Máoyán jí 茅簷集
Collected Works of the Thatched-Eaves Studio by 魏學洢 (撰)
About the work
The Máoyán jí 茅簷集 in eight juǎn is the collected prose and verse of 魏學洢 Wèi Xuéyī (1596–1625; zì Zǐjìng 子敬, hào Máoyán 茅檐), eldest son of the Dōnglín martyr 魏大中 (1575–1625). He died of grief and exhaustion in the same year as his father, after vainly attempting to ransom him from the Dōngchǎng prison and then facing the same zhuībǐ (pursuit for restitution of fabricated bribes) himself. He was never an official and held no examination degree above zhūshēng; he is principally remembered as the author of the much-anthologised Hézhōu jì 核舟記 (Account of the Peach-Pit Boat), one of the canonical pieces of late-Míng xiǎopǐn / micro-essay prose. The collection was first printed by his father’s disciple 錢棻 Qián Fēn (with a preface by 錢士升 Qián Shìshēng) and re-engraved later by his younger brother 魏學濂 Wèi Xuélián; the latter impression is the WYG ancestor. The work’s title in the Sìkù meta-catalog has been written 茅薝集 (with 薝 ‘plant-name’); but the source-file and the WYG redaction itself reads consistently 茅簷集 (with 簷 ‘eaves’) — the latter is the original studio-name and is followed here. The character variant in the catalog is taken to be a copyist’s slip.
Tiyao
Your servants etc. respectfully memorialise. The Máoyán jí in eight juǎn was composed by Wèi Xuéyī 魏學洢 of the Míng dynasty. Xuéyī, zì Zǐjìng 子敬, a man of Jiāshàn 嘉善, was the eldest son of 魏大中 Wèi Dàzhōng. When Dàzhōng crossed the yān (the eunuchs) and was arrested, Xuéyī changed his dress and his name and hid at the home of 鹿善繼 in Dìngxīng, scheming by every means to ransom him — to no avail. When the coffin came home, in the end he died of grief. The world has called this ‘loyal minister and filial son gathered into one household’; the events are fully set forth in Dàzhōng’s Míngshǐ biography, and what the various books record is broadly the same. However: Xuéyī still had an aged mother, and to die without effect — some have wondered whether this was perhaps an excess. Now if one looks in his collection at his letter to Pān Màozhuāng 潘茂莊, where he says ‘the pursuit is upon me, I am about to go to the Zhèjiāng prison’; and at his farewell letter to the village elders, where he says ‘the official warrant has come and I shall die in a day or two; the household is broken and there is no more to say’ — then we see that, after Dàzhōng’s death, the so-called fabricated charge of having taken 3,300 liǎng in bribes from Yáng Hào and Xióng Tíngbì was still being levied by the offices on the family. Xuéyī had been worn down by long anxiety and exhaustion beforehand, was prostrated by accumulated grief afterwards, and now the eunuch faction’s terror further pressed on him from every side; there was no living to be made of it. This was no merely closing the eyes and not looking again, no breach of the injunction against destroying one’s body: his filial piety lay in his father’s day of disaster, when he exhausted strength and mind, walked the cliff and the river, ventured ten thousand deaths to hope for one life. When one now reads his letters to his friends, the cry-from-the-heart in them is enough to move heaven and earth and disturb ghosts and gods. But Qián Shìshēng 錢士升 and others, when they wrote prefaces, sought only to call him one who ‘destroyed his body to die with his father’, and so concealed the matter of the zhuībǐ warrant — that is to know Xuéyī shallowly.
The collection was first printed by 錢棻 Qián Fēn; Fēn was Dàzhōng’s disciple. Re-printed by his younger brother 魏學濂 Xuélián — and this is the present edition. Xuélián let his family’s name fall; the world cannot, on account of Dàzhōng, indulge him with a soft hand. By this we see all the more that Xuéyī’s enduring honour is his own, not borrowed from his father’s shade.
Respectfully collated, sixth month of Qiánlóng 46 (= 1781). Chief compilation officers: your servants Jì Yún 紀昀, Lù Xīxióng 陸錫熊, Sūn Shìyì 孫士毅. Chief collation officer: your servant Lù Fèichí 陸費墀.
Abstract
The Máoyán jí is one of the most famous fùzǐ liǎngshì xùnjié (father-and-son both died for the dynasty) collections of the late Míng — the parallel Dōnglín pair to the Shēn Zhōngmǐn shījí (KR4e0242) of 1644. The textual history is unusually well documented in the Sìkù tiyao itself: a first impression by Qián Fēn shortly after 1625 with a Qián Shìshēng preface (the Sìkù editors retain the text but explicitly criticise that preface for moral euphemism); a second engraving by the younger brother Wèi Xuélián, ancestor of the WYG state.
The eight juǎn contain a mixed prose-and-verse arrangement of the genres of the standard biéjí: fù and gǔshī at the head, sìyán and juéjù, a substantial corpus of letters (in which the principal documentary witnesses to Wèi Xuéyī’s last weeks are preserved — the letters to Pān Màozhuāng 潘茂莊 and to the Jiāshàn village elders quoted by the Sìkù compilers), xù, jì, míng, zàn, and the Hézhōu jì 核舟記.
The textual interest is double:
- As documentary witness to the Tiānqǐ 1625 Dōnglín liù jūnzǐ catastrophe and to the zhuībǐ pursuit-of-restitution practice — the latter a feature of the Wèi Zhōngxián persecution that often killed family members years after the principal had died and which is here directly attested by the victim.
- As literary monument: the Hézhōu jì, written before his father’s catastrophe (its date is not in the piece itself, but it must antedate 1625), is one of the most often anthologised late-Míng prose pieces, included in Zhāng Cháo’s 張潮 Yúchū xīnzhì 虞初新志 and continuously in Chinese-language teaching anthologies. Its subject is a miniature carving by Wáng Shūyuǎn 王叔遠 of Sū Shì’s Chìbì yóu (Red-Cliff excursion) cut on a single peach-stone, with Sū Shì, Huáng Tíngjiān, the Buddhist monk Fóyìn, and the boatman all minutely realised; the essay is a tour de force of late-Míng ekphrastic prose.
The composition window runs from c. 1610 (his teens) to 1625 (his death). The Sìkù compilers’ careful, ethically sensitive tiyao — itself one of the more striking specimens of Jì Yún’s tiyao prose — turns on the discrimination between the moralising yǔnshēn xùnfù trope offered by Qián Shìshēng’s preface and the much harder reality of the zhuībǐ warrant. Their conclusion — that Wèi Xuéyī’s honour stands on its own terms and not under his father’s shade — anticipates the post-Míng-loyalist rehabilitation movement that culminates in Qiánlóng 41 (1776).
Translations and research
Hé-zhōu jì 核舟記 has been translated into English several times — among others by Lin Yutang as ‘Description of a Boat Carved on a Peach-Pit’ in The Importance of Living (1937); and by Christopher Rea in Wayward Words: Chinese Comedy and the Translation Question; see also the literary-historical treatment in Wai-yee Li, ‘The Late Ming Moment’ (in Susan Daruvala et al., eds., China and the West: Reconsidering Three Centuries of Encounter). The piece is treated in modern critical literature as exemplifying the late-Míng xiǎo-pǐn aesthetic of miniaturisation and qí-pǐn (curio-object) attention. For Wèi Xué-yī’s wider context see:
- Charles O. Hucker, The Censorial System of Ming China (Stanford 1966), chap. 5 on the Tiān-qǐ persecutions;
- John W. Dardess, Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627 (Honolulu 2002) — the standard treatment of the Dōng-lín persecution, with Wèi Dà-zhōng as one of its central cases.
A modern edition is the Wèi Xué-yī jí 魏學洢集 (Hángzhōu: Zhèjiāng gǔjí, 2011, ed. Wáng Lìjūn 王利軍), based on the WYG with the recovered Qián Fēn-print readings supplied as variants.
Other points of interest
The title-character discrepancy 茅薝 (catalog meta) vs 茅簷 (WYG text and modern editions) reflects an easy graphic confusion in unicode font tables and CJK input methods; the original studio-name is 茅簷 (‘Thatched Eaves’), referring to Wèi Xuéyī’s family residence at Jiāshàn. The Sìkù tiyao itself heads the piece Máoyán jí.
The Sìkù tiyao’s analysis of Qián Shìshēng’s preface is one of the most morally pointed pieces of book-criticism in Jì Yún’s tiyao corpus, and is a standard example in modern surveys of Sìkù methodology.