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THE Northern and Southern Dynasties (420-589) was an ideological boom time when the grip of Confucianism began to slip and the influences of Taoism and Buddhism were gathering steam in China. This shift in philosophy was captured in New Anecdotes of Social Talk, compiled and edited by a group of scholars headed by Liu Yiqing (403-444), a duke of the Song regime (420-489). This was a period of segmentation when China was split into a northern and a southern section each ruled by a series of local regimes. The extant version of the book is in three volumes, containing more than 1,200 anecdotes about celebrities from the late Han Dynasty (206 BC-AD 220) up to the contemporary time of the compilers and editors. The book reflects a growing diversity in philosophical inquiry and method.
All the people recorded in the book are real historical figures, but some depictions of them are naturally based on hearsay. The characters that populate the tales are from a wide spectrum of society, including emperors, military and civil officials, monks and hermits, but all prominent in their time, for reasons good or bad.
Though the authors never hide their admiration for some of these people and their extraordinary virtues, they usually spare judgment and reprehension for those behaving against orthodox values, just penning the events and stories as they came down. The book therefore offers people of today a largely unfiltered look into the life of China’s upper classes more than 15,00 years ago. The writing is terse, plain, by the standard of its time of course, but highly expressive. The portrayal of one person may be as brief as a couple of lines, but aptly captures the features that best define him. For instance, a man’s parsimony is illustrated in merely 16 Chinese characters: “Wang Rong had plum trees that bore exceptionally good fruit. For fear that others would use the seeds, he bored the core of every plum before selling it.”
For a book covering more than 1,000 persons, attention to detail is critical to making each character stand out among others for his or her unique qualities. A good example is the piece dedicated to Gu Yong, prime minister of the Wu monarchy (222-280) of the Three Kingdoms Period. Gu was known to his colleagues for both his reticence and self-control, both meritorious qualities in traditional Chinese culture. As he played a game of chess one day, watched carefully by some of his aids, the news came that his son died. The man appeared unperturbed, but silently he pressed nails into his palm to suppress his grief, leaving deep cuts in his flesh and staining the mattress under him with blood.
In stark contrast to Gu, Wang Shu, a marquis of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420), had a classically short fuse. The book recounts his “fight” with a boiled egg. Wang Shu tried to pick up the egg by piercing chopsticks into it, but it slipped away. Infuriated, he swiped it off the table. As the egg swirled around the floor, he tried to smash it with his clogs, but missed again. Furious now, he caught it in his hand, flipped it into his mouth, and in revenge bit it in half before immediately spitting it out.
New Anecdotes of Social Talk is also the source of a number of Chinese idioms, such as “quench one’s thirst by thinking of plums” (or console somebody with false hopes). It comes from a story about the treacherous Cao Cao, a military strategist of the Three Kingdoms Period (220-280). After a long expedition, his soldiers were all parched and cynical about their cause. There was no source of water in sight. So Cao Cao said he knew there was a large plum orchard ahead, and it was time the fruits were ripe. As he planned, the thought of sour sweet plums immediately brought saliva into the mouth, enticing his troops to press on in their march. Though they never reached the orchard, they found springs on the way.
There are scant records of the book’s chief editor Liu Yiqing. Historical documents say that he did not share the expensive tastes of other members of the royal family, but instead showed an intense interest in literature even in childhood. Liu died soon after completion of the work.
New Anecdotes of Social Talk had a profound influence on biographical works of later ages, and was clearly the inspiration for a number of dramas and novels made about Chinese history.
All the people recorded in the book are real historical figures, but some depictions of them are naturally based on hearsay. The characters that populate the tales are from a wide spectrum of society, including emperors, military and civil officials, monks and hermits, but all prominent in their time, for reasons good or bad.
Though the authors never hide their admiration for some of these people and their extraordinary virtues, they usually spare judgment and reprehension for those behaving against orthodox values, just penning the events and stories as they came down. The book therefore offers people of today a largely unfiltered look into the life of China’s upper classes more than 15,00 years ago. The writing is terse, plain, by the standard of its time of course, but highly expressive. The portrayal of one person may be as brief as a couple of lines, but aptly captures the features that best define him. For instance, a man’s parsimony is illustrated in merely 16 Chinese characters: “Wang Rong had plum trees that bore exceptionally good fruit. For fear that others would use the seeds, he bored the core of every plum before selling it.”
For a book covering more than 1,000 persons, attention to detail is critical to making each character stand out among others for his or her unique qualities. A good example is the piece dedicated to Gu Yong, prime minister of the Wu monarchy (222-280) of the Three Kingdoms Period. Gu was known to his colleagues for both his reticence and self-control, both meritorious qualities in traditional Chinese culture. As he played a game of chess one day, watched carefully by some of his aids, the news came that his son died. The man appeared unperturbed, but silently he pressed nails into his palm to suppress his grief, leaving deep cuts in his flesh and staining the mattress under him with blood.
In stark contrast to Gu, Wang Shu, a marquis of the Eastern Jin Dynasty (317-420), had a classically short fuse. The book recounts his “fight” with a boiled egg. Wang Shu tried to pick up the egg by piercing chopsticks into it, but it slipped away. Infuriated, he swiped it off the table. As the egg swirled around the floor, he tried to smash it with his clogs, but missed again. Furious now, he caught it in his hand, flipped it into his mouth, and in revenge bit it in half before immediately spitting it out.
New Anecdotes of Social Talk is also the source of a number of Chinese idioms, such as “quench one’s thirst by thinking of plums” (or console somebody with false hopes). It comes from a story about the treacherous Cao Cao, a military strategist of the Three Kingdoms Period (220-280). After a long expedition, his soldiers were all parched and cynical about their cause. There was no source of water in sight. So Cao Cao said he knew there was a large plum orchard ahead, and it was time the fruits were ripe. As he planned, the thought of sour sweet plums immediately brought saliva into the mouth, enticing his troops to press on in their march. Though they never reached the orchard, they found springs on the way.
There are scant records of the book’s chief editor Liu Yiqing. Historical documents say that he did not share the expensive tastes of other members of the royal family, but instead showed an intense interest in literature even in childhood. Liu died soon after completion of the work.
New Anecdotes of Social Talk had a profound influence on biographical works of later ages, and was clearly the inspiration for a number of dramas and novels made about Chinese history.