Xǐngshì Héngyán 醒世恆言
Stories to Awaken the World by 馮夢龍 (撰)
About the work
Xǐngshì Héngyán 醒世恆言 (“Stories to Awaken the World”) is the third of the three great Sānyán 三言 collections of vernacular short fiction (huáběn 話本) compiled and edited by 馮夢龍 馮夢龍 (1574–1646). It contains forty stories ranging from anecdotes of romantic love, domestic conflict, and moral retribution to tales of the supernatural, Buddhist conversion, and official corruption. Together with the Yùshì Míng-yán 喻世明言 (KR4k0080) and the Jǐngshì Tōng-yán 警世通言, it forms the canonical Sānyán 三言 corpus of 120 vernacular short stories — the high-water mark of late-Míng popular fiction.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
Abstract
馮夢龍 馮夢龍 (CBDB 131175; 1574–1646), zì Yóulóng 猶龍, hào Mòhán zhāirén 墨憨齋人, was a prolific editor, playwright, and writer of Sūzhōu 蘇州. He compiled the three Sānyán collections between 1620 and 1627 by selecting, revising, and supplementing Song and Yuan oral storytelling scripts (huáběn 話本) with his own compositions. The preface of the Xǐngshì Héngyán, dated to the seventh year of Tiānqǐ 天啟 (1627) — “mid-autumn of Chóngru dīngmǎo” 崇儒之代天啟丁卯中秋 — and signed by the pen-name Kě-yī jūshì 可一居士 of Lǒngxī 隴西, makes explicit its relationship to the other two Sānyán volumes: “Míng-yán instructs the ignorant; Tōng-yán suits popular taste; Héng-yán (lasting/constant words) is inexhaustible in repetition and capable of enduring transmission.”
The text begins with a preface (xù 敘) by the compiler explaining the moral and pedagogical function of the collection. The forty stories cover subjects including:
- ch. 3: “The oil-seller monopolizes the peerless beauty” (賣油郎獨佔花魁) — one of the most celebrated stories in the corpus;
- ch. 8: “Governor Qiao’s confused matchmaking” (喬太守亂點鴛鴦譜);
- ch. 23: the problematic story about the Jin emperor Hǎilíng 海陵, suppressed in most editions as too explicit.
Wilkinson (Chinese History: A New Manual, §31.1) characterizes the Sānyán as reaching “its zenith in the late Ming” and notes that the 120 stories have been translated into English by Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang (UWP, 2000–9). The Xǐngshì Héngyán is not in the Sìkù quánshū 四庫全書 (excluded from the WYG collection along with the other Sānyán texts).
The Kanripo text is the full 40-story collection. The earliest known edition dates from 1627; the collection was later excerpted in the Jīngǔ Qíguān 今古奇觀 selected by Bàowēng lǎorén 抱甕老人 (final Ming, earliest extant edition 1740).
Translations and research
- Yang, Shuhui, and Yunqin Yang, tr. Stories to Awaken the World: A Ming Dynasty Collection (Vol. 3 of the Sanyan series). University of Washington Press, 2009. Full translation.
- Hanan, Patrick, tr. Falling in love: Stories from Ming China. Harvard University Press, 2006. Five stories from Xǐngshì Héngyán.
- Hanan, Patrick. The Chinese Vernacular Story. Harvard University Press, 1981. Standard scholarly account of the genre.
- Sibau, Maria Franca. Reading for the Moral: Exemplarity and the Confucian Virtues in the Xingshi hengyan. SUNY Press, 2019.
Other points of interest
The 23rd story of the third volume (ch. 23 in this reckoning), “The Jin Emperor Hǎilíng’s Lust Leads to His Ruin” (金海陵縱慾亡身), was omitted from most traditional editions on grounds of excessive explicitness. It has been separately translated by Gopal Sukhu as The Unbridled Lust and Untimely Death of Prince Hailing (New Haven: Schwab, 2011).
Links
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_to_Awaken_the_World
- Wikipedia (Feng Menglong): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_Menglong