Yùshì Míng-yán 喻世明言
Illustrious Words to Instruct the World by 馮夢龍 (撰)
About the work
Yùshì Míng-yán 喻世明言 (originally published as Gǔjīn Xiǎoshuō 古今小說, “Ancient and Modern Tales”) is the first of 馮夢龍’s three Sānyán 三言 collections of vernacular short fiction (huáběn 話本). It contains forty stories, predominantly drawn from Song and Yuan oral performance scripts supplemented by Féng’s own compositions and revisions. Together with Jǐngshì Tōng-yán 警世通言 and KR4k0072 Xǐngshì Héng-yán 醒世恆言, it constitutes the canonical Sānyán corpus of 120 vernacular short stories.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
Abstract
The Yùshì Míng-yán was the first of the Sānyán to be published, originally under the title Gǔjīn Xiǎoshuō 古今小說 (ca. 1620). The prefatory essay (xù 敘), written by a “Lǜtiān guǎn zhǔrén” 綠天館主人 (Master of the Green-Sky Studio), presents the theoretical justification for the collection: that vernacular fiction reaches the people more effectively than the classical texts, moving readers to courage, fidelity, modesty, and virtue more rapidly than reading the Xiaojing 孝經 or Lunyu 論語. The preface traces a lineage for the vernacular story from the Zhou philosophers through the Tang chuanqi and Song storytelling, positioning Féng’s anthologizing work in a long tradition.
Wilkinson (Chinese History: A New Manual, §31.1) characterizes the Yùshì Míng-yán as the first of the Sānyán: “Feng Menglong. 1620–27. Yushi mingyan 喻世明言 (Illustrious words to instruct the world; originally published as Gujin xiaoshuo).” The forty stories range widely in period setting from the Hàn through the Míng and in subject from romantic love and family drama to religious conversion, commercial adventure, and official justice. The opening story (Ch. 1: “Jiǎng Xīnggē’s Reunion with the Pearl-Sewn Shirt” 蔣興哥重會珍珠衫) is among the most frequently anthologized of all Míng vernacular stories.
馮夢龍 (CBDB 131175; 1574–1646) compiled all three Sānyán between ca. 1620 and 1627. For full biographical information see the person note.
The preface refers to “Māo-yuàn yěshǐ shì” 茂苑野史氏 (the Master of Wild History of Māo-yuàn — a poetic name for Sūzhōu) as having “stored in his home a great collection of popular fiction, ancient and modern,” and at a merchant’s request selected forty stories for publication as a first installment. This framing device somewhat obscures Féng’s own editorial role.
The text is not in the Sìkù quánshū 四庫全書. The earliest known edition of the Gǔjīn Xiǎoshuō / Yùshì Míng-yán dates to ca. 1620; the work was later excerpted along with the other Sānyán texts in Bàowēng lǎorén’s 抱甕老人 Jīngǔ Qíguān 今古奇觀 (earliest extant edition 1740).
Translations and research
- Yang, Shuhui, and Yunqin Yang, tr. Stories Old and New: A Ming Dynasty Collection (Vol. 1 of the Sanyan series). University of Washington Press, 2000. Full translation.
- Hanan, Patrick. The Chinese Vernacular Story. Harvard University Press, 1981. Standard scholarly account of the genre.
- Hsu, Pi-ching. Feng Menglong’s Treasury of Laughs: A Seventeenth-Century Anthology of Traditional Chinese Humour. Brill, 2015. On Féng’s joke collection, with learned introduction applicable to the Sānyán context.
Other points of interest
The claim in the preface that vernacular fiction surpasses classical texts in moral efficacy (“the timid become brave, the licentious become chaste, the parsimonious become generous, the stubborn weep in repentance”) is one of the most explicit statements of the pedagogical theory of popular fiction in the Míng period. It directly influenced later defenses of the novel form, including those in the prefaces to Rúlín Wàishǐ 儒林外史 and other Qīng works.
Links
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stories_Old_and_New
- Wikipedia (Feng Menglong): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_Menglong