In the Late Ming, Literature Is Survival

Mahika Dhar reviews two classics of Chinese literature: Kong Shangren’s “The Peach Blossom Fan” and Zhang Yingyu’s “More Swindles from the Late Ming.”

By Mahika DharAugust 30, 2025

• History

• Fiction

FOR THE PEOPLE living through the final decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), things weren’t going too well. If The Peach Blossom Fan and More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams, and Sorcery serve as a reflection of the mood of their times, the late Ming was rife with corruption, natural disasters, and war. The people captured in these stories—exhausted by the incompetence of their governments—are wily and apathetic, shunning any previously held sense of collectivity in favor of individual gain. After all, if soldiers, ministers, and monks are rewarded for their selfishness, why should the burden of moral consciousness fall upon the people?

The Peach Blossom Fan, written toward the end of the 17th century by the playwright Kong Shangren, is a dramatic epic spanning the crucial last months of the Ming empire before its eventual collapse. The new 2024 translation by Wai-yee Li, under the banner of Oxford University Press and part of The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature, offers contemporary readers extensive historical context and cleaner, simpler verses, opening the door to a broader audience. The previous English edition, published in 2015 by NYRB Classics and translated by Chen Shih-hsiang and Harold Acton, offered a distinctly different flavor.

In the prologue to The Peach Blossom Fan, the ritual master introduces the legacy and mood of the play, concluding his speech with two couplets summarizing the play’s events and themes—as is the convention of dramatic plays in southern China. By introducing the key antagonist, Ruan Dacheng, and highlighting the losses of the hero, Hou Fangyu, the verse serves as an appetizer for the tone of the rest of the play.

In the Chen Shih-hsiang and Harold Acton edition, the verse was translated as follows:

Within and without the court, traitors Ma and Juan hide their blades;
Liu and Su astutely plot to foil their machinations;
Master Hou’s life of rapture falls into ruin;
Chang the Taoist tells the fates of dynasties in a song.

In Li’s translation, however, the structure and language differ:

The miscreants Ma and Ruan, at court and beyond, kept their swords hidden.
The clever Su and Liu, going back and forth, offered secret assistance.
The noble son Hou broke off the karma of love once and for all.
Daoist Zhang closed the case of a dynasty’s rise and fall.

Li’s verses are sharper, neater in the picture they paint, and undeniably smoother on the tongue. Each translated page in the new edition is accompanied by the original Chinese text in parallel, creating a book that feels like an academic treasure but, in terms of sheer size and weight, is undeniably tough on a reader’s wrists.

Meanwhile, over in More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams and Sorcery (2024), matters are equally grim. As the introduction reminds the reader, the stories in the collection “present a dim view of society.” Compiled by Zhang Yingyu in the early 17th century and newly translated by Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea, the collection is a sequel to their 2017 collection, The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection, also published by Columbia University Press. In the 40 short stories selected for this new volume, Murphy’s Law holds supreme: everything that can go wrong absolutely does. Silver is stolen, men are murdered, cheats and crooks abound, and the common man rarely triumphs.

The opening essay, written by the translators, poses a warning in the form of a question: “Dear reader, are you fond of tales of neighbors betrayed, spouses prostituted, travelers murdered, honest merchants fleeced, promising students corrupted, women of good family debauched, and widows drugged?” For readers searching for stories of valor, redemption, and romance, other books are better suited.

Zhang’s stories are parabolic, cleanly divided into the categories of shrewd spins and scams honest people may fall prey to, from the sex scandals of “Illicit Passion” to the easy trickery of “Fake Silver.” Each story concludes with a paragraph highlighting who is susceptible to these scams and how to guard oneself against them. While the stories themselves—each only a few pages long—are explicit enough in their lessons, Zhang’s inscriptions transform the book from a collection of parables into a kind of guidebook for navigating the tumult of the times. The advice isn’t revolutionary—don’t trust flattery, question easy money—yet its plainness is the point. The world is complicated enough; can’t literature be a simple but effective crutch?

In The Peach Blossom Fan, characters feel the same way, weaving the canonical prose of the past into their own words. While this is, of course, a convention of Chinese dramas of the time, the characters seem insistent on using literature to engage with the world, from making their mark in a rapidly changing culture to building connections with each other. Take, for example, the titular peach blossom fan. Given as a gift to Li Xiangjun, the hardy heroine, by Hou Fangyu, the morally upright hero, the fan metamorphoses as the play progresses, beginning as a token of love and eventually transforming into a symbol of political and cultural resistance. The key to the metamorphosis comes through changing scripts on the fan.

To cement the festivities of their wedding day, Hou inscribes a poem upon a palace fan for Li Xiangjun “as the lasting token of our solemn promise.” Thus, the fan receives its first inscription:

On a slanting path flanked by vermilion towers,
The prince is the first to ride in his noble carriage.
Along Blue Stream are none but magnolia trees
Outshone by peach and pear blossoms in the spring breeze.

Even this verse, a product of Hou’s affection, has its roots in literature long past. As the footnotes reveal, a slightly altered—but largely similar—version of the poem appears in (the real and historical) Annotated Edition of Hou Fangyu’s Complete Works. Kong Shangren twists the real Hou’s words for the play. Yet the transformation doesn’t end there. In a harrowing scene of struggle, Li spatters the fan with blood as she resists being taken as a concubine to a Ming minister. The bloodied fan, seemingly ruined, is later redeemed by a painter who uses the red stains as a base to paint peach blossoms across its surface. For the rest of the play, Hou and Li yearn from afar, never meeting until the penultimate scene.

When Hou and Li meet again, the Ming dynasty has collapsed completely, thousands are dead, and uncertainty lingers across the land. Between proclamations of love, they admire the fan, its obscured painted verse and bloody peach blossoms. Yet their reverie is rudely cut short by a Daoist priest: “Alas! You two deluded worms! Just look! Where is the country? Where are our homes? Where is our ruler? Where are our fathers? How can this bit of romance not be severed?” The priest’s words, though harsh, seem fair. Still, he appears to overlook the fact that Hou and Li’s path to the final scene was fraught with danger; their survival was not assured, their future never secure. What kept them alive was wit and their words of love, inscribed on the peach blossom fan.

For the fan’s final transformation, the priest snatches it away and rips it into shreds in a brutal reminder of the futility of love in the face of dynastic collapse. Hou and Li take their religious vows, devote themselves to a life of celibacy, and part forever. The implications are clear: from dust were ye made and dust ye shall be, so keep your romance quiet and don religious robes. Even so, during the period in between, isn’t there survival to be found in the arts? Zhang Yingyu surely seems to think so.

While Li and Hou’s words were verbose and affectionate, full of flowery landscapes and intense emotions, Zhang’s prose is sharper, more sardonic—though no less self-regarding. In More Swindles from the Late Ming, his characters, perhaps drawn from real life, serve primarily as props for two purposes: first, to expose the folly, vanity, and vice of the general population, and second, to position himself as the lone, enlightened critic wading through a corrupt and foolish world.

Through Zhang’s endnotes, with statements like “never enter a monastery, never pray to the Buddha” and “don’t fall prey to sextortion,” he acts as a dual director. He is, at once, the author of the collection and also the citizen guide for life in the late Ming. Zhang’s literature becomes both a pleasure and an act of survival, thinly veiled under his humor (one of the stories is delightfully titled “Robbed by Crooks in Broad Daylight While Taking a Dump”).

Wars may be won and lost, and social apathy may grow to a staggering degree, but there is always a story to be built of our collapse. And if one is lucky, the stories, like Zhang’s, can contain an abundance of humor—tart and biting but satisfying nonetheless. As a warning in The Peach Blossom Fan goes, “Desolate is the ornate door / The clever parrot calling for tea has only itself to humor.” The palaces and homes may be stripped of their jewels, and our stories and plays might serve at best only as distractions, at worst as relics of a troubled time. Nevertheless, at least these words still carry some humor, even if we are only repeating them back to ourselves, carrying today into tomorrow, on and on.