Jiāo Yè Pà 蕉葉帕
The Banana-Leaf Handkerchief by Anonymous (無名氏)
About the work
Jiāo Yè Pà 蕉葉帕 is an anonymous Qing-dynasty vernacular romance novel in 16 chapters (huí 回). The catalog attributes authorship to 無名氏 (anonymous). The title refers to a plantain-leaf silk handkerchief (luópà 羅帕) fashioned by a fox spirit — it is the central magical object that links the human hero to the supernatural world. The novel blends the cáizǐ jiārén 才子佳人 (scholar-beauty romance) convention with fox-spirit (húxiān 狐仙) supernatural elements, set against the background of the Southern Song and the Jin-Song wars.
Tiyao
No tiyao found in source.
Abstract
The narrative follows Lóng Xiāng 龍驤, a talented but impoverished young scholar from the Wu region whose late father had served in the north under the Gaozong-era court-in-exile. He encounters a fox spirit who has assumed human form under the guise of a young woman; enchanted, she uses a banana-leaf transformed into a silk handkerchief as a love token to draw Lóng Xiāng into a supernatural entanglement. Through sixteen chapters, the story weaves between the hero’s romantic adventures — including a genuine betrothal to a human woman named Hú Ruòméi 胡弱妹 — and the fox spirit’s increasingly dangerous interference. The fox is eventually exposed and subdued through Daoist intervention (the figure of Lǚ Dòngbīn 呂洞賓 appears in chapter nine), after which the hero achieves military distinction in the campaigns against the puppet Jin-aligned regime of Liú Yù 劉豫, earning imperial honors.
The work is a representative example of the popular “fox spirit befriends scholar” (húmèi yùcái 狐魅遇才) sub-genre that flourished in Ming and Qing vernacular fiction, combining martial romance, examination success, and supernatural comedy. No firm date of composition can be established; the language and conventions are consistent with the Qing dynasty. The catalog and Kanripo metadata attribute the text to the Qing period with no further precision, and no preface or colophon identifying author or date appears in the source file. A defensible bracket is the seventeenth to eighteenth century.
The Amazon Kindle edition (Zhejiang Publishing United Group, under the series “BookDNA Chinese Classics”) describes it as a fox-spirit tale set in the Southern Song, consistent with the internal evidence.
Translations and research
No substantial secondary literature located.