PLEASANT SPRING AND FRAGRANT CHARACTER
BY ZUIXIHU XINHUE ZHUREN
Yi-chun Xiang-zhi 宜春香質 (Pleasant Spring and Fragrant Character) is a set of four Greek love novellas written in the later years of the Chonzhen reign (1627-44) by a writer calling himself Zuixihu Xinyue Zhuren 醉西湖心月主人 (The Moon-Heart Master of the Drunken West Lake).
The novellas are titled Wind, Flower, Snow, and Moon. Each consists of five chapters and includes probably the most sexually explicit writing on Greek love to have survived from anywhere before the twentieth century. The collection “was so rare it was not even included in standard bibliographies listing works with sexual themes (e.g., Sun Kai-ti, 1982; Liu Cun-ren, 1982). However, it was included on lists of books officially banned during the Dao Guang (1821-1850) and Tung Chih (1862-1874) periods. As a banned book, it was rarely circulated, and the edition referred to here is a handwritten copy stored in the Beijing Library.”[1]
The translation is this website’s. Literal accuracy has been favoured over eloquence in English, the main purpose of the translation being to shed authentic light on the past.
A note on people’s ages.
The author gives ages according to the traditional Chinese system. According to this someone is aged one at birth, then goes up one each (Chinese lunar) New Year. Someone born just before a particular New Year would thus be considered aged two just after it, and everybody’s age in English would be either one or two years less than that expressed in Chinese. In the present translation, one year only is deducted from the Chinese number, and the reader should bear in mind that a boy described as “eleven” or “in his twelfth year”, might in reality as easily have been ten as eleven by English counting.
Contents
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1.
5.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
3. 4. 5. |
I. Wind An Open Ruse in the Study; a Secret Passage upon the Couch [This is merely a small extract soon to be replaced by a full translation] In the Village of Weilu, Bitter Tears Are Shed; Wang Qianwen Lies Amidst the Fragrant Flowers of the Willow Grove In Deep Snow, Wrath Rises to Curb the Mighty and Aid the Meek; In Gratitude for Great Kindness, the Soul Turns and Takes Birth Anew
II. Flower
III. Snow
IV. Moon Pretty Young Niu Inscribes a Verse Questioning the Heavens; The Elder of Perfected Sentiment Expounds the Causes and their Requital |
[1] Fang Fu Ruan, Sex in China: Studies in Sexology in Chinese Culture, New York, 1991, pp. 116-7. Ruan also says “the novel appears to have been written between 1796 and 1843, and can safely be said to belong to the first half of the nineteenth century, “ but this is contradicted by works of more recent scholarship, for example Mark Stevenson and Wu Cuncun in their Homoeroticism in Imperial China: A Sourcebook (Abingdon, Oxon.: Routledge, 2013), pp. 184-192.
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