History of Chinese Literature/Chapter 11
Chapter 11: Tang Prose, Fiction, and the Chuanqi Revolution
1. Introduction: The Birth of Chinese Fiction
The Tang dynasty's contributions to Chinese literature are most commonly celebrated in the realm of poetry — and justly so, for Tang poetry represents the supreme achievement of the Chinese verse tradition. But the Tang also witnessed a development of equal, or perhaps even greater, long-term significance for the history of Chinese literature: the emergence of prose fiction as a self-conscious literary art. The Tang chuanqi (传奇, "tales of the marvelous") — short stories written in classical Chinese, typically centered on themes of love, the supernatural, heroism, or political intrigue — represent the first body of Chinese prose narrative that was composed as deliberate fiction by known, individual authors who understood themselves to be creating literary works of art, not merely recording oral traditions, historical events, or supernatural occurrences.
This may seem a small distinction, but its consequences were immense. Before the Tang, Chinese narrative prose existed primarily in two forms: the historical narrative of the dynastic histories and the zhiguai (志怪, "records of the strange") of the Six Dynasties — brief, matter-of-fact accounts of ghosts, spirits, and supernatural events that were compiled not as fiction but as records of things that were believed to have actually occurred. The Tang chuanqi transformed this material by subjecting it to the shaping imagination of the individual author — by creating characters with psychological depth, plots with dramatic structure, and narratives with thematic unity and literary self-consciousness. In doing so, the chuanqi writers created the foundation upon which the entire subsequent tradition of Chinese fiction — from the Song dynasty storyteller's tales to the great vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing — was built.[1]
This chapter examines the Tang achievement in prose fiction and related forms of narrative writing, including the chuanqi tales, the Buddhist popular narratives known as bianwen (变文, "transformation texts"), the guwen prose movement in its narrative dimensions, and the tradition of travel and geographical writing.
2. From Zhiguai to Chuanqi: The Emergence of Fictional Self-Consciousness
The transition from the Six Dynasties zhiguai to the Tang chuanqi was not a sudden break but a gradual evolution — a process in which the short, formulaic supernatural anecdotes of the earlier period were progressively expanded, elaborated, and transformed into more complex, more psychologically nuanced, and more literarily ambitious narratives.
The Six Dynasties zhiguai — collections such as Gan Bao's (干宝, ca. 320) Soushen ji (搜神记, In Search of the Supernatural) and Liu Yiqing's (刘义庆, 403–444) Youming lu (幽明录, Records of the Hidden and Visible Worlds) — were compiled as factual records of encounters with the supernatural. Their narratives are typically brief (often no more than a few hundred characters), their characters are thinly drawn (identified by name and social status but rarely given any psychological interiority), and their plots follow simple, stereotyped patterns: a man encounters a ghost, a fox spirit transforms into a beautiful woman, a dead person returns to settle unfinished business. The zhiguai compiler did not regard himself as creating fiction; he was collecting evidence for the existence of the spirit world.
The Tang chuanqi writers, by contrast, understood themselves to be creating literary works. The very term chuanqi — which literally means "transmitting the marvelous" — implies an authorial act of selection, shaping, and aesthetic presentation. The Tang tale is not a bare record of an event but a crafted narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end; with characters who think, feel, and change; with dialogue that reveals personality; and with themes that are explored through the structure of the plot rather than stated in editorial comment. The typical chuanqi is substantially longer than the typical zhiguai — often running to several thousand characters — and employs a range of narrative techniques (embedded letters and poems, multiple points of view, retrospective narration, ironic juxtaposition) that testify to a sophisticated awareness of the possibilities of prose storytelling.[2]
The reasons for this transformation are multiple. The Tang examination system played a crucial role: candidates for the jinshi degree were expected to submit examples of their prose writing to examiners and potential patrons before the examination — a practice known as wenzhang juanzhou (文章卷轴) or xingjuan (行卷, "traveling scrolls"). The composition of an entertaining, well-crafted story was one way for a candidate to demonstrate his literary skill and attract the attention of powerful sponsors. Many of the finest Tang chuanqi were written by young men who were either preparing for the examination or who had recently taken it, and the stories reflect the concerns and experiences of this class: romantic love, political ambition, the supernatural, the marvels of the capital, and the vicissitudes of fortune.
3. Key Tales: Yingying Zhuan, Huo Xiaoyu Zhuan, Nanke Taishou Zhuan
The Tang chuanqi tradition produced a substantial body of tales — several hundred survive, of varying quality — but a handful of masterpieces stand out as works of enduring literary power and historical significance. Three of the most celebrated are "The Story of Yingying" (莺莺传, Yingying zhuan), "The Story of Huo Xiaoyu" (霍小玉传, Huo Xiaoyu zhuan), and "The Governor of Nanke" (南柯太守传, Nanke Taishou zhuan).
"The Story of Yingying" (莺莺传, also known as "The Story of Encounter with an Immortal," 会真记, Huizhen ji), written by Yuan Zhen (元稹, 779–831) — the same Yuan Zhen who was Bai Juyi's closest friend and collaborator in the New Yuefu movement — is the most famous and most influential love story in the Chinese literary tradition. It tells the story of Zhang Sheng (张生, "Student Zhang"), a young scholar who seduces Cui Yingying (崔莺莺), the beautiful daughter of a good family, during a sojourn at a Buddhist monastery, and then abandons her when he returns to the capital to pursue his official career. The tale is remarkable for several reasons: for the psychological subtlety with which it portrays the progress of the love affair — the initial attraction, the hesitation, the consummation, the gradual estrangement; for the moral ambiguity of its conclusion, in which the narrator (widely believed to be a self-portrait of Yuan Zhen himself) defends Zhang Sheng's abandonment of Yingying on the grounds that she was a dangerous "enchantress" (尤物, youwu) who would have brought ruin upon him; and for the extraordinary influence it exerted on subsequent Chinese literature.
The Yingying story was retold countless times over the following centuries — in poetry, in prose, in drama — and its most famous adaptation, Wang Shifu's (王实甫, ca. 1260–1336) Xixiang ji (西厢记, The Story of the Western Wing), is one of the supreme masterpieces of Chinese drama. The enduring appeal of the tale lies in its unflinching portrayal of the conflict between romantic love and social convention — a conflict that the Tang original resolves in favor of convention (Zhang Sheng abandons Yingying and marries a socially appropriate wife) but that later adaptations often resolve in favor of love (in the Xixiang ji, the lovers are reunited).[3]
"The Story of Huo Xiaoyu" (霍小玉传), attributed to Jiang Fang (蒋防, ca. 792–835), tells a darker version of the same essential story: a young scholar, Li Yi (李益), falls in love with the courtesan Huo Xiaoyu (霍小玉), a woman of noble birth who has been reduced to the status of a singing girl. Li Yi promises eternal fidelity, then abandons Huo Xiaoyu when a more advantageous marriage presents itself. The betrayed woman, consumed by grief and rage, curses Li Yi on her deathbed — a curse that is fulfilled when her ghost haunts him for the rest of his life, destroying his subsequent marriages and reducing him to a state of paranoid misery.
The tale is notable for its psychological complexity — particularly its portrayal of Li Yi's bad conscience, his attempts to rationalize his betrayal, and his progressive moral disintegration — and for its fierce moral vision, in which the faithless lover is punished not by any external authority but by the implacable resentment of the woman he has wronged. It is also one of the earliest works in Chinese literature to portray a courtesan as a figure of moral dignity and emotional depth, rather than as a mere object of male desire — a portrayal that anticipates the great courtesan characters of later Chinese fiction and drama.
"The Governor of Nanke" (南柯太守传), written by Li Gongzuo (李公佐, ca. 778–848), is one of the great philosophical tales of world literature — a story about the nature of reality, the vanity of human ambition, and the insubstantiality of worldly glory. The protagonist, Chunyu Fen (淳于棼), falls asleep drunk under a great locust tree and dreams that he is transported to the kingdom of Huai'an (槐安, a pun on "locust-tree peace"), where he rises to become the governor of the southern province of Nanke. He enjoys twenty years of power, wealth, and domestic happiness, fights wars, governs provinces, and experiences all the triumphs and tragedies of a full human life — only to wake and discover that the "kingdom" was an ant colony in the roots of the locust tree, and that his twenty years of life were the events of a single afternoon's nap.[4]
The tale's philosophical implications are both Buddhist and Daoist: the dream-life of Chunyu Fen is a parable of the Buddhist doctrine that all worldly experience is illusion (梦幻, menghua), and the locust-tree kingdom is a figure for the Daoist insight that human categories of greatness and smallness, importance and insignificance, are relative and ultimately empty. But the story also works as a purely narrative achievement — a tale of adventure, love, and political intrigue that holds the reader's attention completely, even as it undermines the reality of everything it describes.
4. Chuanqi and Drama: The Narrative Foundation
The relationship between the Tang chuanqi and the later development of Chinese drama is one of the most important connections in Chinese literary history. The great dramatic traditions of the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties — the zaju (杂剧) of the Yuan, the chuanqi drama (传奇, a different use of the same term) of the Ming and Qing — drew heavily on Tang tales for their plots, characters, and themes. The Yingying story became the basis of the Xixiang ji; the story of Huo Xiaoyu was adapted into several dramatic versions; the legend of Yang Guifei and Emperor Xuanzong — first told in verse by Bai Juyi and in prose by Chen Hong (陈鸿) — became the subject of one of the greatest of all Chinese dramas, Hong Sheng's (洪昇, 1645–1704) Changsheng dian (长生殿, The Palace of Eternal Life).
The Tang chuanqi provided the dramatic tradition with more than raw material; they established the narrative patterns — the love triangle, the faithful woman betrayed, the dream journey, the supernatural intervention, the conflict between love and duty — that became the fundamental structural elements of Chinese dramatic plotting. The chuanqi also established the convention of mixing prose narrative with embedded verse — a convention that was carried forward into the dramatic tradition, where prose dialogue alternates with sung arias in a pattern that is one of the distinctive features of Chinese dramatic form.
Moreover, the chuanqi writers developed techniques of characterization — the use of dialogue to reveal personality, the portrayal of inner conflict, the depiction of characters who change and develop over the course of a narrative — that were essential prerequisites for the creation of drama. Before the Tang, Chinese narrative had been predominantly historical and episodic; the chuanqi introduced the concept of a unified plot driven by the choices and experiences of individual characters — a concept without which drama, in the full sense of the term, would have been impossible.[5]
5. Bianwen and Buddhist Popular Narrative
While the chuanqi tales were written by and for the educated elite in classical Chinese, a parallel tradition of popular narrative was developing in the Buddhist monasteries and marketplaces of Tang China — a tradition that would prove equally important for the long-term development of Chinese fiction. The bianwen (变文, "transformation texts") — illustrated oral narratives that retold Buddhist scriptures, legends, and secular stories for popular audiences — represent the earliest substantial body of Chinese vernacular narrative and one of the most fascinating discoveries of twentieth-century Chinese literary scholarship.
The bianwen were discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts — the vast cache of documents sealed in a cave near the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang around the year 1000 and rediscovered by the Daoist monk Wang Yuanlu (王圆箓) in 1900. The manuscripts include dozens of bianwen texts, ranging from short, simple narratives to elaborate, multi-scroll performances that must have taken hours to recite. The texts alternate between prose passages (which narrate the story) and verse passages (which are sung or chanted), a prosimetric form that is one of the distinctive features of Chinese popular narrative and that persisted in various guises — the storyteller's tale, the tanci (弹词, "plucking rhymes"), the baojuan (宝卷, "precious scrolls") — through the imperial period and into the twentieth century.
The subject matter of the bianwen is diverse. Many texts retell stories from the Buddhist scriptures — the life of the Buddha, the legends of his previous incarnations (jataka tales), and the exploits of famous bodhisattvas and disciples. The "Transformation Text on Mulian Rescuing His Mother" (目连变文, Mulian bianwen) — the story of the monk Mulian (Maudgalyayana) who descends into hell to rescue his mother from the torments she endures because of her sins — was one of the most popular of all bianwen and became the basis of a dramatic tradition (the Mulian plays) that persisted in Chinese popular culture for over a thousand years.[6]
Other bianwen retell secular stories — tales of Chinese history and legend, such as the wars between the Han dynasty and the Xiongnu, or the exploits of the legendary hero Wu Zixu (伍子胥). These secular bianwen are of particular importance for literary history, because they demonstrate that by the late Tang period, the techniques of vernacular storytelling — the alternation of prose and verse, the use of formulaic phrases and audience-address formulas, the episodic narrative structure — were being applied not only to religious material but to the full range of Chinese narrative tradition.
The significance of the bianwen for the later development of Chinese fiction lies in several areas. First, they established the prosimetric form — the alternation of prose and verse within a single narrative — that became the standard structure of Chinese popular fiction from the Song dynasty onward. The great vernacular novels of the Ming dynasty — Sanguozhi yanyi (三国志演义, Romance of the Three Kingdoms), Shuihu zhuan (水浒传, Water Margin), Xiyou ji (西游记, Journey to the West) — all employ this alternating structure, which ultimately derives from the bianwen tradition. Second, the bianwen created a tradition of popular religious narrative — stories designed to entertain, to edify, and to spread Buddhist teachings among the illiterate — that persisted in various forms throughout the imperial period. Third, and most importantly, the bianwen demonstrated that Chinese vernacular prose could be used for sustained narrative — that stories of considerable length and complexity could be told in the language of everyday speech, not merely in the classical Chinese of the educated elite.
6. Guwen Movement in Prose: Narrative Dimensions
The guwen (古文, "ancient prose") movement, discussed in its broader dimensions in the preceding chapter, also had important implications for the development of Chinese narrative prose. Han Yu (韩愈, 768–824) and Liu Zongyuan (柳宗元, 773–819), the leaders of the movement, were not fiction writers in any conventional sense — but their prose works include narrative elements that expanded the possibilities of Chinese literary prose and influenced the subsequent development of both fiction and essay writing.
Han Yu's biographical sketches and commemorative essays — such as his "Biography of Mao Ying" (毛颖传, Mao Ying zhuan), a satirical "biography" of a writing brush personified as a human official — demonstrate the possibilities of applying the narrative techniques of historical biography to fictional and semi-fictional subjects. The "Biography of Mao Ying" is, in a sense, a miniature chuanqi — a fictional narrative cast in the form of a historical biography, complete with the formulaic phrases and structural conventions of the dynastic histories. Its satirical purpose — the brush/official is eventually discarded by the emperor when his "hair" (i.e., his brush tip) begins to fall out — makes it an early example of the use of fiction for social criticism.[7]
Liu Zongyuan's contributions to narrative prose were perhaps even more significant. His "Eight Records of Yongzhou" (永州八记, Yongzhou ba ji) — a series of landscape essays written during his exile in Yongzhou — are, as noted in the previous chapter, among the finest examples of nature writing in the Chinese tradition. But they are also narratives — accounts of discovery, exploration, and emotional response that follow the author as he wanders through the neglected landscapes of his place of exile and discovers in them a beauty that mirrors his own situation as a talented, loyal official cast aside by an unjust ruler.
The narrative dimension of Liu Zongyuan's landscape essays lies in their structure of discovery. Each essay follows a similar pattern: the author hears of or stumbles upon a natural site (a pond, a hill, a stream) that has been overlooked or forgotten; he clears away the undergrowth, reveals the hidden beauty of the place, and describes it in precise, evocative prose; and he concludes with a reflection on the relationship between the site's neglected beauty and his own neglected talents. This structure — discovery, description, reflection — became a template for Chinese essay writing that was imitated by countless later writers.
The guwen movement's insistence on clarity, directness, and intellectual substance also had indirect consequences for the development of fiction. By establishing a prose style that valued narrative momentum, argumentative logic, and emotional sincerity over the formal pyrotechnics of parallel prose, the guwen writers created a prose idiom that was better suited to sustained storytelling than the elaborate artifice of pianwen. The great prose narratives of the Song and later periods — from the biji (笔记, "brush notes") collections to the classical-language stories of the Qing dynasty master Pu Songling (蒲松龄, 1640–1715) — owe a substantial debt to the prose standards established by the guwen movement.
7. Travel Writing and Geographical Literature
The Tang dynasty also witnessed the emergence of travel writing as a significant literary genre — a development that reflected both the vastness and diversity of the Tang empire and the social mobility of the educated class, whose members were constantly on the move: traveling to the capital for the examinations, proceeding to distant posts after appointment, visiting famous mountains and monasteries, and enduring exile in remote frontier regions.
The most celebrated Tang travel writer is, once again, Liu Zongyuan, whose Yongzhou essays established the literary landscape essay as a recognized genre. But the Tang also produced a substantial body of more conventionally geographical writing — accounts of journeys, descriptions of regions and cities, and records of foreign countries and peoples — that contributed to the development of both literary prose and the Chinese understanding of the wider world.
Xuanzang's (玄奘, ca. 602–664) Da Tang Xiyu ji (大唐西域记, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions), dictated by the great Buddhist monk after his seventeen-year pilgrimage to India (629–645), is one of the most remarkable travel accounts in world literature. Xuanzang traveled overland from Chang'an across Central Asia to India, visiting the major Buddhist sites, studying at the great monastery of Nalanda, and collecting hundreds of Buddhist manuscripts to bring back to China. His Xiyu ji — a systematic account of the countries, peoples, customs, religions, and geography of Central and South Asia — is not only a literary work of great interest but an invaluable historical source for the study of seventh-century Asia. It also provided the raw material for one of the greatest works of Chinese fiction: Wu Cheng'en's (吴承恩, ca. 1500–1582) Xiyou ji (西游记, Journey to the West), which transforms Xuanzang's historical pilgrimage into a fantastic adventure involving the Monkey King, the pig-spirit, and a host of demons and deities.[8]
The Tang geographical tradition also includes works such as Li Daoyuan's (郦道元, d. 527) Shuijing zhu (水经注, Commentary on the Waterways Classic) — technically a pre-Tang work, but one that was widely read and admired during the Tang — which combines geographical description with historical anecdote and literary prose in a way that influenced later Chinese writing about landscape and place. The tradition of the "local gazetteer" (方志, fangzhi), which became a major genre of Chinese prose in the Song and later periods, also has roots in the geographical writings of the Tang.
8. The Tang Literary Marketplace and the Circulation of Stories
The social context in which Tang fiction was produced and consumed is important for understanding both the form and the function of the chuanqi tales. Unlike modern fiction, which is written for anonymous readers and circulated through commercial publishing, Tang chuanqi were typically written for specific social occasions and circulated through personal networks — copied by hand, read aloud at gatherings, and passed from friend to friend. The examination culture that produced many of the tales also provided the primary context for their reception: young scholars exchanged stories as demonstrations of literary skill, and established officials read them as entertainment and as evidence of the author's talent.
This social context helps explain several distinctive features of the chuanqi form. The tales are typically short — most can be read in a single sitting — because they were designed to be read aloud or passed around at a gathering. They frequently include embedded poems, because the ability to compose poetry was an essential literary skill that the author wished to display. They often deal with themes of romantic love and sexual intrigue, because these themes were considered entertaining and because the experience of young scholars — their romantic adventures, their encounters with courtesans and singing girls, their struggles with the conflict between love and ambition — was the shared experience of the audience for whom the tales were written.
The Tang also saw the emergence of commercial storytelling as a form of urban entertainment. Professional storytellers (说话人, shuohua ren) performed in the marketplaces and entertainment quarters of the great cities, telling stories drawn from history, legend, and contemporary life. Although no texts of Tang storytelling performances survive (the earliest examples of the storyteller's written text, or huaben (话本), date from the Song dynasty), references in Tang sources make clear that the tradition was already well established. The relationship between the literary chuanqi and the oral storytelling tradition is complex and much debated: each tradition influenced the other, and both contributed to the development of the great vernacular fiction of the Ming and Qing dynasties.[9]
9. The Legacy of Tang Prose Fiction
The Tang chuanqi occupies a pivotal position in the history of Chinese literature — a position that can be compared, with some justice, to the position of the Elizabethan drama in the history of English literature. Like the Elizabethan plays, the Tang tales were not the first examples of their genre (they had precedents in the zhiguai tradition, just as Shakespeare had precedents in the medieval mystery plays); like the Elizabethan plays, they were products of a specific cultural moment (the examination culture of the Tang court, just as the plays were products of the commercial theater of London); and like the Elizabethan plays, they achieved a level of literary art that transcended their origins and became permanent contributions to their national literature.
The specific contributions of the Tang chuanqi to the Chinese literary tradition can be summarized as follows. First, they established prose fiction as a legitimate literary genre — a genre worthy of the attention of educated, talented writers and capable of achieving the same level of artistic excellence as poetry and classical prose. Before the Tang, fiction had been a marginal genre — associated with popular entertainment, religious instruction, and the recording of supernatural curiosities. After the Tang, fiction was recognized as a form of literature in its own right, with its own conventions, its own masters, and its own standards of excellence.
Second, they created the narrative archetypes — the faithful woman betrayed, the scholar and the courtesan, the dream journey, the supernatural romance, the heroic swordsman — that became the fundamental building blocks of Chinese fiction and drama for the next thousand years. The plots, characters, and themes of the great vernacular novels and dramas of the Ming and Qing dynasties can almost all be traced back, directly or indirectly, to prototypes established in the Tang chuanqi.
Third, they developed the narrative techniques — the use of dialogue to reveal character, the construction of unified plots, the integration of verse into prose narrative, the employment of multiple points of view, the manipulation of the reader's sympathy and judgment — that made possible the more complex and more ambitious fictional works of later periods.
The Tang chuanqi is, in short, the origin of Chinese fiction — not in the trivial sense that it came first chronologically, but in the deeper sense that it established the forms, the themes, the techniques, and the literary standards that defined what Chinese fiction would become. Without the Tang tales, the great novels and dramas of later centuries — the Xixiang ji, the Sanguozhi yanyi, the Hongloumeng — are inconceivable.
10. Conclusion
The Tang dynasty's achievement in prose fiction and narrative writing, though less celebrated than its achievement in poetry, was of equal long-term significance for the development of Chinese literature. The chuanqi tales created Chinese fiction as a literary art, establishing the narrative forms, the character types, and the storytelling techniques that would shape Chinese fiction for a millennium. The bianwen created a tradition of vernacular popular narrative that provided the foundation for the great vernacular novels of the Ming and Qing. The guwen movement reformed Chinese prose, creating a literary idiom capable of sustained narrative and intellectual argument. And the traditions of travel writing and geographical literature expanded the thematic range of Chinese prose to encompass the full diversity of the empire's landscapes and peoples.
Together, these achievements in prose complemented and completed the Tang dynasty's achievement in poetry. If Tang poetry represents the supreme expression of the Chinese lyric imagination — the individual voice speaking in measured verse about the experiences of the human heart — Tang prose represents the beginning of the Chinese narrative imagination — the capacity to create fictional worlds, to tell stories of love and adventure, to explore the nature of reality through the medium of prose narrative. Both achievements were essential foundations for the subsequent development of Chinese literature, and both remain living presences in the Chinese literary tradition today.
References
- ↑ William H. Nienhauser Jr., "Tang Dynasty Tales," in Victor H. Mair, ed., The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 561–588.
- ↑ Li Jianguo 李剑国, Tang Wudai zhiguai chuanqi xulu 唐五代志怪传奇叙录 (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 1993), 1–30.
- ↑ Stephen Owen, The End of the Chinese 'Middle Ages': Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 146–180.
- ↑ Karl S.Y. Kao, ed., Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 1–20.
- ↑ Wilt L. Idema, "Prosimetric and Verse Narrative," in Victor H. Mair, ed., The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 343–370.
- ↑ Victor H. Mair, T'ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1989), 1–80.
- ↑ Charles Hartman, Han Yü and the T'ang Search for Unity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 150–170.
- ↑ Sally Hovey Wriggins, Xuanzang: A Buddhist Pilgrim on the Silk Road (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 1–30.
- ↑ Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Authorship, and Composition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 1–40.