Classic Chinese Novels

Classic Chinese Novels are the best-known works of literary fiction across pre-modern Chinese literature. The group usually includes the following works: Ming dynasty novels Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, and The Plum in the Golden Vase; and Qing dynasty novels Dream of the Red Chamber and The Scholars.
These works are among the world's longest and oldest novels. They represented a new complexity in structure and sophistication in language that helped to establish the novel as a respected form among later popular audiences and erudite critics. The Chinese historian and literary theorist C. T. Hsia wrote in 1968 that these six works "remain the most beloved novels among the Chinese."
During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Chinese novels inspired sequels, rebuttals, and reinventions with new settings, sometimes in different genres. Far more than in the European tradition, every level of society was familiar with the plots, characters, key incidents, and quotations. Those who could not read knew them through tea-house story-tellers, Chinese opera, card games, and new year pictures. In modern times they live on through popular literature, graphic novels, cartoons and films, television drama, video games, and theme parks.

Nomenclature and subgroupings

The literary critic and sinologist Andrew H. Plaks writes that the term "classic novels" in reference to these six titles is a "neologism of twentieth-century scholarship" that seems to have come into common use under the influence of C. T. Hsia's The Classic Chinese Novel. He adds that he is not sure at what point in the Qing or early twentieth century this became a "fixed critical category", but the grouping appears in a wide range of critical writing. Paul Ropp notes that "an almost universal consensus affirms six works as truly great". Hsia views them as "historically the most important landmarks" of the novels of China.
There have been a number of groupings. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Journey to the West, Water Margin and The Plum in the Golden Vase were grouped by publishers in the early Qing and promoted as Four Masterworks. Because of its explicit descriptions of sex, The Plum in the Golden Vase was banned for most of its existence. Despite this, Lu Xun, like many if not most scholars and writers, places it among the top Chinese novels. After the Communist takeover in China, the official People's Literature Publishing House successively republished the collated editions of Water Margin, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber and Journey to the West between 1952 and 1954. Since the early 1980s, they have been known in mainland China as the Four Great Classic Novels.

Textual history and attributed authorship

None of the six were published in the authors' lifetime. Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Water Margin appeared in many variants and forms long before being edited in their classic form in the late Ming. There is considerable debate on their authorship. Since the novel, unlike poetry or painting, had little prestige, authorship was of little interest in any case. While tradition attributes Water Margin to Shi Nai'an, there is little or no reliable information on him or even confidence that he existed. The novel, or portions of it, may have been written by Luo Guanzhong, perhaps Shi's student, who was the reputed author of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, or by Shi Hui or Guo Xun. Journey to the West is the first to show strong signs of a single author who composed all or most of the text, which became more common in later novels.
In the late Ming and early Qing, new commercial publishing houses found it profitable to re-issue novels that claimed specific authors and authentic texts. They commissioned scholars to edit texts and supply commentaries to interpret them. Mao Zonggang, for instance, and his father Mao Lun, edited Three Kingdoms and Jin Shengtan edited Water Margin, supplying an introduction to which he signed Shi Nai'an's name. In each case the editor made cuts, additions, and basic alterations to the text, misrepresenting them as restoring the original. They also supplied commentaries with literary and political points that modern scholars sometimes find strained. Their editions, however, became standard for centuries, and most modern translations are based on them. Zhang Zhupo likewise edited The Plum in the Golden Vase. Zhang worked on an abridged and rewritten text of 1695; the 1610 text, however, was a more coherent and presumably closer to the author's intent.
In chronological order of their earliest forms, they are:

English	Pinyin	Attributed to	Century	Earliest extant printed edition	Editor standard recension	Recension year	Dynasty of Setting	Years of Setting	Unabridged English Translations	Genre
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms			14th century	1494 1522	Mao Lun and Mao Zonggang	1660	Han and Three Kingdoms	168–280	Charles Henry Brewitt-Taylor Moss Roberts	Historical fiction
The Water Margin	Shuǐhǔ Zhuàn	Shi Nai'an Luo Guanzhong	14th century	1589	Jin Shengtan	1643	Northern Song	1120s	71-chapter version: Pearl S. Buck J. H. Jackson and Fang Lo-Tien 100-chapter version: Sidney Shapiro 120-chapter version: Alex and John Dent-Young	Historical fiction, wuxia
The Journey to the West	Xī Yóu Jì	Wu Cheng'en	16th century	1592			Tang	629–646	Dr. Anthony C. Yu William Jenner	Gods and demons fiction, historical fiction, fantasy
Jin Ping Mei	Jīn Píng Méi	The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling	16th century	1610	Zhang Zhupo	1695	Northern Song	1111-27	1610 version: David Tod Roy 1695 version: Clement Egerton and Lao She	Historical fiction, erotic fiction, novel of manners
The Dream of the Red Chamber		Cao Xueqin	18th century	1791–92	Cheng Weiyuan and Gao E	1792	Qing	Early to mid-18th century	Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang David Hawkes and John Minford	Family saga, philosophical novel
The Scholars		Wu Jingzi	18th century	1750		1803	Ming	Early 16th century	Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang	Historical fiction, social novel, philosophical novel

Background

From early times, Chinese writers preferred history as the genre for telling stories about people, while poetry was preferred for personal expression of emotion. Confucian literati, who dominated cultural life, looked down on other forms as xiao shuo, the term that in later times came to be used for fiction. Early examples of narrative classics include Bowuzhi, A New Account of the Tales of the World, Soushen Ji, Wenyuan Yinghua, Great Tang Records on the Western Regions, Miscellaneous Morsels from Youyang, Taiping Guangji and Yijian Zhi. The novel as an extended prose narrative that realistically creates a believable world evolved in China and in Europe from the 14th to 18th centuries, though a little earlier in China. Chinese audiences were more interested in history and were more historically minded. They appreciated relative optimism, moral humanism, and relative emphasis on collective behavior and the welfare of the society.
The rise of a money economy and urbanization under the Song dynasty led to a professionalization of entertainment which was further encouraged by the spread of printing, the rise of literacy, and education. In both China and Western Europe, the novel gradually became more autobiographical and serious in exploration of social, moral, and philosophical problems. Chinese fiction of the late Ming dynasty and early Qing dynasty was varied, self-conscious, and experimental. In China, however, there was no counterpart to the 19th-century European explosion of novels. The novels of the Ming and Qing dynasties represented a pinnacle of classic Chinese fiction.
Until World War II, the dominant sinological scholarship considered all fiction popular and therefore directly reflective of the creative imagination of the masses. C. T. Hsia, however, established the role of the scholar-literati in the creation of vernacular fiction, though not denying the popular subject matter of some texts. Scholars then examined traditional fiction for sophisticated techniques.
The American literary critic and sinologist Andrew H. Plaks argues that Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West as well as Jin Ping Mei collectively constituted a technical breakthrough reflecting new cultural values and intellectual concerns. Their educated editors, authors, and commentators used the narrative conventions developed from earlier storytellers, such as the episodic structure, interspersed songs and folk sayings, or speaking directly to the reader, but they fashioned self-consciously ironic narratives whose seeming familiarity camouflaged a Neo-Confucian moral critique of late Ming decadence. Plaks explores the textual history of the novels and how the ironic and satirical devices of these novels paved the way for the great novels of the 18th century.
Plaks further shows these Ming novels share formal characteristics. They almost all contain more than 100 chapters; are divided into ten-chapter narrative blocks, each broken into two- to three-chapter episodes; are arranged in symmetrical halves; and arrange their events in patterns that follow seasons and geography. They manipulated the conventions of popular storytelling in an ironic way in order to go against the surface meanings of the story. Three Kingdoms, he argues, presents a contrast between the ideal—that is, dynastic order—and the reality of political collapse and near-anarchy; Water Margin likewise presents heroic stories from the popular tradition in a way that exposes the heroism as brutal and selfish; Journey to the West is an outwardly serious spiritual quest undercut by comic and sometimes bawdy tone. Jin Ping Mei is the clearest and most sophisticated example: the action is sometimes grossly sexual, but in the end emphasizes conventional morality.