New Edition of the Tale of the Noble Knights-Errant: An Unusual Wu Song Story

We want to dedicate this essay and the appended translation to David Rolston and express our great admiration for his towering presence in the research of Chinese oral and performing literature. His editorship of CHINOPERL for so many years has been instrumental in building up the journal to a level of high prestige both in the West and the East.

The celebrated episode of Wu Song's killing of a tiger is found in its earliest written form in the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Water Margin, Shuihu zhuan. Wu Song is a prominent member of a bandit group of 108 heroes with some foundation in historical sources from the early twelfth century. In Jin Ping Mei or Plum in a Golden Vase, the famous early-seventeenth-century erotic novel that elaborates on the Wu Song life story, this tiger-killing episode is recirculated as the main episode of its opening chapter.

This epic-like saga has been in living oral tradition in China for more than 700 years up to the present, where it has taken many forms including drama, balladry, song, and storytelling. The novel is the earliest written form but antecedents in semi-historical and pictorial tradition are witness of earlier transmission of the tale of the tiger-killer. In later performance genres, such as the present lithographic version in translation and a roughly contemporary example of Fuzhou pinghua (Fuzhou storytelling), the story has a hint of the erotic aspects that are typical for the Jin Ping Mei tradition.

MBW & VB