Súhuà Qīngtán Èrjí 俗話傾談二集
Candid Talks in the Vernacular, Second Collection by 邵彬儒 (撰)
About the work
Súhuà Qīngtán Èrjí 俗話傾談二集 is the second collection of vernacular short stories by 邵彬儒 Shào Bīnrú, a Cantonese writer active in Guangzhou in the 1850s–1860s. The volume is divided into 上卷 (upper juan) and 下卷 (lower juan) and contains seven stories: 骨肉試真情 (Kinship puts true feeling to the test), 潑婦 (The termagant), 生魂遊地獄 (A living soul wanders hell), 借火食煙 (Borrowing a light to smoke), 好秀才 (The worthy licentiate), 砒霜缽 (The arsenic bowl), and 茅寮訓子 (The thatched hut teaches the son). The language of the entire collection is authentic Cantonese vernacular (廣州話 Guǎngzhōuhuà), making it one of the earliest known works of sustained prose fiction written in that dialect. The opening story is set in Xiāngshān County 香山縣 and immediately deploys Cantonese colloquialisms, discourse particles, and regional idioms that are largely opaque to readers of standard Mandarin. This volume is the companion to KR4k0232 (the first collection).
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source. This text was not included in the Sìkù quánshū 四庫全書 and carries no WYG edition. No tiyao is applicable.
Abstract
Súhuà Qīngtán 俗話傾談 is among the very first works of sustained prose fiction composed in Cantonese vernacular rather than in the standard literary or Mandarin-based colloquial register shared by most Ming-Qing popular fiction. Its author, 邵彬儒 Shào Bīnrú (active ca. 1856–1870), was a Guangzhou writer of whom biographical details are sparse; no CBDB entry has been identified. The first collection (KR4k0232) bears a preface by Shào himself, explaining his aim to compose moral tales in an accessible vernacular idiom so that listeners “of all ears” (men and women, young and old) could readily understand and be moved. Both collections were published in Guangzhou, probably in the 1860s.
The second collection continues the same framework: each story presents a morally instructive situation — tests of kinship loyalty, the punishment of a shrew, a soul’s journey through the underworld, domestic virtue — drawn from settings in the Pearl River Delta region (notably Xiāngshān County). The Cantonese linguistic texture is pervasive: Cantonese particles (e.g., 唔, 係, 咁, 佢), rhetorical questions, and local social vocabulary appear throughout without apology or gloss.
The work’s significance lies primarily in the history of Cantonese-language writing. Modern scholarship situates Shào’s collections as precursors of later Cantonese-language printed fiction and the Cantonese opera libretto tradition. The texts circulated in Guangzhou woodblock editions; the Kanripo text is derived from such a print source. The precise date of composition is uncertain but falls within the Tongzhi 同治 reign (1862–1875) based on the first collection’s preface (see KR4k0232).
Translations and research
Jing Tsu. 2022. Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern. Riverhead. (Background on vernacular writing in the late Qing, including Cantonese.)
Yung Shing-tak 容世誠. 1997. 粵劇研究 (Research on Cantonese Opera). Research includes discussion of vernacular Cantonese print culture. (In Chinese.)
No substantial monographic secondary literature on this specific text located in European languages.
Links
- Wikipedia: Cantonese literature
- Companion text: KR4k0232