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燕丹子

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Text ID
KR3l0131
Date
-200–200
Dynasty
漢

Yān Dānzǐ 燕丹子

The Book of Crown Prince Dān of Yān by 佚名 (anonymous)

About the work

A short narrative work, transmitted in three juàn (sometimes one), recounting the failed assassination of the Qín king Zhèng 政 (the future First Emperor) by the swordsman Jīng Kē 荊軻 at the behest of Crown Prince Dān 丹 of the state of Yān 燕. The book opens with Dān’s hostage-experience at the Qín court, his miraculous escape (the famous prodigy of crows whitening their heads and horses growing horns 烏白頭，馬生角), his recruitment of the strategist Tián Guāng 田光 and of Jīng Kē 荊軻, the gift of the head of the renegade Qín general Fán Yúqī 樊於期, the parting at the Yì River 易水, and the failed assassination at the Xiányáng court (227 BCE). The work covers in narrative-fictional form essentially the same material that Sīmǎ Qiān 司馬遷 placed in his Cìkè lièzhuàn 刺客列傳 (Records of the Grand Historian, juǎn 86), but at greater length, in florid rhetoric, and with several supernatural embellishments and additional anecdotes (Dān’s banquet for Jīng Kē, the offering of a beauty’s severed hands on a jade platter, etc.) that the Shǐ jì lacks. It is universally taken to be one of the earliest extant pieces of Chinese sustained narrative fiction (xiǎoshuō), occupying a position alongside KR3l0085 Mù tiānzǐ zhuàn 穆天子傳 as foundational to the zázhuàn / proto-xiǎoshuō tradition.

Tiyao

Lost; no original 提要; fragments only.

Abstract

The Yān Dānzǐ is registered in the Suí shū jīngjí zhì 隋書經籍志 (under xiǎoshuō, 1 juàn) and in both Táng bibliographic treatises (the Jiù Táng shū jīngjí zhì and the Xīn Táng shū yìwén zhì). Authorship is given anonymously throughout; modern scholarship rejects any of the occasional later attributions (Yāndānzǐ being framed as a memoir of Dān himself is plainly impossible, and the Yuè Yīng 樂英 / Sīmǎ Xiāngrú 司馬相如 attributions found in some late catalogues are without foundation). The internal language and the lexicon of the surviving text are consistent with late Warring States to Western or Eastern Hàn composition — i.e., shortly after the events themselves. Some Six Dynasties scholars (notably the Tàipíng yùlǎn citers) and modern scholars (Yú Jiāxī 余嘉錫, Lǐ Jiànguó 李劍國) accept a Hàn-era date; others (Luó Gēnzé 羅根澤) argue for a Late Hàn / WèiJìn date, citing rhetorical features. The composition window adopted here (c. 200 BCE – 200 CE) brackets the consensus.

The work was lost as a transmitted unitary text by the early Sòng — the Chóngwén zǒngmù and the bibliographic treatises of the Sòng shǐ both note its absence — and survived only in quotations within the great Sòng lèishū (Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽, Tàipíng guǎngjì 太平廣記, Yìwén lèijù 藝文類聚) and (crucially) embedded in full within the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn 永樂大典 juàn 4908. From this Yǒnglè dàdiǎn nucleus, the Qīng kǎozhèng scholar Sūn Xīngyǎn 孫星衍 (1753–1818) produced the standard reconstruction in 1788 in three juàn, printed in his Píngjīnguǎn cóngshū 平津館叢書 and in the Dàinángé cóngshū 岱南閣叢書. Sūn’s text is the basis of all modern editions. The three-juàn division (Dān’s escape from Qín; the recruitment of Jīng Kē; the assassination attempt and its aftermath) was Sūn’s editorial imposition on what the Suí shū had listed as a single juàn; later scholars (Chéng Yìzhōng 程毅中) have used a single-juàn form. The text reconstructed here is essentially what survived in the Yǒnglè dàdiǎn corpus, and is universally regarded as substantively pre-Táng.

The work is significant primarily as a precursor to mature Chinese narrative fiction: its extended set-piece dialogue, its named subsidiary characters, its rhetorical apostrophes, and the elaborated parting-at-Yì-River scene (which becomes a perpetual topos of farewell in later poetry) make it a literary work in a way that the Shǐ jì’s historiographical treatment is not. Lǐ Jiànguó treats it as the earliest substantial example of zázhuàn 雜傳 (miscellaneous biography), the bridge between Warring-States historical anecdote (Zhànguó cè 戰國策) and Six-Dynasties zhìrén xiǎoshuō 志人小說. Wilkinson (A New Manual §31) treats the Yān Dānzǐ as one of the founding works of early Chinese fiction.

Translations and research

  • Franke, Herbert. “Zur Frage der Verbreitung mantischer Praktiken in der chinesischen Geschichte: das Yan Danzi.” Asiatische Studien 34 (1980): 11–34.
  • Cheng, Yi-tsung 程毅中. Gǔ xiǎo-shuō jiǎn-mù 古小說簡目 (Zhōng-huá, 1981). Lists the Yān Dānzǐ with full bibliographical apparatus.
  • Lǐ Jiàn-guó 李劍國. Táng qián zhì-guài xiǎo-shuō shǐ 唐前志怪小說史 (Nán-kāi, 1984; rev. 2005). §3.2 on the Yān Dānzǐ as proto-xiǎo-shuō.
  • Yú Jiāxī 余嘉錫. Sì-kù tí-yào biàn-zhèng 四庫提要辨證, zǐ-bù notice on the Yān Dānzǐ.
  • Wèi Jié 衛紹生 ed., Yān Dānzǐ jiào-zhù 燕丹子校注 (Zhōng-zhōu gǔ-jí, 2014). Modern critical edition with full collation against TPYL, TPGJ, and YLDD citations.
  • Riftin, Boris L. (李福清), and Wáng Lì-nà 王立娜. Translation of Yān Dānzǐ into Russian (Moscow: Nauka, 1972).
  • Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual §31 and §62 on early fiction.

Other points of interest

The Yān Dānzǐ episode of Jīng Kē 荊軻 receiving the severed hands of a beauty on a jade plate as a gift is one of the most famous departures from the Shǐ jì’s austere account, and was singled out by Yáo Zhènzōng 姚振宗 (Qīng) as evidence of the work’s literary (rather than historiographical) ambitions. The parting at Yì River 易水 — Jīng Kē’s Yì shuǐ gē 易水歌 (“the wind soughs, the Yì waters chill; the brave warrior, once gone, will not return”) — is found in both Shǐ jì 86 and Yān Dānzǐ; the textual relationship is contested but the Yān Dānzǐ version has a more elaborate setting. The work is the principal pre-Táng source for the Jīng Kē legend’s persistence in later poetry and drama (Chén Lín 陳琳’s fù, Táo Qián’s Yǒng Jīng Kē 詠荊軻, Luò Bīnwáng’s Yú Yì shuǐ sòngbié 於易水送別, etc.).

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