The Peach Blossom Fan

by K'ung Shang-jen

  Turtle-piss, turtle piss,

  Little turtles come of this;

  Tortoise-blood, tortoise-blood,

  Turning into tortoise brood.

  Mixing, mating, copulating,

  Wholly undiscriminating,

  Never know who fathered who;

  Wouldn’t matter if they knew.

  Ha ha, hee hee! Yesterday Fragrant Princess lost her maidenhead and I lost half a night’s sleep. Today I must rise early to empty the chamberpot, but who knows how late the lucky lovebirds will slumber on? [She scrubs out the pot.]

  The lovebirds turn out to be anything but lucky, however.

  In a preface to The Peach Blossom Fan, K’ung claimed that everything portrayed in the play was based on “true written records” except for the episodes concerning the fan that furnishes the title. A basic device used to provide structural and thematic unity in the sprawling plots of the southern drama is the incorporation of a concrete stage prop, most often a love token, which repeatedly changes hands and develops an emblematic significance over the course of the action. In the most sophisticated treatments, as with the fan here, the object undergoes material changes that register its own narrative history in the play. K’ung masterfully takes a rampant poetic cliché—a courtesan’s “peach blossom fan”—and transforms it into a dynamic microcosm of the romance between Fragrant Princess and Hou as intertwined with the fate of the Ming dynasty. What begins life as a blank paper fan, which Hou inscribes with a poem as a gift for Fragrant Princess on their “wedding” night, is then spattered with her blood when she resists being taken into the harem of Juan’s fellow official, then is transformed into a painting of peach blossoms and delivered to Hou as a message from Fragrant Princess attesting to her fidelity. In the final scene of the play (“Entering the Way”), the lovers meet again in a Taoist temple, where memorial rituals are being conducted for Ch’ung-chen, the last legitimate Ming emperor. Hou holds the precious fan and the lovers gaze at it together, when suddenly the Taoist priest snatches it out of their hands and rips it to shreds. This is the most shocking moment in the play and it ushers in the most radical violation of southern drama convention. What’s supposed to be a “grand reunion” scene to clinch the triumph of love on the order of the finale in a Broadway musical, turns instead into a “grand dispersal” scene rupturing any illusion of love. The now enlightened lovers exit separately and the stage gradually empties, until the only one left is the Taoist priest, who sings the concluding aria:

  White bones are laid in the dust,

  The southern realm concludes its span.

  Dreams of revival fall to earth

  In shreds with the peach blossom fan.

  Many members of the initial audience for the play must have been astonished and disappointed by this unprecedented conclusion; K’ung in any case tells us that a friend of his rewrote the play to provide the missing happy ending for the lovers. (Needless to say, K’ung didn’t approve.) K’ung himself, to soften the abruptness, or just to provide a more extended lyrical threnody for the Ming, includes an epilogue set three years later featuring three hermits—the Master of Ceremonies, the singing master Su K’ung-sheng, and the professional storyteller Liu Ch’ing-t’ing (Jingting, the main comic role in the play and one of the most interesting historical characters). Yet this extra final scene also ends with the gradual dispersal of all the characters, and the last aria of the play is sung from offstage.

  —JUDITH T. ZEITLIN

  PREFACE

  The late Chen Shih-hsiang and I first collaborated in translating some modern Chinese poems while we were together in Peking in the nineteen-thirties. We undertook the present translation one summer over twenty years ago. It was a pleasant distraction from more arduous labours — a holiday task and, for me, a spiritual return to China when I had no chance of returning there in the flesh. Shih-hsiang was occupied at the time with teaching duties at Berkeley and with his researches into early Chinese poetry and criticism. At my suggestion, we devoted delightful hours to The Peach Blossom Fan — for its own sake rather than for publication, though we hoped it might be published eventually. We completed a draft of all but the last seven scenes, and in this unfinished state the manuscript lay until Chen’s untimely death in May 1971. Now Cyril Birch, Shih-hsiang’s colleague at Berkeley for eleven years, has very kindly undertaken to complete the work by adding his own translation of these late scenes and by revising our draft throughout. The complete English version of this fine play is offered here as a tribute to the memory of a dear friend.

  Many popular Chinese plays fail to qualify as literature, being no more than plain scripts for brilliant actors to display their virtuosity. T’ao-hua-shan — The Peach Blossom Fan appears to be a luminous exception, for it is a highly poetic chronicle play composed by a distinguished scholar, K’ung Shang-jen, who was born soon after the events he portrayed. As a vivid evocation of the downfall of the Ming dynasty, it deserves to be better known to students of Chinese literature and history.

  The great Ming dynasty endured close on three hundred years, from 1368 to 1644. It purchased stability at the price of atrophy in certain aspects of the national life, most notably in the art of government; yet there was continuing advance during those centuries in philosophy and the arts, in trade and the growth of cities.

  Though the idea would have been inconceivable to men of the time, 1644 was the last year, forever, in which a Chinese ruler would occupy the Imperial throne. By the early years of the seventeenth century, dynastic decline was rapidly accelerating. The historical background has been described in Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking by E. Backhouse and J. O. P. Bland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), and biographies of the principal characters are given in the two invaluable volumes of Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (1644–1911), edited by Arthur W. Hummel (Washington: Library of Congress, 1943).

  The failing grasp of the last Ming emperors was further loosened by a succession of disastrous famines which drove thousands to brigandage under the leadership of men like Li Tzu-ch’eng. From the province of Shensi, rebellion spread to Shansi, out and down across Honan, southwest into Szechuan. Capturing city after city, Li Tzu-ch’eng assumed the title of Emperor and marched into Peking in April 1644, where the unfortunate Ming Emperor Ch’ung-chen ended his troubles by committing suicide. A month later, Li’s two hundred thousand troops were defeated by the Chinese general Wu San-kuei, whose family Li had exterminated. Into the power vacuum, at the invitation of Wu San-kuei, marched the newly consolidated nation of the Manchus. Swiftly they became masters of North China and established a dynasty of their own, the Ch’ing, which was to yield only to the republican forms of the twentieth century.

  Following the suicide of the Emperor Ch’ung-chen, remnants of the Ming court fled south to Nanking. Here for a few short months of 1644–45 the attempt was made to restore Ming rule by proclaiming Prince Fu as Emperor Hung-kuang. It was a vain hope, and the faction-riven armies of the Ming court at Nanking soon melted before the Manchu advance.

  Fairbank and Reischauer, In East Asia: The Great Tradition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), identify “many classic features” of the Ming decline: “effete and feckless rulers, corrupt favorites misusing their power, factional jealousies among the officials, fiscal bankruptcy, the impact of natural disasters, the rise of rebellion and, finally, foreign invasion.” All items of this melancholy catalogue are visible in The Peach Blossom Fan — although, as we should perhaps expect of a moralist, K’ung Shang-jen tends to stress the first three elements of waning political integrity and personal relations.

  The egregious example of the corrupt favourite was a vicious dictator, the eunuch Wei Chung-hsien. It was a prime folly of the late Ming rulers to deliver power into the hands of such men as he, untrained and ignorant controllers of the Imperial harem, who rose from underling to dominant status by their accumulation of private wealth and by the elimination of rival influences on the Emperor. Wei Chung-hsien was disgr
aced and hanged himself in 1627, but his bane invests the play through his creatures Ma Shih-ying and Juan Ta-ch’eng.

  The latter was as villainous in real life as in the play. After the disgrace of his powerful eunuch patron, Juan went into retirement for about fifteen years. During this time he composed elegant poems and dramas, some of which were still performed at the beginning of the present century. After ignominious and vain attempts to curry favour with more reputable scholar-officials, he was reinstated in office by his crony Ma Shih-ying, who had become Grand Tutor of the Emperor and dominated the court through bribery, extortion, and the sale of degrees and offices. Juan easily won the favour of the last Ming claimant to the throne by pandering to his passion for theatricals. Our play corroborates the anecdote in Annals and Memoirs that while the Manchu troops were investing Yangchow, the newly installed Ming Emperor Hung-kuang was asked by eunuchs the cause of his despondency. His reply: “What distresses me is that in all my court there is not an actor worthy of the name.” The picture of the refugee court at Nanking leaving its hard-pressed armies unfed while it rehearsed Juan Ta-ch’eng’s play The Swallow Letter, or searched the highways and byways for attractive singing-girls, destroys one’s sympathy for the fading Ming regime, but it leaves the impression of truth.

  With equal authenticity, our playwright K’ung Shang-jen establishes the members of the Revival Club as the forces of light. The Club was an offshoot of the Tung-lin or Eastern Forest Party, a loosely organized group of literati who in the late Ming years had called for a return to fundamental Confucian ideals; they attacked governmental corruption, and in consequence were virtually wiped out by Wei Chung-hsien’s purges of the 1620s. It was a stroke of genius on K’ung Shang-jen’s part to select Hou Fang-yü, brilliant young spokesman for the Revival Club, as the romantic hero. The love relationship at the center of the drama is based on solid fact, the liaison of Hou Fang-yü with the beautiful singing-girl Li Hsiang-chün, “Fragrant Princess.” At the age of sixteen, this girl in actual life showed surprising strength of character. Her unwavering devotion to her lover, her delicacy of sentiment, were in accordance with venerable Chinese ideals. We find many chaste and virtuous concubines in Chinese history. Hou Fang-yü himself, like the scholarly young heroes of most Chinese plays, strikes the Westerner as rather effete in comparison with such women. Had not Fragrant Princess firmly put her foot down, Hou might have been misled into abetting the designs of the villainous Juan Ta-ch’eng.

  Yang Wen-ts’ung, who introduced Fragrant Princess to Hou Fang-yü and then undertook — without success — to deliver her to another man when Hou was out of the way, played such an ambiguous role because he had friends in both camps. In spite of his connection with the Revival Club, he was a brother-in-law of the unscrupulous Ma Shih-ying and on intimate terms with Juan Ta-ch’eng. Though a talented painter, poet, and official who died for the Ming cause, Yang could be guilty of shoddy behaviour. He seems to have been more irresponsible than wicked, a convivial type fond of social and literary gatherings, and an instinctive matchmaker. Early in life he had studied painting under Tung Ch’i-ch’ang, the most admired painter and critic of the Ming dynasty. According to Osvald Sirén, in Chinese Paintings (London: Lund Humphries, 1956), Yang Wen-ts’ung’s best paintings were “exceedingly free expressions of his own poetic spirit, album leaves, fans or small pictures of bamboo branches or epiden-drums.” It was therefore appropriate that he should have converted the bloodstains on Fragrant Princess’ fan into the peach blossoms which give the play its title.

  Chinese theatre audiences have always shown a strong partiality for scenes of martial action. The story of The Peach Blossom Fan revolves around events in the south, the abortive restoration of Ming rule in Nanking. The decisive northern campaigns provide only a distant backdrop to the play: neither the destruction of Peking by the bandit Li Tzu-ch’eng, nor the admission of the Manchu forces by the renegade general Wu San-kuei, assumes any direct significance in the action. The central military role is assigned to Shih K’o-fa, President of the Board of War at the restoration court in Nanking, who stands out as a true hero. His frank and eloquent memorials to the Throne were suppressed by Ma Shih-ying; the provisions and munitions he appealed for never arrived. After his gallant defence of Yangchow, which lasted seven days, the Manchu conquerors made attempts to win him over with the most cogent arguments, but he was a stalwart Confucian for whom loyalty was one of the chief virtues. Failing in his attempt at suicide, he was beheaded, and there followed a ten-day massacre of the inhabitants of Yangchow. Our playwright, however, in a rare instance of poetic licence, honours the legend that Shih K’o-fa escaped the city and drowned himself.

  General Tso Liang-yü was another Ming patriot associated with the Eastern Forest Party. In April 1645 he published a denunciation of Ma Shih-ying and moved against the corrupt government at Nanking, which he saw as inimical to the aspirations for a Ming revival. But the confusion created by his advance helped to weaken Nanking’s defence against the Manchus. Against orders, his troops pillaged and fired the city of Kiukiang, and Tso died the same night.

  Of the “Four Guardian Generals” Huang Te-kung, Kao Chieh, Liu Tse-ch’ing, and Liu Liang-tso, Huang remained loyal to the Ming and committed suicide; Kao Chieh, a former bandit and associate of the rebel leader Li Tzu-ch’eng, was in permanent conflict with the other generals, and it is hard to understand why Shih K’o-fa tolerated him and deplored his loss as a blow to the Ming cause. As in the play, Kao Chieh accepted an invitation to Hsu Ting-kuo’s residence, where he was murdered after a banquet, like so many other generals before and after him. The remaining two “Guardian Generals” both became traitors.

  As Backhouse and Bland point out, had there been a single strong man among the last Ming claimants to the throne, their dynasty might have been restored and China spared three centuries of rule by the alien Manchus. The wonder is that loyalty to an ideal in the actual state of China should have inspired so many brave and distinguished martyrs. When The Peach Blossom Fan was first performed, older members of the audience, like the old Master of Ceremonies in the prologue, wept as they remembered the leading characters and the episodes with which they were connected.

  The author of The Peach Blossom Fan, K’ung Shang-jen (1648–1718), was a descendant of Confucius who spent many years completing his family genealogy and re-editing the history of Confucius’ birthplace. A great authority on ancient rites and music, and a discriminating collector of antiques in his native Shantung, he was invited to lecture before the Manchu Emperor K’ang-hsi when the latter visited Ch’ü-fu. Consequently he became a Doctor of the Imperial Academy and held other official posts oddly at variance with the usual career of a dramatist. The Peach Blossom Fan was completed in 1699 after three revisions. It won immediate popularity; but we may well assume that it was the reading in the Manchu Imperial palace of this threnody for the Ming which led to K’ung Shang-jen’s dismissal from office in the spring of the following year.

  HAROLD ACTON, K.B.E.

  Florence,

  1973

  INTRODUCTION

  The Peach Blossom Fan as Southern Drama

  The centers of governmental power have clustered in the north, on the dusty Yellow River plains, through most of Chinese history as at the present time. To past residents of this region, “the south” did not mean the tropical southern coast where Canton lies, but the Yangtze Valley with its silk and tea and porcelain, its rich trade towns like Soochow and Yangchow, its landscapes lovingly recorded by the painters, and its preeminence in all the arts. Much of the action of The Peach Blossom Fan centers on Nanking, which holds a special place even among the glamorous cities of the south: for this reason it is especially appropriate that the play, as we shall show, should be in the “southern” style. Nanking in the fifth and sixth centuries of our era served as capital for native dynastic houses which, however decadent, ill-fated, and shortlived, at least kept alight the lamp of Chinese culture when the north was in the ha
nds of overlords from beyond the frontiers. In the seventeenth century, when K’ung Shang-jen was writing his play, the mere mention of the Nanking pleasure-quarter on the banks of the Ch’in-huai River was still enough to bring wistful sighs from anyone who had dallied there only in his youth, or never at all. The Peach Blossom Fan draws constantly on the fading glories of yore to weave a backdrop of nostalgia for its tale of sad decline.

  As terms in the history of Chinese drama, northern and southern define two generic types of play which at different times dominated the national stage. Readers of English have begun to know northern-style plays in translations such as S. I. Hsiung’s Lady Precious Stream and Romance of the Western Chamber, but they have barely even heard of southern plays. By northern we mean, essentially, Yuan drama, which under the rule of the Yuan or Mongol dynasty (1280–1368) furnished the first Golden Age of the Chinese theatre. This Yuan or northern-style play (the Chinese term is tsa-chü) is governed by the strictest conventions. It is quite short: four acts with the option of a “wedge,” a short prefatory or interpolated segment. Each act of a northern play consists essentially of a song-set, a sequence of a dozen or so arias surrounded by dialogue. The arias are composed in a single musical mode and are allocated to a single character, obviously the lead character in the play. There is a freshness and naturalness about the poetry of these songs which perfectly matches the forceful action and the vigour of the dialogue: crude and creaky mechanisms somehow don’t detract from the vital energy of the best of these plays. There is much self-introduction and soliloquy, much narration of offstage action, too much recapitulation of earlier scenes, but overall a remarkably tight organization of events into the four nucleic acts. The third act is usually climactic; the fourth will usually show the finest poetry, as the singer builds up images to explore the significance of what has been presented.