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Introduction
- The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
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Introduction The Story of the Stone (Shitou ji 石頭記), also known as The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng 紅樓夢), was the first novel to open up the subject of adolescence for the Chinese reader. In 1804, twelve years after the first edition of The Stone, a novel called Mirage (Shenlou zhi 蜃樓志) appeared and set about exploring that subject in a somewhat different direction. Mirage is set not in the capital but in the southeastern province of Guangdong, and largely in the city of Guangzhou itself—in fact, it is a regional novel. Its hero is not the scion of a great official family with imperial connections; instead, he is the son of one of those men, known as Hong merchants, who were licensed to deal with foreign traders in the port of Guangzhou (Canton). (Mirage is the earliest novel by far to treat the subject of the China trade; it was written several decades before the Opium Wars and well before opium was even a factor in the trade.) The hero’s father is the longtime head of the Hong merchants’ association, and he is extremely wealthy, partly from his trading, but also from his landholding and money-lending interests. When the novel opens, the hero, Su Jishi 蘇吉 士, is thirteen, attending class at a neighbor’s house, and obsessed with amorous, and particularly sexual, desire. He is still only fourteen when his father dies and he has to take over the vast family properties. He follows the classic examples of philanthropy—forgiving the debts of hard-pressed tenants and distributing his grain reserves at a modest price in a time of drought—but he continues to philander, ending up at the age of seventeen Mirage-FA02_13Jan2014.indd 9 15/1/14 11:30 AM x | Mirage with four concubines in addition to his wife.1 He escapes, if only narrowly, certain of the dangers that beset the rich but naïve young man, and he learns how to conduct himself prudently in the adult world. Largely by good fortune, he is instrumental in ending a local rebellion, and gains thereby a measure of fame. In the course of the novel he has a number of mentors, notably Li Jiangshan 李匠山, his tutor at the school he attends. At seventeen, having somewhat tamed his libido, Jishi settles down to a private life with his family in Guangzhou. He is actually only one out of a number of youths who appear in the novel, several of whom succeed in different ways, but he is by far the most important. Mirage is principally a bildungsroman, the story of a youth’s growing up and making his way in the world. For reasons of prudence, perhaps, the novel is set in the Ming dynasty, but it is actually closely tied to two crises that took place just before the time of writing, in the years from 1799 to 1802. One was the two-year tenure (1799–1801) as Customs superintendent in Guangzhou of a Manchu named Jishan 佶山; the other was a series of rebellions that broke out in 1802 in the neighboring prefecture of Huizhou, rebellions that at one point threatened even the security of Guangzhou itself. The novel juxtaposes two worlds, the realistic social and political world of Guangzhou and the highly romanticized world of the Huizhou rebellion. The position of licensed trader was potentially lucrative but frequently ruinous. The trader had to contend with a Customs superintendent whose objective was to make as much money for his masters in Beijing—and himself—as he could. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there is ample evidence in the records of the East India Company of a more or less constant conflict between the superintendents and the traders.2 It was not an equal conflict; the superintendents had the traders in their power, for traders needed their permission even to resign. In this novel’s brilliant opening Su Jishi’s father suffers the ultimate indignity at the hands of the superintendent, but still manages by an ingenious ploy to withdraw from his appointment. As scholars have long recognized, Superintendent Jishan appears in the novel as the corrupt and lascivious Heh Guangda 赫廣大. But although readers of the novel were clearly meant to make that connection, the portrait of Heh Guangda has been put together from various sources, including, presumably, the author’s imagination. A similar partial connection exists between Pan Youdu 潘有度 (1755–1820), the actual head of the Mirage-FA02_13Jan2014.indd 10 15/1/14...