San-hsia wu-yi and its Link to Oral Literature

9 San-hsia wu-yi and its Link to Oral Literature Susan Blader Dartmouth College The popularity of the Magistrate Pao theme in Chinese literature is something with which you are all familiar. Y. W. Ma has already done a comprehensive study of the development of the Pao legend, demonstrating how the historical personage, who lived from 999-1072 A.D. was legendarized and then re-humanized to a great extent. l As the Magistrate Pao of the late Ch' ing novel San-hsia wu-yi ..::..-17-,- 1.~[Three Heroes and Five Gallants, hereafter to be referred to as Three HeroesJ, published in 1879, he retains only a few of his supernatural powers. In my own study of Three Heroes, I found at the Fu Ssunien Rare Book Library of Academia Sinica, Taiwan, two manuscript copies of the storycycle from which Three Heroes derived, although perhaps not lineally. Both manuscripts are entitled Lung-t 'u kung-an 1~l'JjI 1t\;t.[The Criminal Cases of the Lord of the Imperial Sketch (Magistrate Pao), hereafter to be referred to as casesJ 2 and both are incomplete, one in twenty~six volumes and one in fifty. At the time that the research for this paper was being carried out, I was aware of only the fifty volume Cases. The following discussion, therefore,. refers only to this version. Cases was created and told by Shih Yu-k'un ~.1 ~ (fl. 1870's), the founder of an individualistic school of storytelling that fell under the category of Tzu-ti-shu ~ ~ . .:$ , ballads sung by Manchu singers. 3 9 San-hsia wu-yi and its Link to Oral Literature Susan Blader Dartmouth College The popularity of the Magistrate Pao theme in Chinese literature is something with which you are all familiar. Y. w. Ma has already done a comprehensive study of the development of the Pao legend, demonstrating how the historical personage, who lived from 999-1072 A.D. was legendarized and then re-humanized to a great extent. 1 As the Magistrate Pao of the late Ch'ing novel San~hsia wu-yi _::., -1~ J2... l [Three Heroes and Five Gallants, hereafter to be referred to as Three Heroes], published in 1879, he retains only a few of his supernatural powers. In my own study of Three Heroes, I found at the Fu Ssunien Rare Book Library of Academia Sinica, Taiwan, two manuscript copies of the storycycle from which Three Heroes derived, although perhaps not lineally. Both manuscripts are entitled Lunq-t •u kunq-an ~~ lJi}~~~[The Criminal Cases of the Lord of the Imperial Sketch (Magistrate Pao), hereafter to be referred to as CasesJ 2 and both are incomplete, one in twenty-six volumes and one in fifty. At the time that the research for this paper was being carried out, I was aware of only the fifty volume Cases. The following discussion, therefore,_ refers only to this version. J - ~ Cases was created and told by Shih Yu-k •un /\7 _:t t.l::J (fl. 1870 1 s), the founder of an individualistic school of storytelling that fell under the category of Tzu-ti-shu ~ ~ ·.1, ballads sung by Manchu singers. 3 10 Shih Yu-k'un, about whom we know very little, was born in Tientsin, although he spent most of his life in Peking as a storyteller. We know that his most popular story- , cycle from 1871-1875 was "Pao kung-art" ~ i.':::. ~ [Criminal Cases of Magistrate Pao], otherwise known as I~ung-t'u kung--an.II Li Chia-jui,' in his article on the evolution of the novel Three Heroes, gives us a description of Shih's talents and the atmosphere surrounding his storytelling: Shih Yu-k'un, styled Chen-chih, was from Tientsin. However, everyone thought that he was was from Peking because he had been there so long singing his tales. During the hsien-feng reign (1851-1862), he became very famous for singing to the three-stringed banjo. He used to do liTheCriminal Cases of Magistrate Paoli in a bazaar, "which has now been closed for many years, to an audience of more than one thousand each time. The bazaar gave him...