Bandits in Print

Front matter

BANDITS IN PRINT

THE WATER MARBIN AND THE

TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE CHINESE NOVEL

Contents

List of Illustrations іх

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction: The Bandits' Reception

CHAPTER 1 *Falsifying a Biography Brought Him Power”

The "Wuding Editions” of Guo Xun

In May 1541, a fire destroyed the newly constructed ancestral temple of the Jiajing emperor. In the aftermath of this fire, a dozen officials were found culpable and removed from office, banished, or jailed. They included Guo Xun, a military figure and holder of hereditary rank; Wang Tingxiang, a member of the Former Seven Masters literary clique and head of the prestigious and powerful Censorate agency; and Li Kaixian, the renowned poet-dramatist and member of the Eight Talents of the Jiajing Era.! Guo was imprisoned on a number of charges and died in jail soon after. Wang was stripped of his status and sent home to Yifeng, Henan, where he died just three years later. Li was also removed from office and sent home to Zhangqiu， Shandong, where he remained until his death in 1568.

Before the Fire

These men's departure from life at court in Beijing serves as an important milestone in the development of vernacular fiction, as they represented nodes in a network formed around the novel Tbe Water Margin: Guo Xun had printed one of the earliest known editions of the work, as had the Censorate, of which Wang Tingxiang was head. Li Kaixian, meanwhile, was an early Water Margin admirer and an advocate of its prose style. Moreover, as these chapters will show, these men had ties loose and strong with one another both directly and through other literary associations.

As high-ranking officials and influential men of letters, Guo, Wang, and Li were at the center of the Jiajing political and literary worlds. Yet the book they admired, The Water Margin, was a tale of outlaws at the margins of society. Many of its most celebrated protagonists, such as Lin Chong, Song Jiang, or Lu Zhishen, are minor officials or military officers who are forced from their positions by corrupt superiors or other unjust circumstances and left with no choice but to take refuge on Mount Liang, where they form an underground brotherhood with one another. What was it about this novel of society's margins that appealed to these men at the center? Of what sort of literary activities was it a part, and how were these men involved with it? This chapter attempts to answer these questions by reconstructing the reading and publishing practices surrounding The Water Margin in this early stage of its existence as a printed phenomenon and tracing the networks in which it was the nexus. This provides a view of The Water Margin—and of vernacular fiction—at an early stage of its development as a printed phenomenon.

The novel as a genre only truly flourished decades after the temple fire of 1541 resulted in these three men leaving the capital; Tbe Water Margin would be widely reprinted around the turn of the seventeenth century in a variety of forms by commercial publishers of Fujian and the Jiangnan region, the likes of whom were renowned for their “ргоmiscuous" editing practices.” Such printers famously catered to a growing class of literate non-elite, among whom this and other works of vernacular fiction were particular favorites. In that competitive and commercialized environment, The Water Margin would be given new meanings through printers’ and commentators’ addition of paratextual materials. By the end of the Ming, there would even be real-life bandits modeling their personae on the characters of Tbe Water Margin, taking their nicknames from the book and flocking to the areas depicted in it. In this time before the fire, by contrast, no editions of The Water Margin or any other work of vernacular fiction were to be found among the woodblock imprints put up for sale by the booksellers in the northern capital. There were a handful of commercial printers in the capital during the time of the tenure of Guo, Wang, and Li in the capital, but fiction was not among their wares. The lower-end outfits among them published cheap popular song collections and chantefables, while the higher-end ones focused on classics, Tang literary anthologies, and the like.? The Water Margin we find before the temple fire of 1541 inhabited a social world that was quite different from the one in which its genre would eventually flourish. It is that world before the fire that is the subject of the first section of this book.

Reading the *Wuding Edition"

The edition of Tbe Water Margin printed by Guo Xun is known as the “Wuding edition," after Guo's inherited tide, the Marquis of Wuding. Anentry for a Wuding edition of The Water Margin is listed in the Baowen tang catalogue of the Ming bibliophile Chao Li’s collection, as is one for a Wuding edition of Romance of the Three Kingdoms." Though the Wuding marquisate was hereditary and Xun was not the only member of the Guo clan to hold it, his personal involvement in the creation of the Wuding edition of Tbe Water Margin can be seen in other sources as well: A preface to a later edition of the novel, signed “Tiandu waichen" and tentatively dated to 1589, describes Guo Xun as having edited and printed a fine edition in the Jiajing era (1522-67)? The late Ming gossip Shen Defu describes the text of a contemporary fine edition of The Water Margin printed in Xin'an as being based on one transmitted by Guo Xun’s family. This is most likely in reference to the “Tiandu waichen" preface edition.

Despite the Tiandu waichen preface's statement that Guo merely edited and printed an edition of Tbe Water Margin, some scholars have speculated that he actually had a hand in the novel's creation. Most influentially, the modern scholar Dai Bufan wrote of his “suspicion” that either Guo or someone in his employ was the author of the novel. Dai noted that Guo’s edition appears to have been the earliest one printed, and that no full-length version of The Water Margin existed before it in any form. Furthermore, Dai noted, there is no mention of Shi Nai’an, the novel’s reputed author, before Guo’s time despite the fact that Shi allegedly lived well before Guo. Dai dismissed the claims in the Tiandu waichen preface that Guo merely edited the text as simply a tactic to dissociate the novel from the by-then infamous Guo. Another scholar, Zhang Guoguang, pointed to the depiction of Daoist elements in the novel as further evidence of Guo’s involvement; Daoism was a shared interest between Guo and the Jiajing emperor, with whom he curried favor. Zhang concluded that Guo had a retainer create The Water Margin no earlier than the early 1530s.° More recently, Yuan Shishuo has challenged these arguments on textual and historical grounds, including geographical inconsistencies and the apparent ideological discrepancy of Guo, a figure of power, having a hand in the creation of a work depicting violent rebellion. Ultimately, however, he concedes that it is impossible to ascertain whether or not Guo was involved in the novel’s creation."

No positively identified exemplar ofan original Wuding Water Margin survives. The pioneering scholar of vernacular fiction Zheng Zhenduo claimed to have been in possession of a five-chapter fragment of the edition, though that claim has not been widely accepted.’ Other claims have been refuted by Y. W. Ма? Judging from the comments by Tiandu waichen and Shen Defu, however, we can assume that the Wuding Water Margin was a finely printed edition. The preface to the Tiandu waichen edition claims that its text is a reconstruction of the Wuding edition, and that Guo had based his edition on an even earlier one-hundredchapter edition by the mysterious Luo Guanzhong. According to the preface, Guo excised introductory stories that prefaced that earlier edition's chapters. However, there is no corroborating evidence for these claims about the text of the edition, so the precise shape of the contents of the Wuding Water Margin remains a mystery.

How, then, can we understand the significance of a book that no longer exists? Without a text, attempting a “close reading” of “the” Water Margin in order to ascertain its appeal to Guo and his Jiajing court coterie is an impossible task. After all, as the following chapters will discuss at length, The Water Margin’s text appeared in many guises and was invested with new meanings at every turn. However, the lack of an exemplar of the Wuding Water Margin and the lingering questions concerning its filiation does not completely prevent us from gauging its meaning in the context of its era. We can create a sort of reading of this nonextant book by reassembling its social, historical, and literary circumstances around its publication, including both literary and material factors, and through them, decode the literary tastes that shaped them. To turn again to the terms of Jauss and reception theory, we can uncover the “objectifiable system of expectations” in which a work such as the Wuding Water Margin appears “in the historical moment of its appearance,” fitting it into the “pre-understanding of the genre” and “the form and themes of already familiar works.”!° It is this objectifiable system that arose in the historical moment of the appearance of the Wuding Water Margin that is to be uncovered in the following discussion.

А point of comparison from contemporary America is to be found in the work of Janice Radway on the Book-of-the-Month Club. Radway describes the organization, which continues to select a book each month for its subscribers, as “а club that uses sophisticated marketing techniques to sell not only individual books but the very idea of taste itself.”"! Like the Book-of-the-Month Club's editorial team, Guo Xun also *marketed" to particular targeted audience by selecting certain books for publication according to specific ideas of taste. This chapter will explore Guo's overall printing project and the place of Tbe Water Margin within it in order to contextualize the novel historically and aesthetically, and to consider that realm of taste to which Guo aimed his publications.

Where Guo differed from the Book-of-the-Month Club, of course, was in that Guo was not a publisher working within a capitalist social framework in order to make monetary profit. Rather, as this chapter will illustrate, he published in order to burnish the social reputation of himself and his ancestral lineage. This goal was not directly profitoriented, though he was granted ever-increasing salaries by the court as he advanced in rank. To borrow from the terminology of Pierre Bourdieu, Guo sought to gain cultural capital by staking out positions in a semiautonomous field of cultural production, and this capital was not immediately reducible to monetary terms. However, again, this terminology must be adapted to the circumstances ofthe era and genre ofthe Wuding Water Margin: as with the Book-of-the-Month Club, Guo staked out his position in the field of cultural production through the selecting and publishing of texts rather than through writing them. The Water Margin and other early works of vernacular fiction did not at the time, and would not until the mid-seventeenth century, be invested by readers with a strong assumption of authorial presence. Only with the rise of strongly opinionated pingdian commentators such as Jin Shengtan would readers begin, paradoxically, to be pointed to the "intentions" of fiction "authors" such as Shi Nai'an or Luo Guanzhong. In the early years before even the Jiajing ancestral temple fire, the *authors" of these works were much less well-known—and of less importance—than their publishers.

Guo and Print

In addition to The Water Margin, Guo printed a number of other books. Through his publishing activity he was able to enter into literary debates of his time and to craft for himself a literary persona without so much as lifting a brush, let alone participating in the civil examination system. The image that Guo crafted was one of a learned military man, a “Confucian-general” (Ru jiang), whose literary activities were a demonstration of his own personal virtue. He did this through the texts he chose to publish and through the prefaces for them that he commissioned from colleagues and well-known literati of the day. In these texts and prefaces, he burnished his credentials as the scion of a family with roots in the founding of the Ming dynasty, and as a cultured man with access to a variety of books that he was willing to make more widely available through recarving and reprinting. The latter activity also demonstrates his connections with interested literati. Like the commercial publishing houses would be later in the century, he was led in his choices of material by anticipating or speculating on what sorts of books his intended audiences would desire. Yet rather than the urban nouveau riche, his audiences were elite members of che official class. It was for these audiences that he presented his Confucian-general persona. He used print to cement his social standing, to establish his virtue, and to project himself as a man of culture. Accordingly, Guo's publishing must be understood in the context of his own life and position.

*Crafty, Deceitful, and Quite Involved in Books"

Despite his best efforts at crafting a persona for himself, Guo quite literally went down in history as a conniving character who took advantage of his position and his relationships for personal gain. In the words ofa biographical sketch of Guo Xun in the Ming History, included under the biography of the first Marquis of Wuding, Guo Ying, Xun was “crafty, deceitful, and quite involved in books” (Xun jiexia you zhishu, po she shusbi).? The sketch goes on to detail his roles in several Jiajing-era scandals, beginning with none other than the Great Rites Controversy that engulfed the court immediately after the Jiajing Emperor took the throne. Guo was an early supporter of the newly installed emperor's position that his biological father should be posthumously named an emperor and placed in the imperial ancestral hall. Because of this support, Guo won the lasting favor of the emperor and, realizing that he had this powerful backing, “often put on airs" (Xun huchong, ро jiaozi). The description of Guo goes on to detail his corruption, and how each time he was punished, his political capital outlasted that of his accusers and he was eventually reinstated. Though he suffered setbacks, he continued to climb the social ladder until the very end.

The Ming History also details Guo's relationships with two supposed magicians. The first, Li Fuda, was accused of being a shape-shifting fugitive from the law, and Guo intervened on his behalf to the consternation ofthe officials who were on his trail." Li claimed that he could turn an elixir into silver and gold. The second, Duan Chaoyong, claimed that he could turn silver and gold into eating utensils that would grant their users long life. Guo introduced Duan to the emperor himself, and the emperor was pleased with Guo's “loyalty” for doing so. Unsurprisingly, Duan was found to be a charlatan.

The biographical sketch lists the ups and downs of Guo's career: officials accused him of taking bribes, of illegally running shops throughout the capital and extorting citizens, and of having a relative in the notorious Eastern Depot (Dongchang) torture people on his private orders. Yet each time Guo would meet punishment or demotion, he would end up being reinstated and climbing to an even higher rung on the social ladder.

The height of Guo Xun's power came in 1539, when he requested of the emperor that his ancestor Guo Ying be installed in the imperial ancestral hall. Despite objections of court officials, the emperor granted his wishes. Perhaps the Jiajing emperor was particularly sympathetic to Guo's filial display due to his own position in regard to his biological father being installed in the imperial ancestral hall; che following year, the Jiajing emperor's father was installed in the ancestral hall as a posthumous emperor. That year, the emperor also conveyed upon Guo Xun the title of Duke of Yi (Yiguo gong) and the prestigious merit title Grand Preceptor (taishi).

This peak of Guo's power did not last long, however. According to the entry, court officials continued to bring up accusations against Guo, and eventually even his personal relationship with the emperor could not save him. When accused of shirking his duties, Guo haughtily countered the charges by questioning the need to trouble the emperor with pardoning him. The emperor was offended by Guo's arrogant assumption of his own immunity and put Guo in the prison of the Brocade Guard (Jinyi wei) in the autumn of 1541. The emperor was still reluctant to allow Guo to be executed, despite the continuing charges against him. Guo died in prison the following year. The dynastic history does not say if he was executed or if he died of natural causes while in prison. The entry ends with a note that, of all of the officials of inherited rank since the founding of the Ming, none took part in governance; only Xun, with his imperial favor, engaged in such corruption and eventually brought about his own downfall.

With this end, the biographical sketch of Guo Xun in the Ming History never provides any details about his "involvement in books." It does, however, go into extensive detail about his “crafty and deceitful” nature. Was it the intention of the Ming History’s compilers to insinuate a connection between the former and the latter without delving into the particulars of the matter? Did the compilers simply find the titles and contents of Guo’s books too trivial to mention compared to the seriousness of his alleged crimes and currying for favor? Whatever the case, the involvement in books must be reconstituted by other means. Several exemplars of his imprints survive; others, including his printings of vernacular novels, are only known through bibliographical records or other forms of writing. Together, these sources can be used to reconstitute Guo Xun’s printing project. That printing project, in turn, represents an opening into the early life in print of The Water Margin and the vernacular novel genre. Proceeding chronologically, we will look at his editions of private clan histories, classics of Tang poetry and prose, and qu art-song collections. Since the circumstances surrounding his imprints of novels are less well-documented and their place in the chronology less certain, discussion of them will be saved for last.

A Family History in Print

Although the Ming History remains silent on the details of Guo’s publishing, he possessed or published enough books to warrant a catalogue of them: Gao Ru’s Baichuan Catalogue of Books (Baichuan shuzhi) lists a single-volume catalogue of Guo’s books named A Record of the Village of Books (Shuzhuang ji). That catalogue is no longer extant. Most of the books discussed below save for the novels are still extant and held in various library collections.

The known editions published by Guo roughly correspond to certain periods of his life, suggesting that he used publishing for different purposes at different times. First came his private clan histories, which appear to be intended to shore up his social reputation. These were followed by his editions of Tang literature, which were explicitly targeted at court officials and apparently intended to burnish Guo’s cultural capital. The qu song anthology and related rhyme manuals, which came slightly later, suggest a role for Guo as not only a connoisseur but an active participant in literary production. Finally, according to late- Ming rumor, he used vernacular fiction to win for himself his promotion from the rank of marquis to that of duke.

Guo came on the power of publishing early in his official career, using it to announce his status as the worthy descendant of an illustrious ancestor, Guo Ying. Ying had been an early follower and bodyguard of the Ming's founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, and later served as a military commander. Ying's greatest accomplishment was in the Battle of Poyang Lake against Zhu Yuanzhang's enemy Chen Youliang. Zhu credited Guo Ying with firing the shot that killed Chen Youliang. He conferred che Wuding marquisate on Ying in 1384. Xun sought to portray himself as the latest in a direct and unbroken line that could be traced back to the dynastic founding. The Ming History, however, tells a different story of the transmission of the Wuding marquisate. Between the time of its original bestowal upon Ying and its eventual inheritance by Guo Xun in 1508, its transmission was punctuated by disputes between two branches of the family. One branch descended from Ying's eldest son, Zhen, while the other descended from another son, Ming. Ming's daughter had become the favored consort of the Hongxi emperor, and the emperor granted the marquisate to Ming's son, the consort's brother. Zhen, however, had his own ties to the imperial family: he had married a daughter of Zhu Yuanzhang, the Yongjia princess, and the princess requested that their offspring be granted the marquisate. Yet when Ming's son passed away, Ming's grandson, Cong, contested the transfer of the marquisate to Zhen's branch. The court terminated the transmission of the marquisate altogether and gave equal ranks to each side as a concession. Later, the marquisate was revived when the next generation in the Zhen branch received it by imperial favor. Cong contested it again, this time unsuccessfully. Yet when the marquisate was to be passed down again, Cong contested it for the third time, saying that its inheritor was illegitimate. Once again, the transmission was brought to an end.

That purportedly illegitimate inheritor was Guo Liang, Xun’s father. Liang lobbied for the marquisate several times, only to land in prison and be pardoned each time. Finally, the Guo clan collectively requested that the court settle the matter once and for all by selecting one of Ying’s descendants as the rightful heir of the Wuding marquisate. The court determined that Liang, as the descendant of the lineage of Ying’s eldest son, was the proper heir to the title, and Liang became the Marquis of Wuding in 1502.

Liang died only a few years later, in 1507, and the Wuding marquisate was conferred upon Xun on April 28, 1508. In the twelfth month of that year, che emperor placed him in charge of the imperial guards, and in the following year he was appointed to a series of military ranks. In 1510, he was granted the title of Grand Guardian (taibao), and in the following year, he was appointed by the emperor to be the Grand Defender (zbensbou) of the Guangdong-Guangxi region.

The Generational Compendium of the Three Families

The earliest known Guo imprint, titled The Generational Compendium of the Three Families (Sanjia shidian), is a collective biography of Guo Xun's ancestor Guo Ying; his comrades-in-arms Xu Da and Mu Ying; and their respective descendants. In the account of the Guo family history, the troubles encountered in the transmission of the Wuding marquisate are left unmentioned. Yet more than the particulars of the accounts of family history, it is the grouping of the descendants of Guo, Xu, and Mu as the “Three Families" that is of importance. Guo Xun’s ancestor Ying had been posthumously granted the title Duke of Ying (Yingguo gong) by Zhu Yuanzhang, the dynasty's founder, while Xu Da and Mu Ying were both made princes. Guo Xun seems to intentionally conflate his own ancestor's prestige with that of his higher-ranked associates by placing them together.

Indeed, che Qing-era compilers ofthe Complete Library of the Four Treasuries (Siku quanshu) expressed their doubts about the appropriateness of the “Three Families" grouping. They also remarked that the Generational Compendium is little more than unembellished excerpts from dynastic veritable records and histories. They provided a description of the work in the catalogue (zongmu), but saw no need to include the text itself in the collection.

The prefaces to the Generational Compendium are dated 1515, just seven years after Guo Xun was granted the Wuding marquisate. Each preface praises Guo Xun's merit and portrays him as a worthy successor to his ancestor. They are by three men Guo knew from his time in the Guangdong-Guangxi region: the famed official and military leader Yang Yiqing; Zhou Nan; and Chen Jin; the latter two being Censorate officials as well as Guo Xun's colleagues in the military administration of Guangdong and Guangxi.

Yang Yiqing's preface is dated the first month of the tenth year of the Zhengde reign (1515). Anticipating objections such as those that were later made by the Four Treasuries editors, Yang notes that of the scores of noble titles granted at che founding of the dynasty, only a very few remained in the current generation. The majority, he writes, ceased transmission after their holders committed offenses of some sort, and it is a credit to the virtues of these three particular families that their titles had continued to be passed down. He lists che civil and martial accomplishments of Xu Da, Mu Ying, and Guo Ying, but points out that while they were great military leaders they never reveled in killing. Their descendants inherited their humaneness and wisdom in governing, and that quality makes them sagely officials of the court.

Yang concludes the preface with remarks about the power of print to spread word of the virtues of Guo Xun and the scions of the Xu and Mu families. Yang also states that Guo's act of compiling the Generational Compendium is evidence that he has inherited his illustrious ancestor's considerable talents. It is the book, then, that bridges the generations.

Zhou Nan, the author of the second preface, was Supreme Commander of Military Affairs for che Guangdong-Guangxi region, with concurrent appointment as Grand Coordinator (хипји) Censor-in- Chief of the Right. Zhou writes of the importance of worthy ministers to the endeavor of a leader and continues on to the particular case of the service of Xu Da, Mu Ying, and Guo Ying under Zhu Yuanzhang. Notably, he avoids using Ying's formal ducal title, instead referring to him as “Lord” or “Duke” Wuding Guo Ying (Wuding Guo gong Ying) in order to emphasize the title that Guo Xun inherited. He also avoids the usage of Xu and Mu's princely titles.

Like Yang Yiqing, Zhou Nan also notes the rarity of the unbroken transmission of inherited titles from the founding of the dynasty to the present day (again eliding the disputes into which the Wuding marquisate's transmission fell) and the virtues of the three families that are the subject of the text at hand, calling them cause for commemoration. Also like Yang Yiging, Zhou Nan presents Guo Xun as a talented military leader who, due to his competence in governing, had the leisure time to engage in literary pursuits.

The author of the third preface, Chen Jin, was Censor-in-Chief of the Left and also held several military appointments in the Guangdong- Guangxi region. He also points out the rarity of noble titles being transmitted for over more than one hundred years, pointing out that of six dukes and eighteen marquises, the three families are all chat remain." Like Zhou Nan, he obscures the differences in the three ancestors' ranks.

Chen is unique in that he writes of knowing all three of the direct ancestors of Xu, Mu, and Guo. He writes that he was willing to pen a preface because he knew of the virtue and filial piety of the three descendants, and of Guo Xun in particular.

A Collection Nurturing and Celebrating Meritorious Service

Around the same time Guo Xun was assembling the Generational Compendium of tbe Tbree Families, during his tenure in the Guangdong- Guangxi area, he was also collating A Collection Nurturing and. Celebrating Meritorious Service (Yuqing xunyi ji), a collection of family documents. These documents, which include not only his direct ancestral line but his extended clan as well, are broader in scope than the biographical outlines given in the Generational Compendium. This work features correspondence between Zhu Yuanzhang and the Guo clan, and the imperial orders granting Guo Ying and his descendants their titles. It also includes documents concerning the sons, daughters, and granddaughters of Ying who intermarried with the family of the Ming's founding emperor, as well as subsequent generations of the family who held prestigious official and noble positions, and their wives and extended families. Additionally, it includes documents pertaining to Guo Ying's elder brother, Guo Xing, who fought alongside him.

The Meritorious Service collection is dated 1516, though it was compiled in some form earlier. Guo Xun's father Liang (1454-1507) is credited in the edition with “respectfully collating and recording (dunshou jilu)" its documents, while Xun himself is credited with its publishing (kanxing) (figure 1.1) By 1516, Guo Liang had already been dead for nine years. Guo's father Liang likely assembled it originally as part of his campaign to revive the Wuding marquisate, and Xun printed it in order to spread word of his legitimacy and reputation.

In this social campaign, Guo Xun enlisted Fei Hong (1468-1535), Wang Zan, and Zhan Ruoshui (1466-1560), all prominent figures, to contribute prefaces to the print edition of the collection. Fei Hong's preface describes how Guo Xun’s father Liang had put the collection together, and emphasizes the ties between the Guo clan and the imperial household. It remarks that the documents in the collection illustrate the closeness between them, and it enumerates the marquises, earls, and other titles conferred on members of the extended Guo clan. It then suggests that Xun had the volume printed in order to preserve his ancestors' worthy legacy.

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When the Fei Hong preface returns to the subject of Xun and his father Liang, it deems them to be worthy inheritors of their clan’s tradition and enumerates the positive moral values that that tradition represents. It then turns to the cultural pursuits of the father and son, noting that their love of books, learning, and the sages are literary rather than martial achievements. These moral and cultural values, it continues, complement one another; the former are preserved and transmitted by the latter, and the collection itself is testament to their loyalty and filiality. Moreover, it declares, one who realizes that the civil and the martial are dependent on one another and has mastered both can be known as a “Confucian general.” The Grand Guardian, Guo Xun, is a man of such talent and stature, it concludes.