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東越祭蛇記

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Text ID
KR3l0159
Date
280–400
Dynasty
東晉

Dōngyuè jì shé jì 東越祭蛇記

Records of the Dōngyuè Snake Sacrifice by 闕名

About the work

A single fully-developed zhìguài narrative — the Lǐ Jì 李寄 slays-the-snake story — circulating in the early-medieval tradition under several names. The Kanripo title “Dōngyuè jì shé jì” 東越祭蛇記 is an editor’s title for the excerpted narrative; the same narrative is best known as juàn 19 of Gān Bǎo’s 干寶 Sōushén jì 搜神記 (KR3l0099). The story is one of the most celebrated zhìguài narratives in the corpus and one of the earliest fully-realised Chinese accounts of female martial heroism.

Tiyao

Abstract

The narrative: in the Yōnglíng 庸嶺 mountains of Mǐn (eastern Yuè / modern Fújiàn) lurks a giant snake — seventy or eighty zhàng long, ten and more wéi in girth — that demands an annual offering of a twelve-or-thirteen-year-old girl. Year after year, the dūwèi 都尉 and chángshǐ 長史 of the Eastern-Yě 東冶 commandery supply girls from servant-households and convict-families. Nine girls die. In the tenth year Lǐ Jì 李寄, sixth daughter of Lǐ Dàn 李誕 of Jiānglè 將樂 county, volunteers — she has no sons in the family to inherit the family wealth and resolves to die for xiào (filial sacrifice) so as to earn her father a son-in-substance. She brings a sharp sword and a quǎn (a hound trained to bite the snake), waits at the cave-mouth, lures the snake out with rice-balls dipped in honey, sets the dog on it, and dispatches it with the sword. She then enters the cave and finds the skulls of the previous nine victims. King of Yuè 越王 marries her; her father Lǐ Dàn becomes a chief of Jiānglè. In subsequent years the country is at peace.

The narrative is preserved most completely in the Sōushén jì (juàn 19); a substantial variant is in the Yìyuàn 異苑 (Liú Jìngshū 劉敬叔, 劉敬叔); and the Tàipíng guǎngjì (juàn 456, snake-strangeness) collects three or four versions. The Kanripo “Dōngyuè jì shé jì” edition is a stand-alone presentation of the narrative as an independently-titled text — perhaps reflecting one of the more substantial Sòng léishū citations under that title. The narrative is anonymous; the Sōushén jì attribution to Gān Bǎo is the Eastern-Jìn compilation horizon.

The dating bracket adopted here (280–400) reflects the Sōushén jì compilation horizon (the standard 320s placement) plus the slightly broader cushion appropriate to a story that may circulate orally before its 4th-c. literary fixing. The narrative’s geographical setting (the Mǐn region under the Eastern-Yě commandery) and the apparent reference to Wú-Yuè-era kingship suggest a Yuè-region oral substrate considerably older than the Sōushén jì recension.

Lǐ Jì has become a foundational figure of Chinese martial-female heroism — she is one of the earliest fully-individualised girl-heroes in Chinese literature, alongside Huā Mùlán 花木蘭 (later), and a key figure in feminist re-readings of pre-modern Chinese narrative. Her decision-monologue, in which she refuses the implicit substitution of male-progeny inheritance for daughter-sacrifice, is one of the more remarkable surviving early-medieval prose passages of female speech.

Translations and research

  • DeWoskin, Kenneth J., and J. I. Crump, Jr., trans. In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record (Stanford, 1996). Translates the Sōushén jì narrative.
  • Campany, Robert Ford. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (SUNY, 1996), with discussion of the Lǐ Jì narrative.
  • Allen, Sarah M. “Tales Retold: Narrative Variation in a Tang Story,” HJAS 66.1 (2006): 105–43 — comparative treatment of the narrative variants.
  • Idema, Wilt L. Heroines of Jiangyong (UWashP, 2009), comparative discussion of Chinese female-heroism narratives.
  • Lǔ Xùn 魯迅. Gǔ xiǎoshuō gōuchén 古小說鉤沉.

Other points of interest

The Lǐ Jì narrative is one of the most-anthologised pre-Táng Chinese zhìguài in modern Chinese curricula (it appears in standard middle-school gǔwén anthologies) and is among the most-translated short pieces from the corpus into English, French, and Japanese. Its persistent presence in Chinese pedagogy and feminist criticism — from the May Fourth period through the 1990s revival of “nǚyīng 女英 narratives” — has given it a cultural afterlife substantially exceeding that of the surrounding Sōushén jì material.

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