Ming dynasty: 1368–1644
The Yuan dynasty was succeeded by the Ming dynasty, under which cultural influences from the South—expressed in movements toward cultural orthodoxy—again became important. Nearly all the major poets and prose writers in traditional literature were southerners, who enthusiastically launched and supported antiquarian movements based on a return to models of various ages of the past. With the restoration of competitive literary examinations, which had been virtually discontinued under the Mongols, the highly schematic baguwen (“eight-legged essay”) was adopted as the chief yardstick in measuring a candidate’s literary attainments. Despite occasional protests, it continued to engage the attention of aspirants to official literary honours from 1487 to 1901.
Classical literature
Although Ming poets wrote both shi and ci and their output was prodigious, poetry on the whole was imitative rather than freshly creative. Tirelessly, the poets produced verses imitating past masters, with few individually outstanding attainments.
Prose writers in the classical style were also advocates of antiquarianism and conscious imitators of the great masters of past ages. Rival schools were formed, but few writers were able to rise above the ruts of conventionalism. The Qin-Han school tried to underrate the achievements of Han Yu and Liu Zongyuan, along with the Song essayists, and proudly declared that post-Han prose was not worth reading. The Tang-Song school, on the other hand, accused its opponents of limited vision and reemphasized Han Yu’s dictum that literature should be the vehicle of Dao, equated with the way of life taught by orthodox Confucianism. These continuous squabbles ultimately led nowhere, and the literary products were only exquisite imitations of their respective models.
The first voice of protest against antiquarianism was not heard until the end of the 16th century. It came from the Gong’an school, named for the birthplace of the three Yuan brothers, of whom the middle one—Yuan Hongdao—was the best known. The Gong’an school challenged all of the prevailing literary trends, advocating that literature should change with each age and that any attempt at erasing the special stamp of an era could result only in slavish imitation. Declaring that he could not smile and weep with the multitude, he singled out “substantiality” and “honesty with oneself” as the chief prerequisites of a good writer.
This same spirit of revolt was shared by Zhong Xing and Tan Yuanchun, of a later school, who were so unconventional that they explored the possibilities of writing intelligibly without observing Chinese grammatical usages. Although their influence was not long-lasting, these two schools set the first examples of a new subgenre in prose—the familiar essay.
Vernacular literature
It was in vernacular literature that the writers of this period made a real contribution. In drama, a tradition started in the Song dynasty and maintained in southern China during the period of Mongol domination was revitalized. This southern drama, also musical and known as chuanqi (“tales of marvels”), had certain special traits: (1) a chuanqi play contains from 30 to 40 changes of scene; (2) the change of end rhymes in the arias is free and frequent; (3) the singing is done by many actors instead of by the hero or heroine alone; and (4) many plots, instead of being extracted from history or folklore, are taken from contemporary life.
Since there were no rules regulating the structure of the chuanqi, playlets approaching the one-act variety were also written. This southern theatre movement, at first largely carried on by anonymous amateurs, won support gradually from the literati until finally, in the 16th century, a new and influential school was formed under the leadership of the poet-singer Liang Chenyu and his friend the great actor Wei Liangfu. The Kun school, initiating a style of soft singing and subtle music, was to dominate the theatre to the end of the 18th century.
Aside from drama and daju (a suite of melodies sung in narration of stories), which in the South were noticeably modified in spirit and structure, becoming more ornate and bookish, it was prose fiction that made the greatest progress in the 16th century. Two important novels took shape at that time. Wu Cheng’en’s Xiyouji is a fictionalized account of the pilgrimage of the Chinese monk Xuanzang to India in the 7th century. The subject matter was not new—it had been used in early huaben, or “vernacular story,” books and Yuan drama—but it had never been presented at length in such a lively and rapid-moving narration. Of the 81 episodes of trial and tribulation experienced by the pilgrim, no two are alike. Among the large number of monsters introduced, each has unique individuality. Like the Shuihuzhuan, it reveals the influence of the style of the oral storytellers, for each chapter ends with the sentence “in case you are interested in what is to follow, please listen to the next installment, which will reveal it.” Unlike the Shuihuzhuan, which was written in a kind of semivernacular, the language used was the vernacular of the living tongue. For the author the choice must have been a deliberate but difficult one, for he had the novel first published anonymously to avoid disapproval. Besides eliciting numerous commentaries and “continuations” in China, it has been translated into English.
The title of the second novel (the author of which is unknown), Jinpingmei, is composed of graphs from the names of three female characters. Written in an extremely charming vernacular prose style, the novel is a well-knit, long narrative of the awful debaucheries of the villain Ximen Qing. The details of the different facets of life in 16th-century China are so faithfully portrayed that it can be read almost as a documentary social history of that age. The novel has been banned in China more than once because of its eroticism, and all copies of the first edition of 1610 were destroyed.