Cháng Yán Dào 常言道
As the Saying Goes by 落魄道人 (編)
About the work
Cháng Yán Dào 常言道 (As the Saying Goes; also known by the alternative title Zǐmǔ Qián 子母錢 or Fùwēng Xǐngshì Zhuàn 富翁醒世傳) is a Qīng-dynasty vernacular satirical novel in four juǎn 卷 and sixteen huì 回 (chapters), attributed to the pen name “Luòpò Dàorén” 落魄道人 — “the Down-and-Out Daoist” — whose real identity is unknown. The preface is signed “Xītǔ Chīrén” 西土癡人 and dated to “Jiāqìng Jiǎzǐ” 嘉慶甲子, the ninth year of the Jiāqìng reign (1804), establishing the date of the preface’s composition; the novel’s textual description mentions a later printing in the Guāngxù Yǐhài year (1875, Déchéng Táng 得成堂 pocket edition).
The novel is a moral-satirical allegory centered on money and its corrupting power. The action is set in the Míng Chóngzhēn 崇禎 era. The protagonist, Shí Bójì 時伯濟, travels abroad carrying a family heirloom (the “gold-and-silver coin” jīnyínqián 金銀錢), which he loses at sea and which drifts to the “Land of Small People” (Xiǎorén Guó 小人國) — a satirical realm of greed and moral debasement — where it falls into the hands of the rich miser Qián Shìmìng 錢士命. After a series of episodes exposing the degradation caused by money-worship, Shí recovers the coin with the help of giants from the virtuous “Land of Big People” (Dàrén Guó 大人國), and Qián Shìmìng dies having lost everything. The embedded title for a preface section within the source file describes the novel as Cháng Yán Dào Sú Qíng 常言道俗情 — “the common saying [captures] human nature.”
The work belongs to the tradition of late-Qīng and early-nineteenth-century moral allegory fiction (fèngshì xiǎoshuō 諷世小說), using a Swiftian conceit of contrasting micro-utopia and dystopia to satirize the money-obsessed culture of Qīng commercial society. The embedded text of the “editorial summary” (tíyào 提要, apparently attached to an early edition rather than from the Sìkù corpus) notes the novel’s language as “clean and crisp,” making extensive use of dialect expressions and homophones for comic effect.
Prefaces
The preface (序) is signed by “Xītǔ Chīrén” 西土癡人 and dated to the first day of the New Year of Jiāqìng Jiǎzǐ (1804), written “at the Shēnggōng lecture platform at Hǔqiū” (虎阜之生公講檯), a famous site in Sūzhōu. This places the preface firmly in early-nineteenth-century Jiāngnán literary culture.
Abstract
Cháng Yán Dào is a Qīng satirical novel first preface-dated to 1804 (Jiāqìng 9). The author’s pen name “Luòpò Dàorén” 落魄道人 follows a Qīng convention of Daoist self-deprecation, and the real identity behind it has not been established. The Sūzhōu locale of the preface signature and the colloquial Wú-dialect flavor of the prose suggest a Jiāngnán author.
The novel’s central conceit — the “gold-and-silver coin” as a magical object that exposes human moral character — is elaborated through a frame of sixteen chapters with embedded stories, debates, and allegorical vignettes. The “Land of Small People” (Xiǎorén Guó) and “Land of Big People” (Dàrén Guó) episodes recall Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), though whether Luòpò Dàorén had direct knowledge of Swift or worked independently within the Chinese tradition of the yóulì 遊歷 (journey-to-wonderful-lands) allegory cannot be confirmed from internal evidence alone.
Two known early editions are mentioned in the embedded editorial summary: a woodblock printing (kèběn 刻本) and a Guāngxù Yǐhài (1875) pocket edition (xiùzhēn běn 袖珍本) from the Déchéng Táng 得成堂 press. The novel was not collected in the Sìkù quánshū 四庫全書.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.
Other points of interest
The preface’s placement at the “Shēnggōng Lecture Platform” (生公講檯) on Tiger Hill (Hǔqiū 虎阜) in Sūzhōu — a site traditionally associated with the monk Zhúdào Shēng 竺道生 (360–434 CE) and his famous sermon to the stones — gives the preface an ironic, self-referential quality, as if the author were a new preacher of moral lessons to an unresponsive audience.
Links
- Kanripo text: https://www.kanripo.org/text/KR4k0086/