Ming Shi Yanyi

Author: Cai Dongfan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-01-01
Features: A popular historical masterpiece that has gained fame both at home and abroad. Renowned historian Cai Dongfan used official history as the backbone and anecdotes as the weft. After ten years of painstaking effort, he vividly portrayed five thousand years of Chinese history in a chapter-based structure with colloquial prose and witty commentary. It authentically recreates the tumultuous process of the evolution of Chinese civilization. It depicts the emperors like Qin Shi Huang and Han Wudi, the founding emperors of Tang and Song dynasties, the customs and livelihoods during the rise and fall of dynasties, and the survival wisdom in the bloodshed of battlefields and palace intrigues. As for the fiction of the Song Dynasty, it is varied, with most being fantastical and few being factual: the clash between dragons and tigers is largely fictional; the cat-and-mouse swap of the throne is entirely imaginary; Di Qing, a man of face-painting tricks, is hardly admirable in appearance; Pang Ji, not a villainous figure, is unfairly maligned; the descendants of Yue family are never mentioned in imperial court appointments; the prince of Jin State never lost his life under a horse; and countless such absurdities are innumerable. Later generations repeated these errors, turning fiction into fact, with insufficient moral guidance and excessive deception. To ask the compilers of ancient books, why did they go to such lengths to fabricate these baseless tales, to deceive the past and mislead the present? This is what puzzles me greatly.