2.1 Introduction

Chinese literature is one of the major literary heritages of the world, with an uninterrupted history of more than 3,000 years, dating back to at least the fourteenth century BC.

The history of the written Chinese language can be divided into three periods. Archaic Chinese (c. 1500 BC—c. AD 200) includes works by Confucius and other philosophers of his time. Classical Chinese (c. 200—c. 1920) includes the prose and poetry of Han Yu and Du Fu, as well as other stories and novels. Finally, Vernacular Chinese includes contemporary works of literature. The classical Chinese novels, which came into being around 600 years ago, were actually mostly written in a combination of Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese.

It is the Chinese and not the American novel which has shaped my own efforts in writing. I believe the Chinese novel has an illumination for the Western novel and for the Western novelist.

Buck (1938)

Writing changes over time to meet the needs of different generations. In the history of Chinese literature, the Ming Dynasty (1368—1644) and Qing Dynasty (1644—1911) were the golden ages of the Chinese novel. Among countless novels published across the span of this period of hundreds of years, six were the most outstanding and influential, of which four novels were published during the Ming Dynasty and two during the Qing Dynasty (cf. Hsia 1968).

Table 2.1 Six classical Chinese novels

The first three novels mentioned above are considered to be works of collective authorship, while the last three are believed to be written by individual authors single-handedly and more creatively.

Since the late Qing Dynasty,it has generally been accepted that four novels were the greatest, judged by their length, impact and literary value. Today,the“Four Great Chinese Classics”,namely Sanguo Yanyi,Shuihu Zhuan,Xiyou Ji and Honglou Meng can be found in almost every home of Chinese intellectual families. Each of these novels became representative of a genre: history, legends of heroic deeds, fantasy and human affairs. The four novels, which were supposed to be composed by individual artists, were all immensely long, vast in scope, and vivid in characterization and description. The two novels Jin Ping Mei and Rulin Waishi eventually disappeared from the list because the former was replaced by Honglou Meng, a more superior novel of a similar genre, and the latter, though considered one of the best novels of satire and humor, is neither well constructed nor long enough (only fifty-five chapters).

A a discussion of the motivation for selecting Sanguo Yanyi as the focus of this study will be provided later in this chapter, after short summaries of each of the other “Four Great Chinese Classics”.