost as a unitary text by the high Táng; the work has been reconstructed from quotations preserved in Yìwén lèijù 藝文類聚, Běitáng shūchāo 北堂書鈔, Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽, Tàipíng guǎngjì 太平廣記, Sǔn pǔ 筍譜, the Gànzhū jí 紺珠集, Léilín záshuō 類林雜說, the Lèi jù 類聚, and other Sòng léishū. The Kanripo edition is a typeset modern reconstruction (the tls base-edition tag indicates a Taiwanese reconstruction-text witness) containing 26 numbered anecdotes, each followed by the citation-trail to its supporting léishū source. The work’s mature 20–30-anecdote range is essentially the range that modern reconstructions (Lǔ Xùn 1912, Wáng Lìqì 1956, Lǔ Yǎjūn 1986) have established.

The 26 reconstructed tales include the famous Wúrén zhì jīng (Wú-man at the capital, tricked into eating làosū cheese), the Tàiyuán rén yè shī huǒ (Tàiyuán man losing the fire), the Mǒu jiǎ yè bào jí (the man at the Kǒng Wénjǔ anecdote: “Blame people according to their capacity”), the Yǒu rén diào sàng (the fool at the wake), the Shěn Héng dì Jùn (the stingy host), the Zhào Bógōng (the man with the plum in his navel), the Hàn Sītú Cuī Liè and Bào Jiān (the bumpkin official), the Chǔ rén tān shānjī (the man with the cock he thinks is a phoenix), the Píngyuán Táoqiūshì (the man who returned his wife seeing the aged mother), the Mǒu jiǎ wèi bàfǔ zuǒ (the host who confuses banquet-music with a prescription), the Nánfāng rén zhì jīngshī (the southerner who eats horse-dung in the capital), the Rén yǒu zhuó gēng zhě (the over-salting cook), the Jiǎ mǎi ròu (the meat-thief with the meat in his mouth), the Yáo Biāo and Zhāng Wēn (the Wúxìng ShěnHéng salt-into-the-river anecdote), the Chǔ rén dú Huáinán (the man hiding behind a leaf), the Hàn shì lǎo rén (the miser who dies and forfeits his estate), the Yǒu jiǎ yù yèjiàn yìzǎi (the man caught quoting Gōngyáng Zhuàn), the Jiǎ yǔ yǐ dòuzhēng (the nose-biting fight), the Jiǎ fùmǔ zài (the over-elegant student), the Cāng rén yù xiānggòng diào sàng (the funeral with mutually-kicking guests), the Yǒu chī xù (the foolish son-in-law), the Lǔ yǒu zhí chánggān rù chéngmén zhě (the man with the long pole at the city-gate — “saw it in half!”), the Qí rén jiù Zhào rén xué sè (the Qí-man tuning his zither with the bridge glued in place), the Wúguó Hú Yōng (the love-bird couple buried together), and the Hàn rén yǒu shì Wú (the man eating the bamboo-mat thinking it bamboo-shoots). Many of these — particularly the long-pole-at-the-city-gate, the phoenix-from-the-Chǔ-fool, and the southerner-and-horse-dung — became proverbial in Chinese culture, surviving into modern chéngyǔ and figurative speech.

Tiyao

No tiyao in source. The Xiàolín is not represented in the Sìkù quánshū (the catalog meta records source: krp-titles, i.e. the Kanripo index, not a Sìkù witness); the work was lost as a unitary text before the Táng, and the only edition is the modern reconstruction. The Suí shū jīngjí zhì lists “Hándān Chún Xiàolín in 3 juàn,” but no text under that title is recorded in any post-Táng catalog. The classical Sòng reconstruction is Gāo Sìsūn’s 高似孫 Wěi lüè 緯略; the modern critical reconstructions are Lǔ Xùn’s Gǔxiǎoshuō gōuchén 古小說鉤沉 (1912) and Wáng Lìqì’s Lìdài xiàohuà jí 歷代笑話集 (1956), with subsequent enlargements by Wáng Lìqì and Wáng Zhēnmín’s 1995 Zhōngguó xiàohuà dàguān 中國笑話大觀.

Abstract

The Xiàolín is universally recognised as the first (or earliest surviving) Chinese joke-book — the founding text of the xiàohuà 笑話 genre that flourished in the Míng and Qīng in such collections as Féng Mènglóng’s KR3l0089-related Xiào fǔ 笑府. Its compilation is securely attributed in Sòng catalogues to 邯鄲淳 Hándān Chún (c. 132 – after 221), the Late-Hàn / CáoWèi wénshì and calligrapher recorded in Péi Sōngzhī’s Sānguó zhì commentary as having received Cáo Zhí’s extraordinary attention (cf. the Person note). The work’s bracket (180–230) is the standard window: Hándān Chún’s active life from the Xīpíng era of Hàn Língdì (180s) to the early years of Wèi Wéndì (Cáo Pī, r. 220–226). Wilkinson §53.3.2 notes that “several pre-Tang collections of jokes are mentioned for the first time in the Jīngjízhì of the Suí shū; none have survived” — the Xiàolín is the head of this lost tradition, surviving only in citations.

Catalog-vs-external discrepancy. The Kanripo catalog meta records the author Hándān Chún under dynasty 後魏 (Northern Wèi, 386–534). This is a clear catalog error: Hándān Chún is the Late-Hàn / CáoWèi figure, fl. late 2nd – early 3rd century, attested in the Hòu Hàn shū, the Sānguó zhì commentary, and CBDB id 511858 (where he is correctly placed under Sānguó Wèi). The error in the catalog likely arose from a homophonic or paleographic confusion between 後魏 (Northern Wèi) and (the Three-Kingdoms) Wèi 魏 — both reign-titles using the same character 魏 — in the source from which the catalog meta was extracted. The present entry corrects this in line with the Hòu Hàn shū, Sānguó zhì, and modern reference works (Knechtges’ Wenxuan commentary; Wilkinson §53.3.2); the dynasty has been recorded as 漢-魏 here to reflect the actual historical placement.

The work’s content — broad social satire (lampooning bumpkins, misers, regional types, pedants, the over-eager and the obtuse) — is in significant continuity with the Hàn fù tradition of huájī (humour and trickery) discussed by Knechtges 1970–71. Several of its set-pieces — most famously the Lǔ yǒu zhí chánggān rù chéngmén zhě (the man with the long pole at the city-gate, told he should saw it in half by a self-described non-sage-who-has-seen-much) — became literary commonplaces, cited in Sòng biji and into modern proverb. The Chǔ rén dú Huáinán fāng dé “tángláng sì chán zì zhàng yè kě yǐ yǐn xíng” tale (the Chǔ-fool who reads the Huáinánzǐ on the mantis’s invisibility-leaf and tries to use it to commit shoplifting) generated the chéngyǔ yīyè zhàngmù 一葉障目 (“one leaf blocking the eyes”) still in current use.

The work is the principal evidence that the Chinese xiàohuà genre — distinct from the zhìguài of anomaly and the bǐjì of miscellaneous notes — emerged as a self-conscious literary form already in the HànWèi transition, two centuries before the Shìshuō xīnyǔ KR3l0002. Modern scholarship (Baccini 2016, Chey and Davis 2011, Knechtges 1970–71) treats it as the foundational text of the Chinese humour tradition.

Translations and research

  • Baccini, Giulia. “Traditional Chinese Jestbooks and Ming Revival,” in Tiziana Lippiello et al., eds., Linking Ancient and Contemporary Continuities and Discontinuities in Chinese Literature, Sinica Venetiana 3 (2016): 69–80. Open access. The principal recent English study of the Chinese jestbook genre; treats the Xiào-lín as its starting point.
  • Baccini, Giulia. Il “Xiaolin” 笑林 di Handan Chun e la tradizione dei testi umoristici in Cina antica. PhD dissertation, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, 2010. The standard modern monograph; full Italian translation of the reconstructed Xiào-lín with commentary.
  • Chey, Jocelyn, and Jessica Milner Davis, eds. Humour in Chinese Life and Letters: Classical and Traditional Approaches (HKUP, 2011). Treats the Xiào-lín as the founding text of the Chinese humour tradition.
  • Knechtges, David R. “Wit, Humor, and Satire in Early Chinese Literature (to A.D. 220),” Monumenta Serica 29 (1970–71): 79–98. Foundational English-language study, with discussion of the Xiào-lín in the late-Han humour context.
  • Lǔ Xùn 魯迅. Gǔ-xiǎo-shuō gōu-chén 古小說鉤沉 (1912; rprt. Rén-mín wén-xué, 1953). The standard reconstruction of the Xiào-lín from léi-shū citations.
  • Wáng Lì-qì 王利器, ed. Lì-dài xiào-huà jí 歷代笑話集 (Shanghai gǔ-jí, 1956). The standard Chinese collection of pre-modern Chinese jokes, with the reconstructed Xiào-lín as the opening text.
  • Wáng Lì-qì 王利器 and Wáng Zhēn-mín 王贞珉, eds. Zhōngguó xiào-huà dà-guān 中國笑話大觀 (Běi-jīng, 1995). Expanded reconstruction.
  • Matsueda Shigeo 松枝茂夫, ed. Rekidai shōwa sen 歴代笑話選 (Heibonsha, 1970). Scholarly Japanese translation of over 2,000 jokes from the lì-dài tradition; includes selections from the Xiào-lín.

Other points of interest

The Xiàolín’s status as the first Chinese joke-book is foundational for the xiàohuà genre; Wilkinson §53.3.2.3 places it in the Han–Wǔdài division of the Chinese humour tradition. Its loss as a unitary text and its survival in léishū citations is a textbook case of the Sòng léishū tradition as a preservation-mechanism for otherwise-lost Hàn–Wèi short-form literature.

The reconstruction-tradition itself — Lǔ Xùn 1912, Wáng Lìqì 1956, Baccini 2010 — has produced incrementally tighter texts; modern counts range from 22 to 29 attested anecdotes, depending on inclusion criteria. The 26-anecdote text preserved in the Kanripo edition (tls base) is the central modern recension.

The Wèi shū records (per Péi Sōngzhī) that Hándān Chún was a calligrapher of the Wèi Sāntǐ shíjīng 魏三體石經 — making him simultaneously the founder of the Chinese joke-book tradition and one of the canonical calligraphers of the early-Wèi state — a striking dual eminence rarely paralleled in Chinese cultural history.

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