Silverfish Collection

Author: Huang Chang
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2006-06-01
Features: If such standards are applied to Zhang Dai, it will be discovered that his most outstanding characteristic is still his talent for writing, and his main achievements lie here. His scholarship is not particularly remarkable, and in terms of cultural attainment, he was probably only at the level of an average scholar in the feudal society; however, his interests were very broad, and he paid close attention to various figures, dynamics, people's lives, customs, and even many aspects such as food, vegetables, and fruits, with a keen interest and courage to appreciate and record them. All of these were often disregarded by the orthodox scholars of the old era. When it comes to "insight," he was probably inferior. However, in terms of life attitude and aesthetic thought, he somewhat broke through certain traditional forces of feudal culture. As for his dominant ideology, it could not but remain traditional. Three hundred years ago, that earth-shattering change and that fierce impact did indeed shake feudal intellectuals like Zhang Dai greatly, but they ultimately failed to bring about any fundamental transformation.
Zhang Dai was born into a "notable family" of the feudal society. Looking at his "Family Chronicle," the Zhang family was not particularly wealthy among the bureaucratic landlords, but he was still a scion of a notable family, a young master. His great-grandfather, Zhang Yuanbai, was a (top scholar) of the Longqing Xini year. I once received his Selected Writings of the Not-Binding Studio, though I did not read it carefully, only remembering that it had a small portrait at the beginning—a thin old man dressed in official robes. For some reason, I always imagined Zhang Zongzi to look like this.
Zhang Dai wrote an Autobiographical Epitaph for Himself, in which he frankly admitted that he "was a young man of leisure in his youth, deeply fond of luxury. He loved fine residences, beautiful maids, young boys, fine clothes, exquisite food, swift horses, splendid lanterns, firecrackers, the opera, music and dance, antiques, flowers, and birds. He was also a tea enthusiast, a bookworm, and a poetry-mad man. He toiled half his life, all of which turned into dreams." This is an extremely precise portrayal of the image and spiritual world of the young masters of the landlord class who lived in a state of drunken oblivion in that late feudal era, serving as a useful key to understand this group of high-level parasites.
I have not seen another person who made such candid self-revelations in the late Ming Dynasty. All of his "life experiences" are recorded in his two famous memoirs—Dreams of Tao'an and Dream of the West Lake. Fifty-four years ago, Dreams of Tao'an was reprinted by Mr. Yu Pingbo, published as the "Reprinted by Po Society" edition, based on Wu Chongyao's series, which was re-engraved from the Qianlong Jiajin Ren Wang edition by Wang Wenqiao. I once saw this original in Fu Xihua's home, and it seems to have become extremely rare. Later, I obtained a Daoguang 2nd year edition re-engraved in a small box format, which was also finely engraved. Twenty-eight years later, the Wang family re-engraved the book again, showing their appreciation and reverence for Dreams of Tao'an.
The main content of Dreams of Tao'an, which is also what Zhang Dai described in his Autobiographical Epitaph for Himself, is the "confession" of a young master of the landlord class. Its value lies in leaving later readers a vivid and realistic sketch of a side of late Ming social life. This cannot be compared to either Old Events of Wu Lin or Dream of the East Lake.
Later, Zhang Dai wrote The Stone Cistern Book, becoming a famous historian, but when writing Dreams of Tao'an, he did not have the "ambition" to write history or geographical records, thus breaking free from those traditional constraints.
Zhang Dai was indeed an outstanding "journalist" three hundred years ago. The sketches, reports, and dispatches he wrote were all very short. The shorter ones had dozens or hundreds of characters, and the longer ones, such as The Lean Horses of Yangzhou, were no more than six or seven hundred characters, yet they completely depicted the various aspects of the human meat market in late Ming Yangzhou.
P2-3