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Caizi jiaren (Chinese: 才子佳人; pinyin: cáizǐ jiārén; Wade–Giles: Ts'ai-tzu chia-jen; lit. 'scholar–beauty'^[1]^[2] and "scholar and beauty")^[a] is a genre of Chinese fiction typically involving a romance between a young scholar and a beautiful girl. They were highly popular during the late Ming dynasty and early Qing dynasty.^[3]

History

Three Tang dynasty works "particularly influential in the development of the caizi-jiaren model" were Yingying's Biography, The Tale of Li Wa, and Huo Xiaoyu zhuan (霍小玉傳, "The story of Huo Xiaoyu"). Song Geng writes that Iu-Kiao-Li (Yu Jiao Li) was "one of the best-known caizi-jiaren novels".^[4] Chloë F. Starr adds that among the best known were Iu-Kiao-Li, Ping Shan Leng Yan, and Haoqiu zhuan.^[3]^[5]

Elements of this theme are also common in Chinese opera, such as Romance of the Western Chamber, which uses the term caizi jiaren in its text, and The Peony Pavilion. In both of these operas, lovers elope, have secret trysts, or were perfect matches in spite of parental disapproval. But the genre finally achieved an independent cultural and historical identity in the early Qing, when writers began to use the term caizi jiaren for a group of vernacular novels with twenty or so chapters which had formulaic or standard characters and plots. The mid-18th century novel Dream of the Red Chamber criticized them, and literati dismissed them as inferior and obscene. By the 18th century, the genre had developed variety as the scholar and the beauty shared the action with fantasy and various other elements (such as judges and courtrooms, monks and nuns, brothels, and illicit assignations, etc.).^[6]

Plot characteristics

Hu Wanchuan (T: 胡萬川, S: 胡万川, P: Hú Wànchuān) writes that the typical caizi jiaren plot is a love story between a beautiful girl and a handsome scholar, both of whose families are socially distinguished and both of whom have an aptitude for poetry and prose. Usually, each of the protagonists is an only child and oftentimes, at least one parent is dead.^[4] Song Geng comments that by having one or more of the parents dead, the number of characters is reduced, and "this plotline may also serve to emphasize the extraordinary value and peerless perfection of the scholar and beauty".^[4]

The story, Hu Wanchuan continues, characteristically opens with an unexpected meeting between the two and love at first sight. The woman often has a resourceful and discerning female servant who serves as a matchmaker and mediates between the lovers. The plot then deals with obstacles to the marriage. These obstacles often consist of the scholar not having an official rank and the father or mother of the girl opposing the marriage. Often, the story ends when the young scholar passes the imperial examinations and the couple is united.^[4] Most caizi jiaren stories have happy endings.^[7]

Keith McMahon comments that the lovers in caizi jiaren stories of the early Qing "are like stereotyped opposites of the characters in earlier works". The love of the scholar and the beauty "sharply contrasts" with depictions in late Ming fiction, where love is erotic rather than spiritual. In the caizi jiaren novel, "sentiment replaces libido" and "refined, internal feelings replace vulgar, external sensations".^[8]

One characteristic of the early Qing works is the mutual respect between the sexes. The men do not condescend to the women, and in many cases, the talented and independent young woman is the equal of her male lover. Since she is often an only child who has been cherished and educated by her father as if she were a boy, she skillfully helps her father and lover out of difficulty. She sometimes even dresses as a male. One beauty states her motto as "though in body I am a woman, in ambition I surpass men" and one father says of such a daughter that she is worth ten sons. Their roles and personalities are so similar that in many instances, the woman dresses as a man. Yet the relation is not entirely equal. To dress as a male, for instance, represents upward mobility, but there are only few instances of men dressing as women, except to seduce women or to seek homosexual encounters. Nor is there necessarily equality in the number of partners, since in a number of later novels, the man takes more than one wife or has a series of lovers. In the end, what the beauty wants is to choose a man who is worthy of her.^[9]

Characters

In addition to physical beauty, the two main characters both (especially the girl) also possess many other positive characteristics, such as literary talent, noble birth, virtue, and chastity.^[4] The preface of Iu-kiao-li: or, the Two Fair Cousins (Yu Jiao Li) states that "The young man is as beautiful as the girl while the girl is as brilliant as the young man" (郎兼女色，女擅郎才).^[4]

Pseudo-caizi, who pretend to be caizi, are foils to the real caizi in caizi jiaren stories.^[10]

Influence and reception

Caizi jiaren novels played a pivotal role in literary history,^[11]^[12]^[13] with works such as Haoqiu zhuan and Iu-Kiao-Li being some of the earliest translated novels in the English language,^[11]^[14] and some even became bestsellers in Europe.^[15] These novels especially made an impact in Europe around the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.^[16]^[17]^[18]

Although these caizi jiaren novels would carry on the whimsical elements of chuanqi fiction and reach an even wider audience than ever before, they were not always appreciated and well-respected in China; literati and Confucian intellectuals dismissed them as being vulgar (hence, they were often published under a pseudonym) and as "light-hearted romantic comedies", and in the early 20th-century, modern progressive writers also criticized these novels as being frivolous and escapist.^[19] Starr wrote that the novels of the genre "encountered a critical silence similar to that occluding red-light novels, though for apparently more 'objective' aesthetic reasons, after the genre was dismissed for its lack of imagination".^[3]

The critical reception of these novels, however, saw a new light in the latter half of the 20th-century and into the 21st-century, when new scholarship on the subject began to appear in China and in the West.^[20]^[21] Scholars noted the playfulness of the writings, as well as the dynamic portrayal of the sexes and of the gender roles, and the dominance of the female protagonists in these novels.^[22]

Further, Song wrote that "although the masterpiece Honglou meng [Dream of the Red Chamber] cannot be regarded as a caizi-jiaren novel as such, there is little controversy about the influence of the caizi-jiaren characterization and theme on it".^[23] Robert E. Hegel, in his review of The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century, wrote that Jean Duval's description of The Nine-tailed Turtle "makes the novel seem indebted to Haoqiu zhuan 好逑傳 and perhaps other works of the earlier caizi jiaren romantic tradition".^[24] Hegel elsewhere stated that The Carnal Prayer Mat (Rou putuan) was intended to satirize the imperial examination system and parody the patterns in caizi jiaren novels.^[23]

These caizi jiaren romantic novels were also widely adapted in Eastern Asia.^[25]^[26]^[27] The novel Jin Yun Qiao, for example, would go on to be adapted into Vietnamese by Nguyễn Du as The Tale of Kieu (1820) and would be adapted into Japanese by Takizawa Bakin as Fūzoku kingyoden (風俗金魚伝, 1839).^[27] Takizawa Bakin also adapted Haoqiu zhuan as Kaikan kyōki kyōkakuden (1832).

References

Hegel, Robert E. "The Chinese Novel at the Turn of the Century" (book review). Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), ISSN 0161-9705, 07/1983, Volume 5, Issue 1/2, pp. 188–191
Huang, Martin W. Desire and Fictional Narrative in Late Imperial China (Volume 202 of Harvard East Asian monographs, ISSN 0073-0483). Harvard University Asia Center, 2001. ISBN 0674005139, 9780674005136.
McMahon, Keith (1988). Causality and Containment in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Fiction. Leiden; New York: E. J. Brill. ISBN 9004085459.
—— (1994), "The Classic 'Beauty-Scholar' Romance and the Superiority of the Talented Woman", in Zito, Angela; Tani E. Barlow (eds.), Body, Subject & Power in China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 228–, ISBN 0226987264
Song, Geng. The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture. Hong Kong University Press, January 1, 2004. ISBN 9622096204, 9789622096202.
Starr, Chloë F. Red-Light Novels of the Late Qing (Volume 14 of China Studies). Brill, 2007. ISBN 9004156291, 9789004156296.

Notes

^ Some of the other English translations for caizi jiaren include "Talent and Beauty" and "Genius and Beauty".

^ Zito, Angela; Barlow, Tani E. (1994). Body, Subject, and Power in China. University of Chicago Press. p. 232.
^ Santangelo, Paolo (2006). From Skin to Heart: Perceptions of Emotions and Bodily Sensations in Traditional Chinese Culture. Otto Harrassowitz Verlag. p. 205.
^ ^a ^b ^c Starr, p. 40.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Song, p. 20.
^ Song, Geng, p. 23–24
^ McMahon (1994), pp. 231–233.
^ Huang, Martin W., p. 215.
^ McMahon (1988), p. 131–132.
^ McMahon (1994), p. 233–235.
^ Song, Geng, p. 203
^ ^a ^b "1. The Haoqiu zhuan, the First Chinese Novel Translated in Europe: With Special Reference to Percy's and Davis's Renditions". Apart from the intrinsic importance of this translation as a document in literary history, it is significant as the first extensive translation of any kind by a native of England.
^ "A Case of the Chinese (Dis)order? The Haoqiu zhuan and Competing Forms of Knowledge in European and Japanese Readings". For mid-eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European readers, the Haoqiu zhuan epitomized China's "whole system of manners," showing at one and the same time the orderly civility and the disorderly excess of the Chinese.
^ Purdy, Daniel. "Goethe Reading Chinese Novels: The Origins of World Literature" (PDF). Institute for Asian and African Studies at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Chinese novels were central to Goethe's developing the idea of world literature. By the last decade of Goethe's career, three such romances had been translated into European languages. All evidence indicates that he had read them intensely in search of material and inspiration for his own poetic creativity.
^ Sieber, Patricia. "The Imprint of the Imprints: Sojourners, Xiaoshuo Translations, and the Transcultural Canon of Early Chinese Fiction in Europe, 1697-1826-". East Asian Publishing and Society.
^ Beebee, Thomas O. "Introduction: Departures, Emanations, Intersections". Bloomsbury Collections. the famous novel that Goethe refers to in his seminal conversation in 1827 with Eckermann on the topic of WL is not one of the great classics, such as the Hong lou meng (Dream of Red Chamber), which had not yet been translated. No, a second- or even third-rate specimen, Abel Rémusat's French translation of the Iu-Kiao-Li as Les Deux Cousines, became a European bestseller upon its publication in 1826. That Chinese novel (in French) became the immediate provocation for the discourse on WL. But decades earlier, another Chinese novel, the Hao Qiu Zhuan, translated from English into German in 1766 by Christoph Gottlieb von Murr under the title Haoh Kjöh Tschwen, d.i. die angenehme Geschichte des Haoh Kjöh, had also come to Goethe's attention.
^ Gill, Vineet (16 June 2022). "BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION: THOUGHTS ON WORLD LITERATURE AND NIRMAL VERMA". 'National literature is now a rather unmeaning term,' Goethe said in 1827. 'The epoch of world literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach.' He had recently read a Chinese novel in translation—most likely the anonymously published Haoqiu zhuan—and it was this experience of engaging with, and identifying with, the foreign ('the Chinese think, act, and feel almost exactly like us . . .') that made Goethe think about literature in global terms.
^ During, Simon. "An eighteenth-century origin of "world literature"" (PDF). Famously, the concept "world literature" (or, more properly, "Weltliteratur") began its career when, in 1827, Wolfgang von Goethe announced "the epoch of world literature." What sparked Goethe's somewhat grandiloquent comment? And what did he mean by it? He had been reading a recent translation of a Chinese novel ...
^ Puchner, Martin. "World Literature - American Academy". The American Academy in Berlin. One of the few Chinese novels Goethe was able to get his hands on, for example, was Hau Kiou Choaan, or The Pleasing History, translated by Bishop Thomas Percy, a representative of the East India Company, the vehicle through which Britain exploited its colonies in the east.
^ Li, M. (2014). In the Name of A Love Story: Scholar-Beauty Novels and the Writing of Genre Fiction in Qing China (1644-1911).
^ Zhou, Jianyu. The Caizi-Jiaren novel: A historical study of a genre of Chinese narrative from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth century.
^ McMahon (1994), p. 231.
^ Hessney, Richard C. Beautiful, Talented, and Brave: Seventeenth Century Chinese Scholar-beauty Romances. Columbia University, 1979.
^ ^a ^b Song, p. 34.
^ Hegel, p. 91.
^ Suyoung Son. "Transmitting Haoqiu zhuan in Eighteenth-Century Chosŏn Korea".
^ "The Woodblock-printed Books of the Genius and Beauty Romances in China and its Influences on East Asia (Korea・Vietnam・Japan)". kaken.nii.ac.jp.
^ ^a ^b "中国才子佳人小説の影響 [The Influence of the Chinese Genius [Scholar] and Beauty Novels]" (PDF). core.ac.uk (in Japanese). This paper will describe the influence of the Genius and Beauty Romances on Bakin. Bakin chose to adopt the Genius and Beauty Romance in order to explore new ideas for his own writing. However, while composing his writings he was constantly making painstaking efforts to insure that his final writings would be as marketable as possible. After reading many Genius and Beauty Romances, he absorbed many elements of the original writing style. In spite of this, he was often unable to produce his own original works using this style of writing as a base. Bakin had written a widely acclaimed adaptation of "Fuzoku Kingyou Den." We can conclude that this novel's success was to some extent a direct result of the literary excellence of the original Chinese version.