Fā Cái Mìjué 發財秘訣
The Secret Formula for Getting Rich by 吳沃堯 (撰)
About the work
Fā Cái Mìjué 發財秘訣 (The Secret Formula for Getting Rich) is a short satirical novel in 10 huí by Wú Wòyáo 吳沃堯 (1866–1910; also known as Wú Jiǎnrén 吳趼人). The novel satirizes the values and social pathologies of the Guǎngdōng treaty-port world in the era after the opening of Xiānggǎng 香港 (Hong Kong). The narrative follows various characters — a petty trader, a comprador, a “foreign slave” (yángnú 洋奴), and their families — as they pursue wealth through cooperation with foreign merchants, only to discover the moral and social costs of that pursuit. The setting is explicitly Hong Kong and the Pearl River Delta region.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
The source file contains a brief author’s postface at the end of the final chapter, in which the author says this novel is the worst (zuì liè 最劣) of all his works: because his genre strength (shàncháng 擅長) lies in descriptive characterization (miáomó 描摹), but his outrage (nù 怒) prevented him from depicting the characters fully — so only the first character (Qū Bǐng 區丙) at the opening and Xuě Qí 雪畦 at the close are fully rendered, while the others are sketched briefly. “Readers can nonetheless grasp [the meaning] from what lies between the lines,” he concludes.
Abstract
Fā Cái Mìjué is one of the shorter satirical fictions of Wú Wòyáo 吳沃堯 (CBDB id 78399; 1866–1910), written in his characteristic mode of sharp social criticism of treaty-port society. The novel’s central theme is the corrupting effect of purely commercial and colonial values on Chinese society in the wake of Guǎngdōng’s early exposure to foreign trade. The opening chapter, set against the background of Xiānggǎng’s development as a commercial hub (“辟香港通商初發達”), presents the narrator’s thesis that what is called “civilized progress” (fēng qì 風氣) in Guǎngdōng amounts to nothing more than pursuit of profit (lì 利). The novel then traces the trajectories of characters who become compradors, adopt colonial manners, and collaborate with foreign capital — satirizing them as morally bankrupt “foreign slaves” (洋奴) and social climbers.
The catalog entry (KR4k.yaml) attributes this work to 吴沃尧 (with simplified characters), which is a variant spelling of 吳沃堯 (traditional characters). The author’s own postface, appended to the final chapter, is a self-deprecating but revealing authorial statement: the novel was rushed and the author’s moral indignation (nù 怒) prevented him from rendering the characters with his usual descriptive subtlety.
The dating of composition is uncertain; a reasonable estimate is the late 1890s to early 1900s, during Wú’s most productive period of social fiction.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature specifically on this novel located.
Hanan, Patrick. 2004. Chinese Fiction of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Columbia University Press. (General context for Wú Wòyáo’s fiction.)