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Notes

¹ Reviewed by Hongchu Fu in this journal, CHINOPERL Papers 29 (2010): 261–67.

² The most recent and scholarly translation in English is Moss Roberts' Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press; and Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991). The version of the novel he translated is the “Mao” edition of the seventeenth century, which is substantially different from the earliest extant edition.

³ Hua Guan Suo is a fictional son of Guan Yu. His name includes two other surnames besides that of his father.

⁴ On the relationship of the first two of these novels to the epic-length narrative ballads that served as their sources, Margaret Wan also published “The Chantefable and the Novel: The Cases of Lü mudan and Tianbao tu,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 64.2 (Dec. 2004): 367–97.

⁵ As was done by C. T. Hsia, in his “The Military Romance: A Genre of Chinese Fiction,” in Cyril Birch, ed., Studies in Chinese Literary Genres (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 384–90.

⁶ Margaret Wan claims that “a number of other novels” (p. 43) had already been written about Di Qing by the time Tower of Myriad Flowers was written, but this appears to be a misstatement on her part, since in her note to this claim (p. 171 n79), she speaks only of Di Qing as a subject in early storytelling and drama (for which she cites Hsia, “The Military Romance,” p. 342, where Hsia also notes that it was not until the era in which Wanhua lou was written that Di Qing “first received full-scale fictional treatment”).

⁷ Boris Riftin, Istoricheskaja epopeja i fol'klornaja traditsija v Kitae: Ustnye i kniznye versii ‘Troetsarstvija’ (Historical romance and folklore tradition in China: Oral and literary versions of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms; Moscow: Nauka, 1970). There is a Chinese edition: Li Fuqing 李福清, Sanguo yanyi yu minjian wenxue chuantong 三國演義與民間文學傳統 (The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and folklore tradition), Ying Xikang 尹锡康 and Tian Dawei 田大畏, trs. (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 1997). Liangyan Ge's important study, Out of the Margins: The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2001), also deals with the interplay of the oral and the written in the creation of the novel Shuihu zhuan. Ge and Børdahl's books complement each other with their different focus and approach.

⁸ Scholarship on this issue in China from the 1920s until rather recently considered vernacular short stories (huaben 話本), plain tales, and early editions of novels to be essentially equivalent to real scripts for performance by storytellers. Western studies from the 1960–80s worked to show the literary nature of the “storyteller's manner” in vernacular fiction; the watershed studies were Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Authorship, and Composition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973) and Wilt L. Idema, Chinese Vernacular Fiction: The Formative Period (Leiden: Brill, 1974). Recent studies of note include Anne McLaren, Chinese Popular Culture and Ming Chantefables (Leiden: Brill, 1998) and the book by Liangyan Ge mentioned above.

⁹ The founder of this school was Wang Shaotang 王少堂 (1889–1968).