Story-singing texts of the Daoguang period: A study of Xiamen editions of ballads about Meng Jiangnü and Zhu Yingtai

• In Event: Vernacular Textual Culture in Ming and Qing China

Abstract

The Oxford University Library holds a corpus of gezaice texts of the Daoguang period of Qing-dynasty China that is of considerable value. All of them were printed in Xiamen, in the southeastern region of Fujian. Among them, two imprints, entitled “Jiangnü ge” (The Jiangnü ballad) and “Yingtai ge” (The Yingtai ballad), stand out in particular. What first strikes about these two editions is their dense illustration: each page includes a picture, according to the format “picture above and text below” (shang tu xia wen), though in a style that is different from those found for novels or dramas. In the wider context of folk culture, the illustrations to the text may also have been placed in a religious context. Moreover, its presentation as an imprint may also have conformed to certain aesthetic expectations. The legends about Meng Jiangnü and Zhu Yingtai are among the most popular in Chinese folk-literary heritage, with countless numbers of variations that have become the object of scholarly study ever since the 1920s. The editions of the Jiangnü and Yingtai ballads represent some of the earliest imprints of texts in the gezaice style from Fujian, but they do not include any Fujianese (Hokkien) vocabulary, as traces of regional dialect are generally rarely found in such texts from the Daoguang period. By studying these texts, we can also better understand the early development of gezaice story-singing.

Author

• Yunhua Cui, China University of Political Science and Law