Classic Chinese Novels

Classic Chinese Novels are the best-known novels of pre-modern Chinese literature. These 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.

They include the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, Journey to the West, The Plum in the Golden Vase (of the Ming dynasty), Dream of the Red Chamber (The Story of the Stone), and The Scholars (of the Qing dynasty). The Chinese historian and literary theorist C. T. Hsia wrote that these six "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 these novels for themselves 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, place 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 (It would not republish The Plum in the Golden Vase until 1957 and in 1985 ). Since the early 1980s, they have been known in mainland China as the Four Great Classical Novels.

Textual history and authorship
None of the six were published in the author's lifetime. 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 (施惠) or Guo Xun (郭勛). 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 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:

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 (lit. “little talk” or “minor writings”), 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 early 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 (not considered one of the four classic novels but discussed by him as one of the four masterworks of the Ming dynasty) 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 (all published after their author's deaths, usually anonymously) 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.

Influence
These novels influenced the development of vernacular fiction in later Chinese literary history. Traditionally, fiction and drama were not held in high regard in the Chinese and East Asian literary culture, and they were generally not seen as true "literature" by the literati who dominated intellectual life. Writers in these forms did not have the same level of prestige as poets or scholars of Chinese classics. The late Ming and early Qing dynasty versions of these novels, however, included commentaries that were printed between the lines, so that the reader saw them as part of the text. These commentaries interpreted the text in often strained ways, but established critical and aesthetic criteria, modeled on those of poetry and painting, that gave fiction a new legitimacy.

These novels were written in a mixture of vernacular and classical Chinese, though some were more completely vernacular. For instance, Romance of the Three Kingdoms is known for its mix of classical prose with folklore and popular narratives, while the Dream of the Red Chamber is known for the use of poetry within its mostly vernacular style. These novels popularized and legitimatized the role of vernacular literature in literary circles.

In the late imperial periods, with the widespread of commercial printing, Chinese novels also became heavily circulated across East and Southeast Asia; it was reported in 1604, several hundreds of titles of Chinese books came through to the port city of Nagasaki alone, and throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, estimated over a thousand Chinese titles were imported every year. Their prominence prove to be crucial in the development of literature in these places.