Selected Legends of the Tang and Song Dynasties

Author: Zhang Youhe
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-04-01
Features: Excerpt: 1. Er You said to Sheng, "You should rest! I will wash my horse's feet and wait for you to recover before leaving." The blank character here is a left-right structure, with the left part being "" and the right part being "." 2. To lament the burden I carried, I inadvertently caused its collapse. The blank character here is a left-right structure, with the left part being "" and the right part being "."
Tang Dynasty legends mark a milestone in the maturation of Chinese fiction. As early as the early Tang Dynasty, around the 1920s of the 7th century, Wang Du's Record of the Ancient Mirror already broke the tradition of the Six Dynasties' eerie tales, which merely outlined the stories, and pioneered the path for legendary fiction. Later, during the high tide of poetry in the mid-Tang Dynasty, new-style novels like Journey to the Immortal Caves and Supplement to Jiang Zong's White Monkey Tale and The Tale of the Four Gentlemen of Liang, which evolved from eerie tales but were given a new form, were successively published. Niu Su wrote a ten-volume collection of tales titled Chronicles of the Strange, becoming a professional writer of fiction. Subsequently, Zhang Jian's Collection of Legends and Dai Fu's Broad Records of the Strange pioneered the tradition of "using the method of legends while recording eerie tales" (as Lu Xun described in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio).
Although the fiction of this period still primarily focused on supernatural stories, it emphasized literary elegance and imagination in writing, strengthened detailed descriptions, and thus had longer, clearly differing from the previous eerie tales. Later, these were called legends. Legends are an alias for Tang Dynasty fiction. It was used as a book title in the late Tang Dynasty by Pei Xian's collection of tales titled Legends. Before him, Yuan Zhen's The Story of Yingying was also referred to as "legends," though it may not have been the original title chosen by the author. It is likely that it was a new title created by Song Dynasty scholars (first seen in Zhao Lingzhi's Record of the Strange quoted by Wang Zhe's Dialectical Explanation of the Story of Yingying).
The Northern Song Dynasty classical prose scholar Yin Zhu once mocked Fan Zhongyan's Record of Yueyang Tower for using "parallel sentences to describe the scenery" as "legendary style." According to Chen Shidao's Post-Shan Poetry Notes, "Legends are tales of Pei Xian from the Tang Dynasty." At that time, the term "legendary style" specifically referred to the literary style of Pei Xian's Legends, which indeed took "using parallel sentences to describe the scenery" as its artistic feature. However, the content of Legends also had distinct characteristics, primarily focusing on stories that combined gods and love.
Southern Song Dynasty people were accustomed to using "legends" to refer exclusively to love stories, gradually transforming the book title into a general term for a certain category of fiction. Storytellers listed tales like The Story of Yingying, Zhu Wenjun, Li Yaxian, and Cui Hu's Search for Water as legendary fiction, alongside supernatural tales, public case tales, and tales of gods (see Record of the Strange in The Drunken Scholar's Record of Tales), showing that it was merely a category of fiction. Xie Caibo, in the preface to his Notes from the Secret Study, said, "The classics and histories of our dynasty, along with miscellaneous literary discussions, amount to nearly fifty thousand words, which are certainly not enough to match ancient works. However, it is better than the folk tales, legends, and eerie tales." He made it clearer by listing legends alongside eerie tales as a general term for this category of fiction.
The Yuan Dynasty scholar Xia Tingzhi, in the preface to The Courtesan Collection, said, "During the Tang Dynasty, there were legends, all compiled by scholars, like unofficial histories, but merely for amusement." He provided a more specific explanation, but his evaluation of legends was not high. It was not until the Ming Dynasty, with scholars like Hu Yinglin, that legends were clearly listed as a major category of fiction and given higher praise.