4. A fabulous ruler of ancient China, said to have discovered fire.
5. The second Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945.
6. Ju-lin wai-shih: literally, the unofficial history of Confucian scholars, a satiric work of officialdom written from 1743 to 1750 by Wu Ching-tzu (1701–1754).
7. A reference to Tathagata, a Buddhist term, frequently used by the Buddha when referring to himself; the meaning is literally “he who has thus come or arrived.”
8. A system of classifying Chinese characters is based on numbers assigned to ten different kinds of strokes. A four-digit number can be derived from the types of stroke found in the four corners of each character.
9. Tu Fu (712–770): one of China’s greatest poets.
10. Yatron is the brand name for chiniofon, a medicine used for treating amebiasis; cinchona, also called Jesuits’ bark or Peruvian bark, is used for treating malaria; sulfate of quinine is medicine used as a febrifuge, antimalarial, anti-periodic, and bitter tonic; formamint is a medicated drop for treating pharyngitis.
11. Pine, bamboo, and plum flower are traditionally known as the “three companions of winter.”
12. The Chinese stage is normally rather bare, with no more than a carpet, table, and two chairs. The significance of the action is portrayed not by elaborate and heavy stage properties but by a highly complex set of formal, symbolic gestures and portable objects. For instance, by carrying a riding whip with heavy silk tassels, an actor indicates he is riding a horse, and a formal upward kick represents the motion of mounting a horse.
13. The saying is from the Confucian Analects, IX, 12. “Tse-kung said, ‘There is a beautiful gem here. Should I lay it up in a case and keep it? Or should I seek a good price and sell it?’ The master said, ‘Sell it; sell it! But I would wait for one to offer the price.’” (James Legge’s translation; New York: Dover, 1893).
14. Meng Ch’ang-chün (d. 279): a native of the state of Ch’i. When he was put in prison, one of his retainers, who could steal like a dog, was able to steal a fur robe for the King’s favorite concubine. She then persuaded the King to release Meng Ch’ang-chün. Later the King changed his mind and sent a courier after him. Meng would have been stopped at the frontier gate, which was not opened until cockcrow, had not another retainer, who could crow like a cock, been able to have the gate opened for Meng.
15. To many superstitious people a woman is considered “unclean,” and hence no woman should sit on any food that goes into the mouth.
16. The fire in Ch’ang-sha was one of many episodes as the war in China took a turn for the worse in 1937. There was the fall of Nanking on December 13, and later the occupation of major cities such as Tsingtao, Hangchow, and others by the Japanese.
17. In wartime China credit was hard to establish. Hence to prove one’s identity or to cash a check, a shop or store was required to affix its seal to guarantee the person’s identity or the check’s validity.
18. Mint-flavored sugar pellets.
CHAPTER SIX
1. From The Great Learning (Ta hsüeh), one of the Four Books read by all educated Chinese. It contains short philosophical sections from the Book of Rites (Li chi) on key Confucian ideas.
2. Ping fa: a compilation on the subject of war and stratagem accredited to Sun Tzu, who probably lived in the early fourth century B.C.
3. T’ang San-tsang (596–664), also known as Hsüan-tsang and Tripitaka, was a Chinese Buddhist priest who journeyed to India, where he visited its holy places, and brought back over six hundred copies of the sacred books of Buddhism. In 645, when he returned to China after an absence of seventeen years, he was received with public honors. See also note 35, Chapter Two.
4. The original expression, “not sharing the same sky,” refers to irreconcilable enemies who hate each other so much they can’t live under the same sky. The author is poking fun at Lu’s slick hair.
5. Each year is represented by an animal (Le., rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, snake, horse, sheep, monkey, cock, dog, and boar) and the complete cycle repeats itself once every twelve years. Hence it is possible to know another person’s age simply by asking him what his animal sign is.
6. The most powerful executive branch of the Chinese Nationalist Government, with jurisdiction over many important ministries, such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Education, and others.
7. The cone-shaped hat was worn by officials in ancient times. “To throw away the cone-shaped hat” means to resign one’s position.
8. A commemorative meeting every Monday in memory of Sun Yat-sen (1866–1925), the founder of modern China, during which announcements are read, the national anthem is sung, and plans are made for the rest of the week.
9. Fang Hsiao-ju (1357–1402): a scholar and tutor to the sons of Emperor Hui-ti, second emperor of the Ming dynasty. When this emperor disappeared under mysterious circumstances, Fang refused to serve the new emperor, Ch’eng-tsu. For this Fang was cut to pieces in the marketplace and his family was exterminated to the last branch.
10. The palace grounds in the city of Peking.
11. Sterculia platanifolia: It is sometimes called the national tree of China; the trunk is straight and the leaves are beautifully green. It is said to be the only tree on which the phoenix will rest.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. A delightful old figure, easily recognizable by his domed head, and the peach he invariably carries. His long beard and staff denote his old age, and the peach, which he holds, is culled from a miraculous tree that blossoms every three thousand years and bears fruit three thousand years later. He is sometimes depicted as surrounded by mushrooms, which confer immortality. So far he has survived political change and enjoys enormous popularity in Chinese art.
2. Someone tall and thin in body build. See also note 8, Chapter Three.
3. Ts’ao Yü (real name Wan Chia-po), born in 1905 in Hupeh province, is considered the greatest writer of modern Chinese drama (hua-chü). His best plays were written between 1933 and 1940. His first was Thunderstorm (Lei-yü, 1933), followed by Sunrise (Jih ch’u, 1935), and others.
4. Loso: A transcription of the word “Rousseau,” it also means to talk incessantly and tediously.
5. Chinese chess is similar to Western chess. But the game is played on the lines, not on the squares. The European pawn, castle, knight, bishop, and king are matched in their moves by the Chinese soldier, chariot, horse, minister, and king, and the object of both games is the same.
6. The Confucian ideal of the perfect gentleman.
7. The Chinese is “Fang po-po.” “Po-po” generally refers to the elder brother of one’s father, even though in some areas in China the term also means “father.”
8. The Chinese is ‘Tang ku-fu.” “Ku-fu” is the husband of the father’s sister, and its English equivalent is “paternal uncle.”
9. A wife is addressed as “fu-jen,” while the word for concubine is “ju fu-jen,” meaning literally, “like a ‘fu-jen.’”
10. A couplet by Tseng Kuo-fang. See also note 1, Chapter Five.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. The Chinese is “shih-sao,” a term of address to the wife of a friend.
2. An umbrella given by the people to a popular departing official or some public benefactor.
3. A tablet commemorating a person’s virtuous conduct, the first of the three imperishable qualities of a man. The other two are “to establish one’s merit,” and “to establish one’s words, teaching. . . . .”
4. Someone bewitching enough to have “sucked away” another person’s soul.
5. Losing at both ends, from a story in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
6. The Chinese is “shao fu-jen,” a proper term of address for a friend’s wife. It is similar to note 1 in this chapter.
7. The Chinese is “lao pai-mu,” which is here translated as “auntie.”
8. Ku Chieh-kang edited the Ku-shih pien (1926–1941), a multivolume reeva
luation of China’s traditional history and traditional methods of historical investigation and interpretation.
9. On October 10, 1911, a Chinese soldier killed his commanding officer and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 officially began at Wuchang, leading to the abdication of the Manchu child-emperor Hsuan-t’ung on February 12, 1912. Since then, October 10 has been commemorated as the National Day of the Republic of China.
10. On January 18, 1915, the Japanese Minister in Peking, Hioki Eki, presented to President Yüan Shih-k’ai (1859–1916) what came to be known as the Twenty-one Demands, which would give Japan special political and economic privileges not only in Shantung province and in Manchuria but in other parts of China as well. Soon word of the demands leaked out, and Chinese student organizations in Peking met and planned to hold a mass demonstration on May 7, designated as the “National Humiliation Day.” The demonstration, however, was held on May 4.
CHAPTER NINE
1. First Meeting gifts: The mother-in-law usually gives jewelry to a new member of the family, who in turn gives gifts of cash or items of small value to nephews, nieces, and servants.
2. During the Ch’un Ch’iu period (722–481 B.C.), the royal families of the states of Ch’in and Tsin formed marital alliances one generation after another. Thus the phrase, “joining together as Ch’in and Tsin,” means to be allied in marriage.
3. Fuel, rice, oil, and salt are the four necessities of life.
4. Huang Ti, the Yellow Emperor (fl. 2697 B.C.): reputed founder of the Chinese empire, recognized by the historian Ssu-ma Ch’ien, who wrote the first general history of China in the first century B.C. Ssu-ma describes the Yellow Emperor as a human ruler and the Yellow Emperor’s reign as the golden age when the government of the world was perfect.
5. A Peking opera which tells the story of Su San, a courtesan, and her lover, Wang Chin-lung. The scene referred to here is a very popular one in which Su San, falsely accused of murder, is taken under escort on a long journey to court for her trial with a cangue around her neck in which her hands are locked.
6. A servant receives tips from family guests when they come to the house to play mahjong and when she cleans up after them.
7. By the end of 1938 the Japanese controlled most of northern China and the eastern coastal regions extending inland as far as Hankow in the center of eastern China. To administer this vast area, the Japanese developed puppet governments. They succeeded in enticing Wang Ching-wei (1883–1944), a longtime Kuomintang leader, to defect and head a puppet government in Nanking.
8. The address of the secret police during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai.
AFTERWORD
1. See T’ang Shih’s review of Shih T’o’s Marriage (Chieh-hun) in Wen-hsin, 8, no. 3 (March 1948), p. 473. In the review, T’ang calls Mao Tun’s Midnight (Tzu-yeh) and Ch’ien Chung-shu’s Fortress Besieged the two best modern Chinese novels. See also Ping Hsi’s “Wei-ch’eng tu hou” (After Reading Fortress Besieged) in Ta-kung pao (August 19, 1947), p. 9. Ping Hsi expresses a similar idea. Quoted by David Theodore Huters, “Traditional Innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and Modern Chinese Letters,” Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1977, p. 344.
2. C. T. Hsia, A History of Modern Chinese Fiction (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 441.
3. The two doctoral dissertations are Dennis Hu’s “A Linguistic-Literary Study of Ch’ien Chung-shu’s Three Creative Works,” University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1977; and David Theodore Huters, “Traditional Innovation: Qian Zhong-shu and Modern Chinese Letters,” Stanford University, 1977. The master’s thesis is Mai Ping-k’un’s “Lun Ch’ien Qiung-shu te san-wen ho hsiao-shuo” (On Ch’ien Chung-shu’s Essays and Fictional Writings), The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1976. For a detailed listing of works by Ch’ien and about him, see Hu, pp. 212–217, and Huters, pp. 349–363.
4. C T. Hsia, A History, p. 442.
5. Huters has written that it is doubtful that Ch’ien ever taught at the National Southwest Associated University in Kunming as claimed by Dennis Hu and C. T. Hsia. Neither Mr. George Yeh of Taipei nor Mr. Stephen Soong of Hong Kong has any recollection of Ch’ien’s ever having taught there (Huters, p. 190, especially note 25). In May 1979 Ch’ien commented that there must have been a lapse of memory on the part of my old teacher Mr. George Yeh, who was the dean of the English faculty at the National Southwest Associated University when I taught there for a year under him.”
6. C. T. Hsia, “Chui-nien Ch’ien Chung-shu hsien-sheng” (In Memory of Mr. Ch’ien Chung-shu), Chung-kuo shih pao, Overseas Edition, February 14, 1976, p. 6, and February 15, 1976, p. 7; also collected in Hsia’s Jen te wen-hsüeh (Taipei: Ch’un Wen-hsüeh ch’u-pan she, 1977), pp. 177–194.
7. Professor C. T. Hsia of Columbia University, who talked with Ch’ien Chung-shu on April 23, 1979, in New York City, supplied many of the facts found here. On May 4–5, 1979, Leo Ou-fan Lee of Indiana University submitted the biographical part of the Introduction and the Author’s Preface to Ch’ien Chung-shu for correction while he was in Chicago. A page from the original Preface was omitted in the translation at his request, several items of biographical detail were clarified, and recent information has been added.
8. GT. Hsia, A History, p. 433.
9. Roland Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” tr. by Lionel Dusit, New Literary History, VI, 2 (Winter 1975), pp. 253, 255. Barthes’ definition of a sequence is a “logical string of nuclei, linked together by a solidarity relation: the sequence opens when one of its germs is lacking an antecedent of the same kin, and it closes when another of its terms no longer entails any consequent function.” Quoted by Huters, p. 343, note 2.
10. C. T. Hsia, “The Scholar-Novelist and Chinese Culture: A Reappraisal of Ching-hua Yuan,” in Chinese Narrative, ed. by Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 269.
11. Ibid.
12. See Dennis Hu, “Ch’ien Chung-shu’s Novel Wei-ch’eng,” Journal of Asian Studies, XXXVII, 3 (May 1978), pp. 427–443.
13. Huters, pp. 301–302. Huters points out that there are two narrative voices throughout the novel, but since there is a frequent overlapping between them, the reader thinks of them as one.
14. The fad of studying abroad goes on unabated in Hong Kong and especially in Taiwan even today.
15. For a full treatment of the theme in traditional Chinese fiction, see William Bruce Crawford, “‘The Oil Vendor and the Courtesan’ and the Ts’ai-tzu Chia-jen Novels,” in Critical Essays on Chinese Literature, ed. by W. H. Nien-hauser, Jr. (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1976), pp. 31–42. In the twentieth century, the Butterfly fiction (i.e., sentimental love stories) was extremely popular, despite efforts by modern writers to call for relevant themes in modern fiction. See Perry Link, “Traditional-Style Popular Urban Fiction,” in Modern Chinese Literature in the May Fourth Era, ed. by Merle Goldman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 327–349.
Copyright © 1947 by Qian Zhongshu
Copyright © 1947, 2004 by Yang Jiang
Copyright © 2004 by New Directions
Translation copyright © 1979 by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao
Foreword copyright © 2004 by Jonathan Spence
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in a newspaper, magazine, radio, or television review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Publisher.
Fortress Besieged is published by arrangement with Yang Jiang and the translators.
The Publisher would like thank to Kathi Paton, Joanne Wang, and Dominique Bourgois for their help in making this edition possible.
The translators wish to dedicate their translation to Petey and to Nathan’s children.
First published clothbound in 1979 by Indiana University Press
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p; First published as a New Directions Classic (NDP966) in 2004
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eISBN: 9780811223546
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