Qíxié jì 齊諧記
Records of Qíxié (Records of the Strange) by 東陽無疑 (撰)
About the work
A LiúSòng zhìguài 志怪 collection compiled by Dōngyáng Wúyí 東陽無疑 (東陽無疑, fl. mid-5th c.). The title invokes the Qí xié 齊諧 of the Zhuāngzǐ — the work of the strange-collector to whom Zhuāng Zǐ alludes in the opening of “Xiāoyáo yóu” 逍遙遊 — and signals the work’s self-conscious affiliation to the zhuangzian tradition of paradoxology. The work is closely paired with Wú Jūn’s 吳均 (469–520) Xù Qíxié jì 續齊諧記 (a continuation of the same title in the next generation), and was one of the most popular zhìguài compilations of the southern dynasties.
Tiyao
Abstract
The Suí shū jīngjí zhì 隋書經籍志 lists “Qíxié jì 7 juàn, by Dōngyáng Wúyí of the Sòng” under zǐbù xiǎoshuō; both Táng catalogs preserve the entry. The work was lost as a transmitted unitary text by no later than the Sòng. Surviving fragments are preserved most importantly in the Tàipíng yùlǎn 太平御覽 and Tàipíng guǎngjì 太平廣記, in the Yìwén lèijù 藝文類聚, in the Běitáng shūchāo 北堂書鈔, and scattered in TángSòng léishū. Lǔ Xùn collects the surviving fragments in Gǔ xiǎoshuō gōuchén 古小說鉤沉.
The dating bracket adopted here (420–479) corresponds to the LiúSòng dynasty, the standard placement for Dōngyáng Wúyí (whose precise lifedates are not preserved). The work is one of the principal LiúSòng zhìguài compilations, contemporary with Liú Yìqìng’s Yōumíng lù and the Liú-Sòng-era Yìyuàn.
Among the preserved fragments the best known is the Dǒng Zhāozhī yǔ yǐ 董昭之與蟻 (Dǒng Zhāozhī and the ant) narrative: Dǒng Zhāozhī of Dāngyáng 當陽 county in Wú crosses the Qiántáng 錢塘 river, sees a desperate ant clinging to a reed; over his fellow-passengers’ objections he rescues it; later the ant-king (in human form) visits him to announce that any troubles he may have should be reported to him; years later, wrongly implicated in a criminal case and imprisoned, Dǒng Zhāozhī petitions in his dream; the ants gnaw through the prison-bars and he escapes. The narrative is the locus classicus of the Chinese bào ēn 報恩 (gratitude-for-kindness) topos in animal-fable form and is widely anthologised. Other surviving fragments include immortal-realm narratives (a Daoist bāngxiá 蚌仙 ascension) and a number of jiànguǐ episodes.
The work’s relationship to Wú Jūn’s Xù Qíxié jì (in 1 juàn) and its successor-titles (Liáng Wáng Jiā 王嘉’s Shíyí jì etc.) constitutes one of the better-documented sequences of late-Liù-Cháo intra-generic continuation in the zhìguài corpus. The Qíxié / Xù Qíxié pair is sometimes treated together as a unitary tradition.
Translations and research
- Lǔ Xùn 魯迅. Gǔ xiǎoshuō gōuchén 古小說鉤沉 (1909–11; publ. 1938). Principal modern reconstruction.
- Wáng Guó-liáng 王國良. Wèi-Jìn nán-běi-cháo zhì-guài xiǎoshuō yán-jiū 魏晉南北朝志怪小說研究.
- Lǐ Jiàn-guó 李劍國. Táng-qián zhì-guài xiǎoshuō shǐ 唐前志怪小說史 (rev. 2005).
- Campany, Robert Ford. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (SUNY, 1996).
- No major monograph or critical translation specific to the Qíxié jì located in Western languages.
Other points of interest
The Dǒng Zhāozhī yǔ yǐ narrative — the ant-king’s bào ēn / prison-rescue — is one of the most-anthologised and most-translated pre-Táng Chinese animal-fables, appearing in standard middle-school Chinese pedagogical anthologies and in collections of Chinese folktales worldwide. Its cultural circulation has been wide enough to make it a kind of folk-canonical Qíxié jì identifier — a fragment that has rather outshone the parent work in popular reception.
The title Qíxié — borrowed from Zhuāngzǐ “Xiāoyáo yóu” 逍遙遊 — is itself a witty self-affiliation: the Zhuāngzǐ alludes to “Qí xié zhě, zhì guài zhě yě” (“Qí Xié is a recorder-of-the-strange”), and Dōngyáng Wúyí’s adoption of the title positions the work explicitly as continuation of the most ancient Chinese tradition of paradoxological narrative.
Links
- Lǔ Xùn, Gǔ xiǎoshuō gōuchén.
- https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/齊諧記