Presented here are nine tales from the celebrated Ming dynasty Sanyan
collection of vernacular stories compiled and edited by Feng Menglong
(1574-1646), the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of
his time in China. The stories he collected were pivotal to the
development of Chinese vernacular fiction, and their importance in the
Chinese literary canon and world literature has been compared to that of
Boccaccio's Decameron and the stories of One Thousand and One
Nights.
Peopled with scholars, emperors, ministers, generals, and a gallery of
ordinary men and women in their everyday surroundings--merchants and
artisans, prostitutes and courtesans, matchmakers and fortune-tellers,
monks and nuns, servants and maids, thieves and imposters--the stories
provide a vivid panorama of the bustling world of imperial China before
the end of the Ming dynasty.
The three volumes constituting the Sanyan set--Stories Old and New,
Stories to Caution the World, and Stories to Awaken the World,
each containing forty tales--have been translated in their entirety by
Shuhui Yang and Yunqin Yang. The stories in this volume were selected
for their popularity with American readers and their usefulness as texts
in classes on Chinese and comparative literature. These unabridged
translations include all the poetry that is scattered throughout the
original stories, as well as Feng Menglong's interlinear and marginal
comments, which point out what seventeenth-century readers of the
stories were being asked to appreciate.
