Rethinking the Authorship and Dating of “Gujing ji” 古鏡記

Tang Studies 20-21 (2002-03) Rethinking the Authorship and Dating of "Gujing ji" * M f 3 DING XIANG WARNER CORNELL UNIVERSITY Everyone loves a great story, and "Gujing ji" (The Story of an Ancient Mirror) is truly one of China's great tales of the fantastic. Attributed to the early seventh-century figure Wang Du 3:8 in literary histories and anthologies, "Gujing ji" relates the miraculous powers of an ancient bronze mirror that was once bestowed upon Wang Du by "a man of extraordinary talents" and which he lent for a short time to his younger brother, Wang Ji 3£fti. The Yellow Lord of high antiquity fashioned this wondrous mirror: its configuration embodies the very essence of the cosmos, and its luminosity matches that of the sun and the moon. It wards off dangerous beasts and demons, stills the violent waves of the horrific tidal bore, slays a giant snake and a monstrous fish, exposes goblins and bogies disguised in human form, rescues maidens from the spells of evil spirits and even restores the health of dying plague-victims. But then, from its keeping-place inside a locked chest, the mirror disappears without a trace.1 As a work of narrative literature, furthermore, "Gujing ji" is admired as something of a miraculous item in its own right—an extraordinary landmark, at least, in the development of early Chinese fiction. Dated to the first two decades of the seventh century, 1 For the full text of "Gujing j i / ' see Taiping guangji ± ¥ ^ t 2 , comp. L i Fang ^$ (925-996) et al. (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 230.1761-67. A modern collated edition is in Tangren xiaoshuo USA'hafc, ed. Wang Bijiang $EBtM (rpt. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1978), 3-10. For an annotated English translation see Pauline Bentley Koffler, "The Story of the Magic Mirror (Gujing ji) by Wang Du/' in Hommage a Kwong Ring Foon: Etudes d'histoire culturelle de la Chine, ed. Jean-Pierre Dieny (Paris: Institut des Hautes Etudes Chinoises, College de France, 1995), 165-214. All translations in this essay, however, are my own. 1 Warner: The Authorship and Dating of "Gujing ji" a time when most other narrative writing that is extant took the form of anecdotal zhiguai Sffi stories (tales of anomalies), which are short in length and simple in plot, "Gujing ji" stands out for its narrative sophistication and its unprecedented length of 3,650 characters, a total matched or exceeded by only three other much later Tang chuanqi W^ stories (tales of the marvelous).2 It appears to have come out of nowhere, anticipating by many decades the full flowering of Tang prose fiction.3 Consequently, in nearly all twentieth-century anthologies of Chinese narrative literature and treatises on the subject, "Gujing j i " is heralded for marking the transition from the crude anecdotes of the Six Dynasties period to 2 See Sarah McMillan Yim, "Structure, Theme and Narrative in T'ang 'ch'uanch 'i'" (Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 1979), 188. According to the summary of data Yim appends to her dissertation, the longest Tang chuanqi tale is "Youxian k u " Iffiflijgf (a total of 8,650 characters) by Zhang Zhuo ^M (ca. 660740 ), and the second longest is "Liu Y i " #Pit (4,050 characters) by L i Chaowei 3 ^ $ c (late eighth century). "Gujing j i " and "Li Wa zhuan" 3 ^ £ ^ b y Bo Xingjian Ei3fjf§f (776-826) are exactly the same length. 3 As William H . Nienhauser, Jr., writes, for example: "Although the structure of each tale [in 'Gujing ji'] differs little from that of earlier zhiguai, the attempt to construct a more lengthy text and the use of characters who were actual historical figures (Wang D u [ca. 584-ca. 625] and his brother, the philosopher Wang Ji [590-644]) foreshadow later developments in the Tang [chuanqi] tales." See "T'ang Tales," in The Columbia History of Chinese Literature, ed. Victor H . Mair (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2001), 582. Nienhauser in this quote has apparently confused the poet Wang Ji for his brother Wang Tong 3E5l (ca. 584617 ), who operated a Confucian academy and whose sayings are reputed to be preserved in...