Recreating the Storyteller Image: Publishing Martial-arts Fiction to Renew the Public in the Late Qing

Recreating the Storyteller Image: Publishing Martial-arts Fiction to Renew the Public in the Late Qing by Paize Keulemans The Cases of Judge Peng is copied all over the capital. In broad streets and shallow alleys, it is narrated everywhere as a fanciful tale to the-acclaim of all. There are countless storytellers performing this tale at temple fairs, where the audience is so thick that they form a solid wall and listeners are so enthralled that they forget their sleep. When I was off from studies; I would sometimes listen to a few phrases and find them full of flavor. However, because I was busy, I would not have .time to listen and consequently never got to know the wholestory. In the year renchen (1891), I was staying in the capital, when my friend Liu Hengtang brought these pages and showed them to me. I read· through a few chapters and only then got to know the begin.. ning and end. Only then did I learn that Judge Peng was an illustrious official of Our Dynasty. I think that once this book comes out, people in urban alleys and country markets will pass it on by chanting it. Scholars, peasants, arti.. sans and merchants .will all rejoice in hearing it. .Truly it will be enough to help cultivate the morals of the world, to enlighten the human heart and im.. prove the people's customs ... 1 The Cases of Judge Peng (Peng gong'an) is a typical late-nineteenth .. century martial-arts novel. Published for the first time in 1892 by the Benli tang, a Beijing publisher located on West Gate Street in the Liulichang area, it was written. by· an author who wisely chose to remain hidden behind his pen name "TbeTaoist Yearning for Dreams" (Tanmeng daoren).Cheaply produced, shoddily written,· and based on tales that had been made popular by storytellers plying their trade in the capital, The Cases of Judge Peng is indeed exemplary of the popular martial-arts novels that began to flood the market in ever greater num .. bers during the final decade of the nineteenth century. While the novel was first published in Beijing and the "shallow alleys and broad streets of the capital" feature prominently in the preface (and the novel itself), Beijing was of course not the only place where this tale found an eager reading audience. The author of thepreface, Sun Shoupeng, already predicted that, once published, "people in urban alleys and country markets" would pass the tale on, and indeed readers in other cities did rush to buy this tale of an incorruptible judge and his valiant Twentieth-Century China, Vol.29,No.2 (April,2004):7..... 37 8 Twentieth-Century China martial helpers. By the end of the decade The Cases of Judge Peng had be republished at least seven times, by six different publishers, both in woodblo and lithograph print, in four different cities (Beijing, Tianjin, Chongqing, a Shanghai). By 1896 the first sequel, The Continued Cases of Judge Peng C Peng gong'an), had been published and by 1899 the Shanghai Press (Shang} Shuju) had published two additional sequels. In the final years of the Qing a the first years of the Republic, over thirty additional sequels were to follow.: As various scholars have noted, together with Mandarin Ducks and Bl terfly fiction, the martial-arts novel has been the most popular mass-produc genre of fiction of the twentieth century. As such, these popular tales of hen knights, valiant martial-artists, and swash-buckling rogues have proven to more than mere stories that allow readers to wile away boredom or spend ala afternoon reading; rather these novels have consistently provided a fertile grou for the imagining of local, national, and transnational communities.3 Yet as 1 example above demonstrates, the broad appeal of the martial-arts novel p dates the twentieth century and, even more interesting, the claim of these pOI lar tales to inspire and mobilize a broad audience and imbue their readers wit renewed sense of community can be found as early as the prefaces of la nineteenth-century novels such as The Cases of Judge Peng. In this artie It want to...