Meng Jiangnü Brings Down the Great Wall: Ten Versions of a Chinese Legend tran. by Wilt L. Idema (review)

Book Reviews 145 rendering the dialogues of the Master and his students into clear, accurate, and elegant English is truly a work of profound scholarship. That Hendrischke has succeeded in this is a sign of her immense learning, reflecting many years’ immersion in the world of the Taiping jing. The translations are accompanied by a fine and lengthy introduction—probably the best single overview of the text we have to date—as well as the appendix on the composition of the Taiping jing mentioned above. This impressive book will become the standard work on the Taiping jing. It should take its place on the shelves of all serious students of the history of Chinese religions. BENJAMIN PENNY, ANU China Institute, The Australian National University Meng Jiangnü Brings Down the Great Wall: Ten Versions of a Chinese Legend Translation and Introduction by WILT L. IDEMA, with an essay by HAIYAN LEE. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. x, 295 pages. ISBN 9780 -295-98784-2. US$25.00, £13.99, paper. One may have the superficial impression of being well acquainted with a story such as Meng Jiangnü’s 孟姜女 odyssey towards the Great Wall in search of her lost husband. Professor Idema’s small anthology comes as a good reminder that it may not be so. In the first of the two prefatory essays that open the book, Idema retraces synthetically the development of the legend: A “Wife of Qiliang 杞梁” appears as early as the Zuozhuan 左傳, where she refuses, out of propriety, to accept in the middle of the street the condolences that the Duke of Qi 齊 intends to present her for her husband who just died in battle. Though some pre-Han sources mention that she is well known as “good at wailing,” it is only in the Han Dynasty, in Liu Xiang’s 劉向 “Biographies of exemplary women,” that one of the key elements of the legend appears: Qiliang’s wife weeps for her husband so bitterly and relentlessly that the city wall eventually crumbles. It is only in the Tang dynasty, however, that the synopsis of most of the later elaborations takes its definitive shape: Qiliang is now a conscript laborer on the cyclopean First Emperor’s Great Wall. Escaping his ordeal, he spots young Meng Jiangnü bathing; she demands that he marry her, and he complies, just before being taken back to the Wall—to his death. His spouse undertakes a long journey to bring him winter clothes (hanyi 寒衣), and, upon hearing the news of her husband’s demise, her grief causes the wall to crumble under her flowing tears, enabling her to recover the body buried underneath. It is in Tang times, too, in a fragment of a prosimetrical text recovered at 146 Journal of Chinese Religions Dunhuang—fully translated by Idema—that the heroine receives her name, Meng Jiangnü. Then Idema briefly draws an outline of the numerous novels, plays, and ballads which retold the story from the sixteenth century to the present–in doing so, he uses the well known 1920s research by Gu Jiegang 顧頡剛, the work of folklorists of the May Fourth Movement, as well as recent studies by Wang Qiugui 王秋貴 and younger scholars from Taiwan or the Mainland (references given in the useful short bibliography at the end of the book). The second essay, by Lee Haiyan, takes issue with Gu and the research from the May Fourth period. She describes a paradox: Gu and his followers “invented” modern Meng Jiangnü studies and first gathered a very precious corpus of material, but at the same time they tried to impose a rather restrictive interpretation on the legend, dictated by a political and cultural agenda of their own; Meng Jiangnü’s voice could only be heard as that of a rebellious oppressed woman, and her story had to be a celebration of the struggle of feeling (qing 情) against ritual propriety (li 禮) and feudal order. Lee actually refutes most of the assumptions of Gu and his followers, enumerating the numerous elements pointing to the very importance of ritual—especially regarding the importance of weeping in the story—in many of the versions. Actually, Gu’s enthusiastic celebration of Meng Jiangnü’s character was constructed by...