All Men Are Brothers – [Shui Hu Chuan] – Intro #2

All Men Are Brothers – [Shui Hu Chuan] – Intro #2

Translated by Pearl S. Buck

I. Introduction by Lin Yutang – Part 2

Some one of the band was always in trouble, and his brothers would be going down the valleys to rescue him. A great deal of fisticuff and slug-fest make up the rest of the charm of the story. To take an illustration of a typical situation, the following is the plot of Yuan drama, written in the 14^th century and forming a story in this cycle:

“A certain man was traveling through a dangerous countryside and asked the outlaw chief, Sung Chiang, who was an extremely kind-hearted and fair gentleman, to send him a man for protection. ‘Black Whirlwind’ Li K’uei volunteered and was sent. The traveler’s wife, however, had an affair with a government bureaucrat, and arranged to run away with her lover at a given signal. The traveler went to the court upon coming to town to report the disappearance of his wife, and was put in jail by the bureaucrat who had stolen his wife. Li K’uei disguised himself as a peasant and bribed his way into the prison as a visitor of the prisoner, put the jailer to sleep by a kind of narcotic, and rescued the prisoner. Then he disguised himself again as a guard, slipped into the government residence, killed the lovers and returned to the mountains with their severed heads.”

It was raw and it was primitive. But it was swift justice and makes extremely good reading, by the law of compensation, for the great majority of Chinese people: who are law-abiding, fight-abstaining and injustice-tolerating, docile citizens. For it must be remembered that the cycle of these outlaw stories had captured the popular imagination long before the author or authors had put them in to novel form. Dr. Hu Shih, in his long essay on the authorship of the novel, pointed out that in the 14^th century, during the Mongol Dynasty, there were 19 plays written about incidents and characters in this cycle, 5 of which have survived, the remaining 14 being known through references to their titles.

I have not yet made quite clear what the “anger” is about. The political background of the 4 centuries during which the cycle evolved into its present form makes it easy to understand the popularity of these stories. The bare historical facts on record are the following:

The robbers, carrying the banner of “patriotism and justice”, roamed through the modern provinces of Shantung, Hopei, Anhuei and Honan, robbing the rich and helping the oppressed, during a period of notorious misrule around the year 1120. The most heart-rending story is that of the building of a pleasure garden for the emperor, Huitsung, in which every rare flowers and every rock transported from private homes had cost some human lives. 8 of 36 outlaws were originally officials in charge of transporting the rockery. The Emperor soon paid for this misgovernment by losing his throne and dying in captivity in the camps of the Kin invaders. The northern Sung Dynasty came to an end in 1126, thanks to the Emperor’s belief in an astrologer, but Sung Chiang and his band had been captured and killed en masse in 1121. Dissatisfaction with the government was rampant. Northern China was under foreign rule by the aid of the Chinese puppets; and the Chinese Emperor, ruling from Hangchow, was forced by his policy of appeasement to acknowledge the Kin conqueror as “lord sovereign” and pay him annual tributes in silk and silver. The situation was not made any more pleasant by the fact that national resistance to the foreigners was by no means ineffective; and that the most popular general, Yo Fei, who was winning victory after victory, was summarily recalled by the appeaser premier Ch’in Kuei and murdered in prison. The Hsuanho Chronicles (“Hsuanho” being the name of the reign preceding the downfall), written probably in the 12^th century and giving the earliest stories of the exploits of Sung Chiang and his band, concludes with a note of bitter rebelliousness:

“Emperor Kaotsung twice lost his opportunity for regaining the territory of north China, 1^st through the temporizing policy of Ch’ien-shan and Po-yen in the years 1127-1130, and then through the appeasement policy of Ch’in Kuei thereafter. Because of such successive political bungling, our national territory has not been recovered, our emperors’ deaths have not been avenged and our national shame has not been wiped out. That is why patriots wring their hands in despair and wish that they could eat the flesh of the traitors and sleep in their skin.”

<Continued – part 3>