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Introduction

“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can; all of them make me laugh.”

W. H. Auden

THE great Buddhist divinities of China have marked an austere passage through history. Arhats of immense dignity—severe gods of wisdom—left sacred texts; patriarchs founded grand temple complexes so that their doctrines might live; and martyred men and women sacrificed their own limbs as signs of devotion. These lions of the faith are the saints of Buddhism, famed for their miracle tales. But Ji Gong—the saint in this book—is not that saint; and that is not his story. Ji Gong is a god of the streets—a drinker, a trickster, a city magician who lives among shopkeepers and traveling merchants, among the impoverished scholars, street hustlers and courtesan-prostitutes, all with survival tales and hard-luck stories. He is their exorcist, their avenger; he is a streetwise hero, the common man’s patron saint.

Ji Gong was born in Hangzhou, perhaps in the year 1130, during the Song Dynasty (960–1279). However, only one Song Dynasty biographer, Chan Master Jujian, found him worthy of mention, and the Master’s account is mercifully short.¹ Lord Ji studied at the great Lingyin Monastery, an immense temple compound that still ranges solemnly up the steep hills above Hangzhou. The Chan masters of the temple instructed him in the infamously harsh practices of their sect, but failed; the young monk, following in the steps of other great ne’er-do-wells and holy fools of Chinese religions, managed the one distinct accomplishment revealed in this account: he got himself fired. He left the monastery, became a wanderer with hardly a proper jacket to wear, and achieved renown—not in the temples, but in the wine shops.

If this were the only version of this monk’s life, he would have vanished, as did the thousands, perhaps millions, of other lowly disciples; but Ji Gong’s story was hijacked. It was claimed by generations of city dwellers—900 years of entertainers and the entertained—who seized on this tale of defiance and trickster humor among the Hangzhou taverns, giving the simple account both life and bulk. Indeed, the full might and weight of the storyteller profession—its multiple clans and guilds, its steely membership practices, and its decades of training starting in childhood—was thrown behind the lore of Ji Gong. This ignominious monk assumed center stage in the cycle of accounts; accounts that multiplied and expanded as city life in China expanded. Later chroniclers gave him many names: Ji of the Dao, the Living Buddha, the Hidden Recluse of the Qiantang Lake, the Chan Master, The Drunken Arhat, Elder Brother Square Circle, Abbot Ji, and his most familiar and suitable rubric: Crazy Ji.

The author of our version, Guo Xiaoting, lived in the late 1800s and into the twentieth century, coming happily to the tales almost a millennium after Ji Gong lived. Guo Xiaoting wrote The Complete Tales of Lord Ji in the 1890s, editing the raft of material from popular performances, mimicking in some measure the storyteller’s gimmicks and voice. Nor was Guo Xiaoting embarrassed about his lowly sources. For another of his works, he bragged that the long performances of storytellers—two-month stagings were not unusual—were his source.² And although many of these sorts of claims are specious—an attempt by intellectuals to evade the charge of producing frothy literatures—this one seems to have been true. Ji Gong does, in fact, reveal the world of the Beijing storyteller as the century changed in 1900: where restaurants and theaters offered the tales, and where Guo Xiaoting—in retirement—earned a living.

Thus, though the original tale and early versions of Ji Gong tell of Hangzhou life, where the famous Lingyin Monastery presides, the 900-years-later version—our version—though set in Hangzhou, has the look, smells, and—above all—sounds of Beijing. Within Guo Xiaoting’s tale and John Shaw’s translation, not only does the monk Ji Gong emerge, but so also do the lives and places of Guo Xiaoting’s own world. We see the alleyways and temple grounds, the lowlife and high ambitions of the men and women of China of the late 1800s and early 1900s, a curbside capsule of the late Qing Dynasty as it teetered on the brink of collapse.

Six years after Guo Xiaoting published a second installment of the Ji Gong tales, the Outer City District Police for the city of Beijing compiled a survey.³ In 1906 the “First Statistical Survey of the Security Administration” (Jingshi waicheng xunjing zongting diyici tongjishu 京師 外城 巡警 總廳 第一次統計書) reported that there were 347 restaurants, 308 courtesan-entertainer halls, 301 inns, 246 teahouses (where operas were performed), and 699 opium dens: all in a single district of Beijing. These were not the only place where people gathered. Temple complexes housed thousands of religious clerics and disciples and offered holiday fairs and popular performances. Grand compounds served the thousands of visiting merchants; they used the extensive banking institutions⁴ to monitor their investments. Businesses of all levels dominated the streets of Beijing; at the turn of the century, when Ji Gong was published, there were over 25,000 commercial establishments.⁵ Of course, the poor numbered in the thousands: soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and programs for temporary employment helped some.⁶ The police did not simply observe this activity; Beijing was the most policed city in the world. A network of officers supervised the city through the night in a series of watchmen’s contacts. “The beating of drums, bells, and bamboo boards enabled policemen to be part of a sweep through the streets and lanes … part of an elaborate choreographed system … that kept officers always within earshot of each other.”⁷ Members of the British Macartney mission in 1793 complained of being kept awake by the continual clapping and clopping.⁸

This was a city of size and scale. Foreigners were astounded; Father Pierre-Martial Cibot thought Beijing “the most peopled in the universe.”⁹ The estimates varied from one to three million inhabitants, depending on the inclusion of the extensive suburbs. The inns and restaurants, so carefully recorded by security officials, reflected this scale. One restaurant, a “publick house” visited by the Scotsman John Bell, was “the largest of that sort I ever saw; and could easily contain six or eight hundred people. The roof was supported by two rows of wooden pillars … the great part was filled with long tables, having benches, on each side, for the accommodation of the company.”¹⁰ Traders, artisans, factory workers, bosses and laborers, and the institutions—from temple compounds to marketplaces, big and small—shaped the nature of Beijing. This was a city with a city ecology: a city that had its own order and rhythm, with thriving subcultures of interlocking occupations. To be sure, the Manchu dominated the capital—laws were becoming increasingly strict on separation of races—but city patterns held the contours of life in Beijing.

Thus for Guo Xiaoting’s audience, The Complete Tales of Lord Ji presents a tour of the places, sounds, and customs of Beijing on the brink of the twentieth century. Readers would have been quick to hear the Beijing slang; shopkeepers lived and worked in and among the neighborhood hutong (the Beijing term for alley); a sly Daoist monk would be likely to yuan (Beijing slang for “cheat,” a word that is at the heart of many plot twists). Red fruit (hongguo)—sweetened hawthorn fruit—was a Beijing snack available in the novel; and Beijing buildings, not the palaces or temples, but the sihefang—courtyard homes—sheltered the novel’s residents.¹¹ If the city sights and sounds matched the Beijing cityscape, so did the characters. Some were generic city dwellers, but some were clearly northerners familiar to a nineteenth-century reader. Pipe smokers greeted one another in teahouses; pipe smoking was a popular diversion never seen in Hangzhou of the Song Dynasty.¹² A typical Beijing entertainer—the pingshu performer—makes his appearance in the novel. This artist was a typical northern “clapper-style” teller of rough-and-tumble tales of heroes and bandits.¹³ And if the citizens of The Complete Tales were northerners, they were also plain people. A few rich and mighty sit on the narrative outskirts—usually to threaten, occasionally to reward; but workaday Beijing is the setting, and Beijing citizens the cast.

Beijing is clearly the common man’s city. Though great walled compounds dominated old Beijing, Ji Gong’s Beijing is permeable. It is a city with a horizontal sight line; traded goods move through the streets like fish through shoals. When a precious talisman disappears from a friend’s keeping, Ji Gong learns of its progress. The talisman was stolen by members of the White Coin Gang, and then sold to the manager of the Old Studio Antique Shop (for 30 ounces of silver); then it is sold to Prime Minister Qin (for 500 ounces of silver!). Finally, it is taken through the gate of Prime Minister Qin’s estate and hung in the upper story of a fine pavilion. This slick circulation is managed, Ji Gong is told, “in a matter of hours, while you were drinking with your friends.”¹⁴ As goods move, so do travelers. As readers, we are on foot in this vital city; no need for the grander forms of travel. When Ji Gong threads his way through this peculiar urban marriage of Hangzhou and Beijing, we can follow him at a good crisp walk.

Enter the ghost.

His skin was a light sickly purple in color, his eyebrows heavy and long, shading his widely spaced eyes. With his hands he dragged the long chains with which he was bound and the heavy lock that fastened them together. His tangled hair was tied in a loose knot and his beard was like trampled grass.

Prime Minister Qin gazed at him. “Alas!” Yes, it was his adoptive father and patron, Qin Guai, returning home as a baleful ghost!…

“My old father!” exclaimed Prime Minister Qin. “I thought that you would have been in heaven long ago. Who would have thought that you could still be suffering in the underworld!”

Qin Guai answered, “Son, for your father’s sake, while you are yet in the world of light occupying your high position, return to the path of virtue before father and son-in-law go down in the stormy sea.”¹⁵

You might expect an evasive view of morality in The Complete Tales of Lord Ji, for these characters rely on peasant cunning. But the mournful voice of Qin Guai’s ghost tells another story. Ji Gong has here summoned an agent of retribution laced with the terrors of filial guilt. And despite the low humor and humble streets, the moral code of Ji Gong is rigorous, his punishments sure and certain. The retribution meted out in this scene is exquisitely personal. The ghost-father shames the avaricious son; a wrenching humiliation abases the prime minister. Indeed, if the Confucian bureaucracy named itself a moral patriarchy with the Son of Heaven residing at the top, the horizontal landscape of nineteenth-century Beijing had its parallel forms of rectitude. Beijing life occupies, in The Complete Tales, a moral landscape, where a harsh and deeply ingrained vision shapes events, although these codes may have varied from what the Emperor recommended.

Ji Gong governs an ad hoc clan of the righteous oppressed. He pulls the threads of karmic connections, wrestling the high and mighty out of their compounds. Abuse of office, sexual violence against the weak, humiliation of the ordinary, and even the never-trivial crime of snobbery are always punished. The code is simple: decency. Though none of the characters is grand, all of them are armed with a pitch-perfect sense of probity. Even small gestures are governed by the sense of a refined doctrine. Decorum reaches to the smallest scale: “Even though at first the monk looked like nothing more than a beggar, to save Zhao Yuanwai’s face Li Guoyuan could not do otherwise than go forward to offer a ceremonial greeting.”¹⁶ As with the rites (li) of fine society, this is the li of the counter-tradition, constituting a powerful bond, clan-like and rigorous. Shopkeepers, courtesans, and monks—denizens of Beijing—use the words “sister” and “brother” deliberately. “When Li Guoyuan saw that it was Zhao Wenhui, he immediately went forward, raising his clasped hands in greeting, and said, ‘I have been looking forward to seeing you, Elder Brother.’”¹⁷ These kinship terms color the fabric of the novel; they signal bonds that, once made, are never broken. Loyalty was paramount.

The aristocrats of these clans of the streets are Ji Gong’s warriors. Dyed through and through with righteousness (yi 義), they are the moral police of the Beijing streets, the elder-brother patriarchs of the Beijing hutong. In reality they are an odd mismatch of bodyguards, martial-arts stage-performers, and bandits. But, of course their mismatch-outsider status is a point of pride, all of them suffering from a failure to know their place in society. These warriors call themselves men and women of the “water-ways and greenwood” (jianghu lülin 江湖綠林). As outsiders they are proud to know each other by secret signs: an arc made by a weapon, an odd word used in greeting, some trick of appearance; with a simple gesture, kinship is recognized. Ji Gong himself is the chief among his band of defiant rogues. His skills are the most powerful; he is the godly (shen 神) version of this cast. But with his magic, lowly characters, though banished from power, are sanctioned—literally—by an eccentric, though intrinsically lucid, divine authority. The Complete Tales make something magical and deeply moral out of the city and its clash of circumstances. Guo Xiao ting, along with the centuries of performers of the Ji Gong epic, manufactured in this book a comic bible, appropriating a saint who was out and about in their midst, and clearly available: for, as the Song biographer has told us, Ji Gong was conveniently out of work.

In 1900, the same year that Guo Xiaoting published his second installment of The Complete Tales of Lord Ji, the city of Beijing was under siege. The forces of Germany, Japan, England, Russia, the United States, Italy, and France had taken Beijing; they had marched through the massive city gates, taken control of the foreign legation, and seized the Imperial Palace. The army of foreign soldiers had driven out the court; in April of that year, the Empress Dowager fled the palace dressed as a peasant. Nor did the troops stop there; they had arrived to punish the Boxer rebels. These rebels were a band of the displaced poor that had attacked Christian missions “to save China.” Indeed, the Boxers had an implacable hatred of foreigners. Thus, there followed a vicious European response; this was divine retribution. Emperor William II of Germany declared, “Peking should be razed to the ground!” When the troops left for China, he urged his men, “Show no mercy! Take no prisoners.”¹⁸ Nor did they; foreign troops razed villages and executed thousands of peasants and peasant soldiers.

Not that this chaos was isolated. As the century ended, massive failures marked China’s political life. In 1894 sections of the empire were ceded to Japan, and Germany in the same decade received sections of Shandong. From the court to the bureaucracy, to universities, to fine estates of educated gentry, all the structures of a well-policed world were in disarray: leading to the year 1911, when 2,000 years of dynastic governance convulsed in failure, toppling like a mountain into revolution and civil war. China was at one of the most terrible tipping points in history.

Within this maelstrom, in 1900, Guo Xiaoting wrote his second installment of The Complete Tales of Lord Ji. In these violent years Guo takes us, with apparent insouciance, through an odd-fellow comic narrative. Ji Gong is the curbside comedian of China. He typically plays the fool; temple statues portray him with an idiot’s grin. But from that vantage point he is a master of the fine art of ridicule, as he exposes the grand as grandiose. And if he is a fool, he is a holy fool. Meir Shahar, in his wonderful book Crazy Ji, has linked Ji Gong to other lunatic eccentrics in Chinese religion. “Crazy shamans, eccentric Daoists, wild Buddhists, and carefree poets” have all “played an important role in the religion and art of China.”¹⁹ Ji Gong’s madness has obvious method. It invokes the elemental, engaging what Robert Torrance called “the subversive and even anarchical sense of life.”²⁰ He is a comic hero whose outrageous laughter evokes the sense of nature’s raw authority; Crazy Ji conveys a sense of “heightened vitality, of challenged wit and will.”²¹

The horrors of 1900 notwithstanding, Ji Gong’s brand of comedy had an audience. Tales of rogues—or picaros—was a booming industry. For the entire Qing Dynasty, into the time of civil war of the 1910s and 1920s, readers loved the picaresque. Popular presses in Beijing and Shanghai produced the tales of Monkey, the comical demon-queller from Journey to the West; other episodic tales were also popular. Journeys to the North, to the South and to the East were available as well.²² Still more rogues emerged from these original adventures. Pigsy from Journey to the West had his own story cycle. The band of heroes from the Enfeoffment of the Gods had dedicated readers. Even the magistrate Judge Bao appeared in these story cycles as a comic eccentric, a master of disguise.²³ Of course, readers and listeners thrilled to the epic cycle Shuihu zhuan, or Water Margin. They knew precisely the weaponry, the costumes, the strategies, and the famous lines of all 108 heroes. When Russian diplomat Egor Petrovich Kovelevsky perused the bookstores of Beijing in 1850, he found that the “back rows of the (book) shops are usually crowded with novels … The greatest fame is enjoyed by the old novels, which are reprinted in hundreds of editions.”²⁴ He was right, as we know from the numbers. Aside from the storyteller scripts and storyteller imitations, there were the smoothly narrated novels, and then there were reprints, sequels, and spin-offs, with single chapters expanded into new books entirely. This was a good crop to harvest. No wonder Guo Xiao ting came out with The Complete Tales of Lord Ji, Part II, in 1900.

The picaresque tales that flew off the back shelves were not always well received by the court, however. Imperial censors, in fact, found the “old novels” to be deeply troublesome. Light-hearted and comical though they may be, novels were considered polluting. Censors looked at fiction and saw rebellion. Novels had a terrible reputation. Water Margin, though a favorite throughout the Qing, was subjected to heavy-handed censorship. Ambassador Kovelevsky, in his visit to the Beijing bookstore, may have noticed the numbers, but he did not notice the laws. The Laws and Codes of the Great Qing (Da Qing lǜli 大清律例) labeled the book “licentious”; adventure tales undermined that well-ordered cityscape laid out in the police survey. The Qing legal code was clear: “All bookshops that print the licentious story Water Margin must be vigorously sought out, and the work prohibited. Both the woodblocks and the printed matter should be burned. In case [it is discovered that] this book is being made, and … should [an official] himself engrave it, he shall be stripped of office entirely.”²⁵

If the officials monitored publishers, they monitored ordinary citizens as well. The reading public for these tales of adventure had an official category: “stupid” (yu 愚). Those who bought vernacular texts or who listened to storytellers were called yufuyufu (愚夫愚婦)²⁶—stupid men and stupid women. This official view was more than demeaning, it was damning. The word “stupid” (yu 愚) had the connotation of politically dangerous, as in stupefying, deluding, or corrupting. Officials laced their descriptions of local leaders with such terms, accusing them of yumin (愚民), deluding the masses. The empire’s unsavory elements were bracketed together: the practitioners of cults, the malcontents, the tumultuous, as well as the writers and readers of fiction.

This fearful view of popular fiction was not without real bite. Popular fiction and all books were monitored with malign precision. Censors had terrible means at their disposal. When the Abbreviated History of the Ming History was published, censors were repelled by some few passages. The author foolishly linked the Manchu people to other “barbarian” peoples. The book itself was quickly suppressed, but the censorship was extended. Those connected with the project were tracked down. The publishers were tried, convicted, and executed, and “those who had merely purchased the book” were punished as well. “Seventy individuals were put to death and their families exiled, their estates confiscated.”²⁷ This is censorship at an impressive level.

The imperial watchdogs and culture police were a ready posse. Fiction could stir up rebellion. In this, as it turns out, they were right. Readers of Qing fiction were truculent. They mimicked their heroes, used gangster argot, practiced swordplay, and gathered and plotted against the state. Mimicry was not the only issue, however. Heroes of the picaresque were considered gods. Ji Gong, in particular, was an unruly saint. The same Boxer rebels who surrounded Beijing in 1900 practiced the cult of Ji Gong.²⁸ Missionary observers had seen young Boxer soldiers in cult practices: “After greeting the deities and taking their places respectfully on either side of the altar, the little boys suddenly began to look sickly, with red faces and staring eyes; they foamed at the mouth; they began to shout and laugh.”²⁹ These rituals inspired the Boxers. Northern China was a vast terrain of the displaced and desperate; flood, disease, and imperial incompetence had created an impoverished and unstable population, a mob of “hungry, discontented, hopeless idlers,” as the American ambassador noted.³⁰ This northern mob, however, coalesced through cult practices. Ji Gong and other heroes of the waterways and greenwood gave them divine legitimacy.

Vibeke Bordahl has traced the long histories of “schools”—the specific lines—of storytellers. She has collected performance lineages going back as many as seventy-eight generations. Storytellers of Water Margin passed down their knowledge in one famous clan for two hundred years.³¹ The Ji Gong stories have had their own great lineage. From storyteller performances to storyteller scripts, to smooth narratives by Qing writers, to contemporary movies, and then to TV shows, Ji Gong has lasted a millennium. He has, in fact, fared better than Confucius. Not that this is surprising. When the court and its revered texts and malign proclamations were abandoned, the oral tradition survived. Performers retained the lore of Ji Gong in their prodigious memories. Nor was Ji Gong a mere entertainer. Though he may be charged with the crime of comedy, his signature off-kilter view is compelling. Indeed, off-kilter has its uses. His anarchical intelligence offers us a refracted view of a difficult age, an age of corrupted authority and unmoored lives—a world in which the Empress had to flee the city dressed as a peasant. The late Qing was not a time for the great lions of history, but was “a world too numbed for tragedy and too disillusioned for glory.”³² Comedy sits in that vacuum, providing an apparently blithe view from the sidelines.

Günter Grass revealed that he preferred the style of the “Spanish and Arab picaresque”; the jester’s version reflects the world “in concave and distorting mirrors.”³³ Indeed, the picaresque attracts those who live with violence. The talent of the jester for comical escape, offers a model, if not of victory, then at least of survival, as playing the rogue offers useful cover.

Victoria Cass

Baltimore, Maryland