The “Tale of Wu Song” in Chinese Popular Prints

CHINOPERL Papers No. 27 (2007)©2007 by the Association for Chinese Oral and Performing Literature, Inc. THE “TALE OF WU SONG” IN CHINESE POPULAR PRINTS Boris Riftin One of the most important kinds of Chinese folk arts are woodblock prints, called “popular prints” (minjian banhua 民間版畫) and commonly referred to as nianhua 年畫, or “New Year’s pictures.” They are used to decorate dwellings for the New Year holiday. There exist many kinds of popular prints, which may be divided into two groups: those that are narrative in nature, depicting scenes from legends, novels, dramas, etc., and non-narrative prints that represent deities, good omens, and wishes. Narrative popular prints were first produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including both ordinary narrative prints illustrating a scene from a novel, for example, and theatrical popular prints (xichu nianhua 戲齣年畫) showing the same scene as it was staged. The present essay describes how episodes from the great vernacular novels were illustrated by the nonprofessional folk artists in popular prints and attempts a preliminary analysis of their contents. Popular prints were found in earlier times in almost every Chinese commoner household; it is in this sense I refer to them in English as popular prints (John Lust: 1996). Interrelations between the Chinese popular print and the novel were more complex than those between the novel and storytelling, since artists frequently based their work on orally transmitted tales or legends (chuanshuo 傳説), on various dramas on the same subject, and on the folk storytelling tradition, as well as on descriptions found in the written novel. I began to research the interactions between the written and folk tradition in the 1960s. However, the focus of my publications has been restricted to the mutual relations of the written novel and storytelling in Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo zhi tongsu yanyi 三國志通俗演義; hereafter Three Kingdoms) (Riftin: 1970; 1997). I am glad to have the opportunity to return to the broader question of how the Chinese novel relates to the folk tradition, including storytelling, local drama, and masterpieces of folk arts such as popular prints. Here I want to discuss a few popular prints depicting Wu Song, one of the most prominent heroes of The Water Margin (Shuihu CHINOPERL Papers No. 27 108 zhuan 水滸傳) theme. I have found the earliest image of Wu Song in the popular prints in the Kupferstich-Kabinett Gallery in Dresden. This image is a Suzhou popular print “Wu Song qin Fang La” 武松擒方腊 [Wu Song seizes Fang La] that was included in the gallery’s 1738 inventory book. I have chosen for the present paper two popular prints entitled “Wu shi hui” 武十回 [Ten chapters on Wu Song]. Their title corresponds to that of the storytelling cycle. These popular prints were created in the late Qing (late nineteenth century to 1911). The prints, produced in Suzhou, provide a rare opportunity to study visual culture and the reception of oral performance. However, since we have no records of Suzhou storytelling from the late Qing, I base my comparison on the eminent Yangzhou storyteller Wang Shaotang’s 王少堂 “Water Margin” cycle. I draw as well on other quantitative studies of the legends and text concerning the heroes of the “Water Margin.” These findings must be considered hypothetical, but they do offer evidence of how visual materials disseminated ideas found also in popular fiction. Scenes from “Three Kingdoms” were a favorite among Chinese artists specializing in the production of popular prints. There are more than five hundred popular prints showing scenes from “Three Kingdoms” in private collections and museums, including four thousand popular prints in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, one thousand pieces in the British Museum (according to the statement of its curator), and one thousand in the Tianjin Museum of Art (Riftin: 1999). In contrast, we know of only eighty popular prints showing episodes from the novel and/or storytelling cycle “Water Margin,” despite the fact that it apparently enjoyed popularity similar to that of “Three Kingdoms.” The discrepancy in numbers of popular prints signals that the heroes of “Water Margin” had only local distribution, whereas the “Three Kingdoms” heroes were more widely received. It may be the consequence of the different nature of these two narratives: Romance of...