Tang Dynasty Tales

The study of the tale-literature from the Tang dynasty began less
than one hundred years ago with May Fourth scholars, especially
Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881-1936). His anthology, Tang Song chuanqi ji 唐宋
傳奇集, prepared in the late 1920s, was the first modern critical
edition of the texts and helped to initiate the generic term by
which they are now often known: chuanqi 傳奇 or “transmissions
of the strange.” Glen Dudbridge, the doyen of T’ang-tale studies
in the West, has argued that the label chuanqi is essentially a
creation of May Fourth critics and should not be used to refer to
narratives such as those translated in this volume. At the other
extreme, Li Jianguo 李劍國, one of the masters of this genre in
contemporary China, suggests that several hundred texts deserve
to be labeled chuanqi.1 Lu Xun 魯迅 steers a middle course in his
Tang Song chuanqi ji 唐宋傳奇集,2 which includes some thirty tales.
Sarah Yim, in one of the earliest Western studies of these tales,
based her claim that there were about seventy Tang tales on

Wang Pijiang’s anthology.3 However, Wang had carefully avoided
the term chuanqi, titling his book Tangren xiaoshuo 唐人 小說 ,4
precipitating a discussion in China over the genre that continues
to this day. Whatever generic label one may give to these accounts
in Chinese, the term “Tang tale” is widely accepted in the West.5
There is something distinctive about what are now
considered the major tales, those generally written in the first
decades of the ninth century. Many deal with the trials of the
literati in the capital, their love lives or political vicissitudes. In
addition to the normal conventions of verisimilitude, such as
expositions that resemble the ‘historical biography,’ these tales are
often capped by colophons noting the origin of the piece, origins
that are often claimed to have been via oral transmission.6
Long before Lu Xun, however, Western scholars began to take
an interest in classical-language fiction, with translations from
the Soushen ji 搜神記 (Records of Searching for the Strange)7 that
date to the 1840s. Several renditions of stories from Pu Songling’s
蒲松齡 (1640-1715) Liaozhai zhiyi 聊齋志異 (Strange Tales from a
Chinese Studio) then appeared in the 1870s. The first translation of
Tang tales seems to have been that of Georges Frederic Leon
Wieger (1856-1933) in the early years of the twentieth century.

Arthur Waley’s (1889-1966) renditions of “Li Wa zhuan” 李娃傳
(“The Story of Miss Li”) and “Yingying zhuan” 鶯鶯傳 (“The Story
of Ts’ui Ying-ying”) which appeared in Waley’s More Translations
from the Chinese9 certainly drew a wider audience.
But the serious study, teaching and translation of these
texts began shortly after Lu Xun completed his anthology in
the late 1920s. Sung-nien Hsu’s 徐松年 (1904-1981) Contes choisis
des T'ang,10 the first collection of translations of these texts, was
published only a few years thereafter,11 but Hsu based his sixteen
renditions on Wang Pijiang’s Tangren xiaoshuo 唐人小說. A close
friend of Wang, Hsu used a translation of Wang’s “Tangren
xiaoshuo zai Zhongguo wenxue shang zhi diwei” 唐人小說在中國
文學上之地位 as his introduction (pp. 1-23).12
For English readers, however, it was Evangeline Dora
Edwards’ (1888-1957)13 Chinese Prose Literature of the T’ang Period,

A.D. 618-906 in the late 1930s that provided the first widely read
collection of Tang tales.14 Edwards notes her indebtedness to Lu
Xun in her preface, but she chose the Tangdai congshu 唐代叢書 as
her base text. Edwards translated (or paraphrased) and analyzed a
great number of Tang tales. Although she has been criticized for
errors in translation and for the selection of the original base text,15
her work contributed immensely to the early study of Tang tales.
A few years later, the noted translator Chi-Chen Wang (1899-
2001), who had given Western readers the first (abridged) English
version of the Honglou meng in 1929, published his Traditional
Chinese Tales.16 Although Wang appends a bibliographic note, he
gives no information on which base text he used for his
translations.
Yang Xianyi 楊憲益 (1915-2009) and his wife Gladys B. Tayler
(Dai Naidie 戴 乃 迭 , 1919-1999) offered the next collection of
Tang tales, ten works titled The Dragon King’s Daughter (Beijing:
Waiwen Chubanshe, 1954).17 Their short introduction, while
introducing some ideas similar to those that Lu Xun had offered
in his Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue 中國小說史略 in the early 1920s,

does not specify which texts they used. The translations, although
free, often offer a clearer rendition than those of other
translators.19
The favorable reception of the Yangs’ translation led Foreign
Languages Press to issue a second, similiar anthology of twenty-
two stories titled Stories of Old China (1958). These texts, including
six Tang tales (four not previously available in English) had been
translated in 1942 by the scholar-official W. W. Yen (Yan Huiqing
顔惠慶, 1877-1950) during house arrest in Hong Kong. There is no
indication of what texts Yen used.20
Just two years after W. W. Yen’s translations appeared,
Elizabeth Te-chen Wang presented free renditions of twenty-two
tales in her Ladies of the Tang (Taibei: Heritage Press, 1961).
Although the accuracy of these versions was widely criticized, the
collection was important (1) because it reached so many Western
scholars during the 1960s and 1970s and (2) because it contained
the only English-language translation of several tales. Wang
apparently based her renditions on the Taiping guangji.

The next important collection of translations–nine tales from
the Tang22–resulted from the cooperation of two major figures
of twentieth-century German Sinology, Herbert Franke and
Wolfgang Bauer (1930-1997) and was titled Die goldene Truhe.23 The
volume, which contains many of the same stories Chi-Chen Wang
included, was translated into English by Christopher Levenson
and published by Penguin Classics in 1964. In the following two
decades, it enjoyed a wide readership in both the German original
and the English translation.
Just a year later, Ch’u Chai (1906-1986) and Winberg Chai,
who had made their reputation in studies of Confucianism,
presented five of their own tale translations in their A Treasury of
Chinese Literature; A New Prose Anthology including Fiction and
Drama (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965).24 Thus by the late
1960s a number of versions of the major Tang tales were available
in English, French and German. But there was little scholarship on
either the original texts of these tales or of their translations.
The situation was to change significantly with the publication
of James R. Hightower’s “Yüan Chen and the ‘The Story of Ying-
ying’” in 1973. Although this article was intended to be a
thorough study of the relationship between Yuan Zhen the author
and Yuan Zhen the protagonist of the tale, it contains (pp. 93-103)
a careful, heavily annotated translation of “Yingying zhuan” 鶯鶯
傳, and is therefore the first scholarly rendition of a Tang tale.
Published in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies,25 Hightower’s
translation continues to have a broad impact on students and
scholars even today. Three years later, William H. Nienhauser’s “An Allegorical
Reading of Han Yü’s ‘Mao Ying chuan’ 毛潁傳 (Biography of
Fur Point),” Oriens Extremus, 23.2 (1976): 153-174 attempted,
without the grace and style of Hightower’s translation, to explore
the subgenre of Tang pseudo-biographies26 through a complete
translation and close reading of Han Yu’s “Mao Ying zhuan.”27
Yet if it was Hightower who prepared the foundation for the
scholarly study of Tang tales in the West, Glen Dudbridge was the
scholar who established the first edifice on that foundation.
Dudbridge’s The Tale of Li Wa (London: Ithaca Press, 1983) set all
the norms: from the first line of its “Introduction” to the last
sentence of the appendix on “Musical contests in Ch’ang-an,” The
Tale of Li Wa is a model of texual criticism, annotated translation,
and organization. Dudbridge’s careful attention to the details of
the history of the “Li Wa zhuan” 李娃傳 tale, to its author, and to
its dating, are juxtaposed to his inspired reading of the work as a
veiled attack on the three sons of Zheng Hu 鄭昈 (708-777).28 The
book also adumbrates future study, its fifth chapter including a
discussion of “Renshi zhuan” 任氏傳, pointing to the you wu 尤物
(beautiful creatures) of these tales as women who often lead the
male protagonists to the “dangerous edge” of life. All this serves
as background for Dudbridge’s translation and analysis of two
versions of “Li Wa zhuan”(the Taiping guangji 太平廣記 and of the
Lei shuo 類説) that complete the volume. The two original texts are
printed on the verso pages facing his English translation. By comparing these texts, Dudbridge shows that the Lei shuo version
preserves elements of an alternative, no-longer extant, version
of “Li Wa.” Modeled on the Arden Shakespeare editions (in
particular on Frank Kermode’s edition of The Tempest [1954]),
Dudbrdige believed that his book would inspire other
monographs on other Tang tales, a hope that has not been
fulfilled.29
Instead, translations of the tales continued to be aimed at a
general audience. The next important collection was that selected
and prepared by H. C. Chang in his Chinese Literature 3: Tales
of the Supernatural (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984),
which presented several tales that had not been previously
translated. His extensive introduction to the genre (pp. 14-27) also
contributed to a burgeoning interest in these tales among Western
students. That interest was recognized by Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M.
Lau, who for the first time assembled a team of translators–
including James R. Hightower, Jeanne Kelly, Peter Rushton,
Donald Gjertson, and the present author–to render twelve tales (in
addition to a number of vernacular stories and some zhiguai) in
their Traditional Chinese Stories, Themes and Variations (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1978). Although they appended a still
useful set of “Biobibliographic Notes” (pp. 575-85) in which they
took note of Wang Meng’ou’s early annotations of these stories (in
his Tangren xiaoshuo yanjiu, erji 唐人小說研究，二集 [Taibei: Yiwen
Yinshuguan, 1978]), these translations relied primarily on versions
found in the Taiping guangji. The renditions are lightly annotated
and, despite the considerable editorial efforts of the two editors,
vary in reliability.

Karl S. Y. Kao, following the model and suggestion of his
teacher Joseph Lau, also organized a team of translators to help
him gather the next important group of translations of Tang tales
in his Classical Chinese Tales of the Supernatural and the Fantastic
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). This collection
contained thirty-six Tang tales and sixty zhiguai, making it the
single most important source of translations of this genre even
today. The translations were done by colleagues at the University
of Wisconsin (where Kao did his graduate work) and Yale
University (where Kao was teaching). Major contributors included
Pedro Acosta, Paula Varsano, Laurie Scheffler, Douglas Wilkerson,
and Cordell Yee. Kao also provides useful bio-bibliographic notes
and an bibliography that reaches beyond his model. A major
contribution, however, is the excellent, lengthy “Introduction”
(pp. 1-51) which endeavors to apply modern narrative theory to
Chinese tales.
A few years later and several thousand miles away, André
Lévy, who had made a name in his work on vernacular stories,
was preparing a two-volume collection of Tang tales in translation
to rival Kao’s: Histoires d'amour et de mort de la Chine ancienne,
Chefs-d'oeuvre de la nouvelle (Dynastie des Tang. 618-907) and
the subsequent Histoires extraordinaires et récits fantastiques de la
Chine ancienne.30 Following lengthy introductions to both volumes,
Lévy offers renditions of twenty-four tales with notes, a list of
previous translations, and commentaries that include textual
notes, introductions to the authors, parallel texts (some translated
in full), and Lévy’s own insights. The early 1990s Madeline Spring gave us another careful
study and translation of the fictional biographies and fables,
found primarily in the writings of members of the Guwen 古文

Movement, in her Animal Allegories in T’ang China (1993).31 That
same year Victor H. Mair included several similar works
(including “Mao Ying zhuan”), as well as five classical-language
tales (by Hightower, Dudbridge, and Nienhauser), in his The
Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature. Pauline Bentley
Koffler’s heavily annotated rendition of “Gujing ji” 古鏡記, also
appeared in 1993.32
Since 1993 translations of Tang tales have appeared in various
anthologies. Stephen Owen published his own translations of four
Tang tales in his Anthology of Chinese Literature, Beginnings to 1911
(1996).33 This was followed by nine translations John Minford and
Joseph Lau included in their Classical Chinese Literature, Volume 1:
From Antiquity to the Tang Dynasty.34 Although several are older
translations (from Cyril Birch, E. D. Edwards, James R. Hightower,
and Chi-chen Wang), there are new translations by Hightower
(“The Alchemist”), Robert Joe Cutter (“The Betrothal Inn”), John
Minford (“Liu Yi”) and Nienhauser (“Mid-River”). Monika
Motsch’s study of Tang tales (“Tang-Dynastie: Vom Mythos zur
Literatur,” 2003) does not contain full translations of tales, but the
extensive excerpts and commentary she provides still merit mention.35 Finally, in 2004, Jacques Pimpaneau gave us four tales
into French in his Anthologie de la littérature chinoise classique.36
The translations included in this volume have benefitted from
many of the above renditions. They have evolved over the past
fifteen years in seminars, Saturday morning meetings in my
dining room, and several workshops. Although they may not
match all of the high standards set by Glen Dudbridge, they
attempt to provide the first annotated versions, relying heavily on
Wang Meng’ou’s Tangren xiaoshuo jiaoshi 唐人小說校釋 (2v.; Taibei:
Zhengzhong 正中 Shuju, 1983), of six tales. Moreover, through the
translators’ note, they will allow students of Tang tales a closer
look into the meanings, both within and beyond the texts, of these
wondrous narratives