Selected Tang Dynasty Stories by Shen Jiji Search Amazon for other books by or about Shen Jiji. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

The Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a claim to be the most glorious of all periods of Chinese history. Under the Tang emperors, the extent of Chinese territory was extended in all directions, bringing large swathes of Central Asia under control, as well as the Korean peninsula and additional outposts in the lands of Vietnam and Yunnan to the south. The Confucianist scholar-gentry helped to administer the Empire and the glories of Buddhism and its artistic and spiritual representations greatly enriched the already vibrant world of the mind. In this society, how did people entertain themselves? What forms of popular literature existed both, as Aristotle would have it, to educate and to entertain? It is to answer these questions that editor Shen Jiji and translators Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang have brought together this bilingual anthology of short tales. With pages showing both Chinese original and its English translation (which is mostly managed unobtrusively and with elegant restraint), the stories here show a delightful range of human experience and interests. For example, in "The White Monkey," "Ren the Fox Fairy," and "The Dragon King's Daughter," ordinary human beings are brought into contact with the supernatural, with or without their knowledge or volition, and reveal the nobility or otherwise of their nature in unusual circumstances. Despite the ever-present nature of the supernatural in the Chinese popular imagination, there is still space and indeed responsibility for people to demonstrate their humanity and ability to relate to other people according to proper principles. Other stories relate to the nature of women and their place in society: "Wu-Shuang the Peerless" and "Story of a Singsong Girl," for example, reveal a degree of personal freedom for women, which is far from the common conception of the role of women in Chinese society.

Although some of these stories do have quite explicit moral content, this is comparatively rare and instead people are shown behaving with a degree of self-determination and ability which is quite modern in tone. Of course, the ability of real people to behave like characters in stories is likely to have been quite limited but, even so, the aspirations of characters shed some light on the hopes and dreams of the audience. It makes quite a contrast with contemporaneous Anglo-Saxon literature, for example, or Scandinavian sagas, with their insistence on the trapped nature of humanity under destiny, remote redemption and the damned ice and snow everywhere. Hwaer cwom mearg? Hwaer cwom mago?

This is a splendid collection of tales from a society that shows the benefits of cheerful materialism which nevertheless possessed a coherent spiritual core. It is recommended to anyone with an interest in the past and in Chinese society and literature.