The Peach Blossom Fan

by K'ung Shang-jen

  K’UNG SHANG-JEN (1646–1718) was a sixty-fourth generation descendant of Confucius and was raised in his ancestor’s hometown of Qufu in Shandong province. A noted expert in music and Confucian rites, he was chosen in 1684 to lecture to the visiting emperor Kangxi, who later appointed him to the Imperial Academy in Beijing. The Peach Blossom Fan was completed in 1699 and was performed to great acclaim in 1700. It was not published, however, until 1708, a few years after K’ung had left his post and returned home to Qufu.

  JUDITH T. ZEITLIN is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature.

  CHEN SHIH-HSIANG (1912–1971) was a professor of Chinese and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Among his books are The Genesis of Poetic Time and, with Harold Acton, Modern Chinese Poetry.

  HAROLD ACTON (1904–1994) was a prolific Anglo-Italian writer, poet, novelist, and translator. He lived in China from 1932 to ’39, teaching English literature at the University of Peking.

  CYRIL BIRCH is a translator and the Agassiz Professor of Chinese and Comparative Literature emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.

  THE PEACH BLOSSOM FAN

  K’UNG SHANG-JEN

  Translated by

  CHEN SHIH-HSIANG and HAROLD ACTON

  with CYRIL BIRCH

  New introduction by

  JUDITH T. ZEITLIN

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1976 by the Regents of the University of California

  Introduction to the New York Review Books edition copyright © 2015 by

  Judith T. Zeitlin

  All rights reserved.

  Published by arrangement with the University of California Press

  The illustrations in this text are from a Chinese edition of the play published in 1917, but stylistically they are modeled on woodcuts made for a fine late-Ming edition (early seventeenth century) of T’ang Hsien-tsu’s famous play The Peony Pavilion.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kong, Shangren, 1648–1718.

  [Tao hua shan. English]

  The peach blossom fan / by K’ung Shang-jen ; introduction by Judith T. Zeitlin ; translated by Chen Shih-hsiang and Harold Acton, with the collaboration of Cyril Birch.

  1 online resource. — (NYRB Classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-877-5 () — ISBN 978-1-59017-876-8 (paperback)

  I. Ch’ên, Shih-hsiang, 1912–1971, translator. II. Acton, Harold, 1904–1994, translator. III. Birch, Cyril, 1925– translator. IV. Title.

  PL2717.U47

  895.12'4—dc23

  2014039704

  ISBN 978-1-59017-877-5

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  New Introduction by Judith T. Zeitlin

  Preface by Harold Acton

  Introduction by Cyril Birch

  Principal Characters

  Prologue

  PART I

  Scene 1: The Storyteller

  Scene 2: The Singing-Master

  Scene 3: The Disrupted Ceremonies

  Scene 4: The Play Observed

  Scene 5: A Visit to the Beauty

  Scene 6: The Fragrant Couch

  Scene 7: The Rejected Trousseau

  Scene 8: A Riverside Occasion

  Scene 9: The Troops Mollified

  Scene 10: The Letter

  Scene 11: A Visit to Headquarters

  Scene 12: The Lovers Parted

  Scene 13: Lament for the Emperor

  Scene 14: The Traitor Blocked

  Scene 15: The Coronation

  Scene 16: The New Regime

  Scene 17: The Matchmakers Resisted

  Scene 18: The Rivals Struggle

  Scene 19: The Pacification Attempt

  Scene 20: The Defence Assignment

  Interlude (Supplementary Scene): A Quiet Chat

  PART II

  Prologue to Scene 21

  Scene 21: The Invented Match

  Scene 22: The Rejected Suit

  Scene 23: The Message on the Fan

  Scene 24: The Revellers Upbraided

  Scene 25: The Cast Selected

  Scene 26: The General Tricked

  Scene 27: A Meeting of Boats

  Scene 28: The Painting Inscribed

  Scene 29: The Club Suppressed

  Scene 30: The Return to the Hills

  Scene 31: The Impeachment Drafted

  Scene 32: The Imperial Mourning

  Scene 33: Reunion in Jail

  Scene 34: The River Fortress

  Scene 35: Call to Battle

  Scene 36: Flight from Disaster

  Scene 37: Theft of the Jewel

  Scene 38: Lost in the River

  Scene 39: Temples of Refuge

  Scene 40: Entering the Way

  Epilogue

  NEW INTRODUCTION

  THE PEACH BLOSSOM FAN is a play in forty-four acts, which may seem dauntingly long, but just like a great novel, it opens up a richly detailed social world to us. The play has a huge and varied cast of characters that encompasses poets, painters, and singing girls; booksellers, storytellers, and musicians; politicians, generals, princes; Taoist hermits, refugees, and even ghosts. The play’s settings are similarly varied, since the traditional Chinese stage, like Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, required no built sets or scenery. We are easily transported from the deflowering ceremony at an elegant brothel to the meeting of a political club at a local bookstore, from play rehearsals in the inner recesses of the palace to military headquarters on the eve of battle, and from crowds of rioters and looters in the city streets to a scene of sudden enlightenment at a secluded mountain temple. The language, too, deftly captured in Chen Shih-hsiang, Harold Acton, and Cyril Birch’s translation, crosses all the vocal registers: highly lyrical verses that are meant to be sung, intermixed with witty dialogue, heroic speeches, and bawdy jokes.

  Completed in 1699, The Peach Blossom Fan is the greatest historical drama in Chinese literature, which traditionally has prized the writing of history above all. The Register of Ghosts, written around 1330, one of the earliest Chinese books about the theater that has come down to us, declares: “The purpose of writing is to record history; the purpose of theater is to mourn the past; theater brings those who are gone back to life and provides a forceful lesson for those who come afterward.” The book hails the great playwrights whose names it records as “ghosts that will never die.”

  Chinese historical dramas usually took their subject matter from the distant past, allowing legend to mingle freely with history and the past to be deployed as an innocuous mirror to reflect upon the present. This was still the common practice when K’ung Shang-jen (Kong Shangren) sat down to write The Peach Blossom Fan in the 1690s, during the prosperous reign of the emperor K’ang-hsi (Kangxi), the second ruler of the Ch’ing (Qing) dynasty. K’ung, however, chose as the topic of his play tumultuous events of comparatively recent history: the violent fall of the Ming dynasty only fifty-five years or so before, which survivors could still remember. The Ming’s demise is conventionally dated to April 25, 1644, the year that rebels overran the northern capital Peking (Beijing) and the last em
peror, Ch’ung-chen (Chongzhen), hanged himself from a tree inside the Forbidden City. Six weeks later, invading from the north, the Manchus breached the Great Wall, took Peking, and proclaimed themselves rulers of a new dynasty, the Ch’ing. In actuality, it took another year for the Manchus to conquer the heartland of southern China, and the last remnants of Ming resistance weren’t wiped out until 1662.

  Set mainly in the years 1643 to 1645 (each scene is labeled with the year and month), The Peach Blossom Fan depicts the founding and self-destruction of the most important of these holdout southern Ming regimes: the court of the puppet emperor Hung-kuang (Hongguang), the former Ming prince Fu, in the southern capital of Nanking (Nanjing). This “Nanking Restoration,” as it’s called in the play, lasted scarcely a year before the Manchu army subdued the city of Yangchow (Yangzhou) in the course of a ten-day massacre, and then marched on Nanking without encountering further resistance. The play deftly exposes the foibles of the regime, the factional struggles at court, its corruption and frivolousness, the military blunders and misplaced heroism that leave Yangchow, the gateway to the south, undefended and provoke the final debacle.

  K’ung Shang-jen was born in 1648, only a few years after the events depicted in his play, and grew up in north China hearing stories from relatives about the fall of the Ming. Like many people who are born in the immediate aftermath of wars and other cataclysmic events, he became fascinated with the history of what he had narrowly missed. A member of the venerable K’ung clan, which traced its direct lineage back to Confucius, and which maintained the imperial Temple of Confucius at the sage’s burial place in the town of Ch’ü-fu (Qufu) in Shandong province, K’ung Shang-jen was a man of letters and a specialist in Confucian ritual and ancient music. During Emperor K’ung-hsi’s trip to Ch’ü-fu to visit the Temple of Confucius in 1684, K’ung was called upon to expound on Confucian ritual to the emperor, which made his career. For this he was promoted to a doctor of letters in the imperial academy in Peking and entered the official bureaucracy, the most prestigious avenue of success.

  Despite (or because?) of his orthodox upbringing, K’ung developed a deep interest in the sensuous pleasures of late Ming popular culture and the tangled fortunes of the Hung-kuang court—not just in the destruction of that world but also in the world that was destroyed. He got his opportunity to do firsthand research into both when he was appointed to a waterworks commission in 1686 and stationed in Yangchow for several years. The rebuilt Yangchow was once again one of the most glittering and prosperous cities in the empire. During those years, K’ung frequented literary circles that shared his nostalgia for the Ming and interviewed the older generation of survivors. He supplemented these oral histories with avid reading in the primary sources, not only historical accounts and memoirs but poetry collections, letters, and plays written by the historical figures he cast as the main characters in The Peach Blossom Fan. He drafted the play itself after resuming his official position in Peking, where it successfully premiered in 1700. It was not published, however, until 1708, a few years after K’ung had left his post and returned home to Shandong. (Contrary to what Acton says in his preface, the scholarly consensus nowadays is that K’ung’s resignation most likely had nothing to do with his authorship of The Peach Blossom Fan.) The play has remained popular ever since, rarely performed but widely read.

  Although it was written more than three hundred years ago, The Peach Blossom Fan seems an astonishingly contemporary work, perhaps not least in the dark and cynical view it takes of politics. After news of Emperor Ch’ung-chen’s suicide breaks, the south is awhirl with rumor and gossip. Contending factions emerge to support rival princes as pretenders to the throne. In Nanking, the two power-hungry villains of the play, Juan Ta-ch’eng (Ruan Dacheng) and Ma Shih-ying (Ma Shiying), rush to be the first to crown their candidate (the venal Ming prince Fu), chosen in part because he is so weak and easily manipulated. As Juan declares: “To select an Emperor is like choosing the most profitable merchandise. One should act quickly before rivals stake a claim.” Substitute “president” for “emperor” and he could easily be talking about an upcoming American election.

  The play is also acutely aware of politics as theater, a game of pretense and posturing, and at many points K’ung makes active and dramatic use of this metaphor. Even now in China, gaining or losing political power is described as “entering or exiting the stage,” while the saying “If you find yourself onstage, you perform the play” means opportunism. Thus the scheming Juan, having just returned to politics, enters costumed anew as an official and delivers the lines: “I can see the black and white of events as on a chessboard; / Brushing my eyebrows and beard again, I shall play a role in the drama.” This last line is doubly piquant, not only because in real life Juan was known for his luxuriant whiskers and nicknamed “the Beard” but because in the play his character belongs to the “painted face” role type assigned to a villain, and as in the Peking opera today, would have worn a conspicuously artificial beard onstage. Even better, the historical Juan was also a famous playwright, and a considerable subplot in the play involves preparations for a palace production of his masterpiece The Swallow Letter at the behest of the theater-besotted Hung-kuang, as the armies desert and the southern Ming crumbles. Talk about fiddling while Rome burns.

  Theater, like politics, is a double-edged sword, then, to be wielded and feared, and the play’s two villains are only too aware of it. Here Juan is toadying to Ma, who has become the prime minister:

  Juan: We shall be our simple selves without play-acting.

  Ma: Don’t talk about acting, I beg. Actors can be dangerous fellows. When they impersonate a character successfully, he will live forever in the image of this caricature. If they paint his face white like a traitor’s, he will remain so infamous that even his descendants will repudiate him as an ancestor. . . . Take the Prime Minister Yen Sung [the most tyrannical of wicked Ming prime ministers], for instance. He was quite an accomplished statesman in his time, but since that play, “The Singing Phoenix,” he has always appeared with a hideous white face.

  Think of Shakespeare’s hunchbacked Richard III, and the truth of this statement about the power of theater to mold our perception of a historical figure forever immediately strikes home. Again the dramatic irony is that Ma himself, as the villain of The Peach Blossom Fan, would be played by an actor wearing whiteface when he utters these lines.

  These devices are not just ironic and elegant; they also help K’ung to keep the centrifugal forces of his play from spinning out of control. If his fictional reimagining of the southern Ming was only possible because of the temporal distance separating him from the regime, he fulfilled his fantasy to have personally lived through these events by writing a part loosely based on himself. This character, called the Master of Ceremonies, a direct allusion to the playwright’s own position as a ritual specialist, presides over some raucous ceremonies in the imperial Temple of Confucius in Nanking and makes sporadic appearances throughout the rest of the play. Most important, the Master of Ceremonies introduces the prologues that frame parts I and II of the drama as an imaginary performance of the play taking place over two consecutive nights at a public theater. The year given is 1684 (precisely the year when K’ung had his greatest triumph lecturing to Emperor K’ang-hsi), some forty years after the events depicted in the play and fifteen years before the play was actually written. By having his dramatic counterpart praise the flourishing reign of the current emperor, the playwright bracketed off even the slightest suggestion of potential sedition. (Ideologically, The Peach Blossom Fan is squarely in synch with the ruling Ch’ing interpretation of Ming history.) At the same time, in portraying the Master of Ceremonies as both survivor and spectator, K’ung simultaneously bridged and maintained the gap separating past and present that gives historical drama its suggestiveness and power.

  The Peach Blossom Fan is very much about “the rise and fall of an empire,” as the Master of Ceremonies says in the prologue, bu
t the fashionable dramatic genre K’ung adapts to tell this story—the long southern drama—was a species of romantic comedy involving “a story of meeting and separation,” to quote the Master of Ceremonies again, with a mandated happy ending. (For more on the southern drama, see Cyril Birch’s introduction.) K’ung constructs the larger historical plot around a love story in which the male lead figures as a young man of letters, Hou Fang-yü (Hou Fangyu), and the female lead as the budding young courtesan, Li Hsiang-chün (Xiangjun, called Fragrant Princess in this translation). Both Hou and Fragrant Princess (like all the characters in the play, minor as well major) represent real historical figures, though K’ung naturally took some dramatic license with the facts and chronology. In actuality, the pair had a love affair when Hou was taking the provincial examinations in Nanking, and as was customary took a mistress from among the courtesans in the famous pleasure quarter across the river. Having failed the examinations, however, he said his goodbyes, left the city, and never saw her again. (In the play, he is forced to leave to avoid arrest on trumped-up charges by Juan.) The real Hou did, however, write a biography of Fragrant Princess, praising her acumen in warning him against accepting disguised favors from the likes of Juan and for her refusal to accept a princely sum to join the harem of a powerful official in Juan’s clique. These episodes furnish the basis of her fiery, principled character as dramatized in the scenes called “The Rejected Trousseau” and “The Rejected Suit”; a similar scene, “The Revellers Upbraided,” is pure invention. Throughout the play, Fragrant Princess is far more heroic in her actions and speeches than Hou ever is.

  Despite the beautiful love duets the couple sings, The Peach Blossom Fan is deeply unromantic. Not because the heroine is a courtesan—southern drama is full of idealized courtesans and scholars who wind up happily married—but because the playwright repeatedly deflates the very premise of romance. Again a meta-theatrical scene sets the tone. When we first meet Fragrant Princess, she’s in the midst of practicing some arias from The Peony Pavilion, the most famous tale of true and triumphant love in the southern drama repertory. Again and again, Fragrant Princess’s singing master, Su K’un-sheng (Kunsheng, another historical figure), interrupts to correct her technique, reminding the audience that love in the pleasure quarter is a performance, not something real and lasting. Also present at the lesson is the painter and official Yang Wen-ts’ung (Yang Wencong), the most morally ambiguous figure in the play, and historically the brother-in-law of the villain Ma. Yang offers to launch Fragrant Princess on her career as a courtesan and arranges for the dashing Hou to become her first client. Although carefully trained for this profession from youth, Fragrant Princess willfully takes the sham wedding, performed with such touching fanfare in the brothel in the scene called “The Fragrant Couch,” as entailing a real pledge of her love and fidelity to Hou. The very next scene punctures the romantic illusion of the previous night, as the maid (played by a clown), enters with a chamber pot: