In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

101 7 Preface, Postscript, and Colophon But virtue, as it never will be moved, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, So lust, though to a radiant angel linked, Will sate itself in a celestial bed And prey on garbage. —Shakespeare, Hamlet I. v The preface to the Ruyijun zhuan was written by a man whose pen name was Huayang Sanren. Scholars have concluded that it was written between 1514 and 1754 by a contemporary of the author, by a precocious hermit of the seventeenthcentury ,byananonymousJapanese authorofthe eighteenthcentury, or even, perhaps, by the author himself.1 While there is no shortage of candidate authors and dates of composition, the preface itself has attracted little attention . Scarcely a word has been written about its contents, its style, or its relation to the work it purports to introduce.2 And yet a careful examination of thisprefacemightverywell lead to theidenti¤cationof the personwho wrote it. Preface While Wu Zetian’s lover Xue Aocao is not destitute of personal merit and has happily discovered a manner in which he can gratify his appetites while ministering to the feeble moral sense of his sovereign, it is not proper to compare his rude intrigues to the glorious career of Zhang Liang, one of the most artful statesmen of the Han dynasty. Yet this is precisely what the author of this preface does. But instead of provoking heated debate, his audacity has been greeted with cold indifference: the same scholars who express such a keen interest in the identity of its author do not even mention his ridiculous conclusions. Before addressing questions of authorship and date of composition, therefore, we should ¤rst examine the preface itself. 102 Context and Analysis The preface alleges that Xue Aocao has stumbled upon a situation in which even the stratagems of Zhang Liang would have been to no avail. As Zhang Liang’s resourcefulness was legendary, this is a remarkable assertion. Qi Ji, one of Emperor Liu Bang’s favorite concubines, had persuaded him that his son Crown Prince Liu Ying was weak, effeminate, and not worthy to succeed him. Her own son Zhaowang Ruyi, she said, deserved to be made crown prince in his stead. But she made the fatal mistake of overestimating the stamina ofLiu Bang’s infatuation and underestimating the licentious fury of her rival Empress Lü. Upon learning of Qi Ji’s plot, Empress Lü solicited the advice of Zhang Liang, a trusted adviser who had already rescued the dynasty on more than one occasion. This challenge was an acute test of his political acumen, as Qi Ji had succeeded in persuading the emperor to admit what he already knew in his heart to be true: his son the crown prince was conspicuously de¤cient in the personal attributes that Liu Bang valued most. As this was also clear to Zhang Liang, he chose to say nothing rather than engage in empty sophistry. Instead he devised an elegant scheme to convince the emperor that deposing the crown prince without suf¤cient reason would not enjoy the support of his subjects. He persuaded the “four whitebeards” to emerge from their lofty seclusion and appear in the company of the crown prince; as Liu Bang held the four whitebeards in great esteem, their appearance with the crown prince made the thought of deposing him unimaginable. Although Zhang Liang had thwarted the elevation of an illegitimate crown prince with a silence more eloquent than words, it would not take long for Liu Bang’s heirs to reap a bloody harvest once the seeds of discord had been sown. And Qi Ji would at length discover that her artless foray into politics was not productive of the most salutary of consequences. Upon the death of the emperor, Empress Lü’s son was indeed invested with the imperial yellow. But her irritated sense of justice did not permit her to let the elevation of her son pass without further comment. She found it necessary to acquaint her vanquished rival with her displeasure in a manner that wasconsistentwiththecruelgeniusofamonster.ShebeganbypoisoningZhaowang Ruyi. She then proceeded to amputate Qi Ji’s hands and feet, gouge out her eyes, burn her ears, tear out her tongue, and throw her mangled yet living remains in a privy. Empress Lü had now been elevated above the necessity of dissimulating her appetite for revenge, which she grati¤ed with in¶exible pertinacity . Then she cheerfully observed that she had turned the emperor’s favorite into a “human pig...

Share