Peach Blossom Fan

Author: Tian Jianjing
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: China is a great literary nation, and classical literature is a splendid gem that grows in the soil of our national traditional culture. Our nation's traditional cultural spirit has nurtured it, making it dazzling and fragrant. As one of the classical literary arts, drama has long been regarded as a tool for moral education on high platforms and an instrumental means to reform customs and rectify the people's hearts. For thousands of years, it has nurtured our national cultural spirit of truth, goodness, and beauty with its humanistic spirit of praising virtue and condemning evil, as well as its beautiful national forms. Any nation that belittles its own traditional cultural spirit will be powerless to stand among modern nations; denying or neglecting the inheritance of the spirit of truth, goodness, and beauty in our national culture is tantamount to digging out its own roots. Without roots, how can there be flourishing flowers and lush leaves! Based on this idea, we invited a group of experts and scholars to rewrite some excellent classical dramas into popular stories, editing this series of "Chinese Classical Literature Story Books" to be released in installments to delight readers.
The Taohua Shan (The Peach Blossom Fan) is a classic written in 1699, the result of over a decade of painstaking effort by its author, Kong Shangren, who revised it three times. It is a historical drama that reflects the rise and fall of the Southern Ming Dynasty through the love story between Hou Fangyu, a scholar from the Fushu Society during the late Ming Dynasty, and Li Xiangjun, a famous courtesan in Qinhuai. As the author himself said: "Using the joys and sorrows of love to write about the rise and fall of dynasties, based on real events and people, with evidence to support it." The play is filled with tears, yet it cannot fully express the sorrow of the Southern Ming's downfall. Kong Shangren intended to use the joys and sorrows of a couple to answer the question of who destroyed and what caused the collapse of the Ming Dynasty's three-century rule, hoping to provide people with spiritual enlightenment and intellectual inspiration through reflection on historical events.
Kong Shangren (1648–1718), styled Yingzhi, also known as Jizhong, was known by the sobriquets Dongtang, An Tang, and Yunting Shanren. He was born in Qufu, Shandong, the 64th descendant of the Kong family, the lineage of Confucius. In his early years, he passed the county-level exams to become a xiucai (a candidate for the imperial examinations). Later, he fled turmoil and studied in Shimen Mountain in northern Qufu with his father. In 1684, the Kangxi Emperor visited Shandong during his southern inspection, and after being recommended, Kong Shangren lectured before the emperor, earning his favor and being appointed as a "Doctor of the Imperial Academy." In 1686, he accompanied the Vice Minister of Works to Huaiyang to dredge the mouth of the Yellow River. Over the next two years, he met some Ming loyalists, paid respects at Shi Kefa's tomb in Yangzhou, climbed (Yanzi Cliff) in Nanjing, visited the Qinhuai River, passed the Ming Palace, paid homage at the Ming Xiaoling Tomb, and visited Baiyun Temple in Qixia Mountain to meet the Taoist master Zhang Yaoming, learning much about the Southern Ming period and gathering materials for his work The Peach Blossom Fan.