The Emperor of China in a House of Ill Repute: Songs of the Imperial Visit to Datong

by Pu Songling

The Hsu-Tang Library presents authoritative and eminently readable translations of classical Chinese literature, in bilingual editions, ranging across three millennia and the entire Sinitic world.

The Emperor of China in a House of Ill Repute by one of China's most famous authors builds on earlier dramatic works that had been inspired by the antics and travels of the Zhengde emperor (posthumous title Wuzong; r. 1506-1521) of the Ming dynasty. The Zhengde emperor was, despite his reign title ("Right Virtue"), a dismal failure as emperor. His life was given over to the pursuit of pleasure. When in Beijing he often left the palace in disguise and roamed the city incognito. He also made several long and elaborate trips to other parts of the empire, for instance one to Nanjing and Yangzhou, and one to the cities of Datong and Taiyuan in Shanxi. While these historical trips might have had a certain military purpose, the popular imagination saw them as informed by a search for beautiful women. In alternating prose and song, The Emperor of China in a House of Ill Repute tells the tale of the emperor setting out for Datong in the disguise of a common soldier after his evil genius Jiang
Bin has told him about the beauty of the three thousand courtesans in the red-light district of this garrison town.

This volume presents a fully annotated translation of all twenty-eight chapters of the work, preceded by an Introduction that provides context to the life and works of Pu Songling, the genre of "rustic songs" to which the work belongs, and the specific characteristics of the translated text.

Genres: Classics

424 pages, Hardcover

Published October 26, 2023

About the author

Pu Songling (simplified Chinese: 蒲松龄; traditional Chinese: 蒲松齡; pinyin: Pú Sōnglíng; Wade–Giles: P'u Sung-ling, June 5, 1640—February 25, 1715) was a Qing Dynasty Chinese writer, best known as the author of Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio.

Pu was born into a poor landlord-merchant family from Zichuan (淄川, now Zibo, Shandong). At the age of nineteen, he received the gongsheng degree in the civil service examination, but it was not until he was seventy-one that he received the xiucai degree.

He spent most of his life working as a private tutor, and collecting the stories that were later published in Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. Some critics attribute the Vernacular Chinese novel Xingshi Yinyuan Zhuan to him.

Reviews

[Mel · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me just over a month to read this but it was SO worth it! Lovely dual langage version of a Pu Songling book that I'd not read before. A gorgeous copy, but I discovered that by underlining passages I liked, understood, or wanted to learn, I actually retained what I was reading MUCH better. I then went and copied out all the sentances I underlined. Which was great practice.
The layout was a tad bit confusing as the poetry and prose indentation was swapped in the different languages.
But it was a great way to read it.
The story itself was much less scandelous than I was expecting. He only had sex with one girl who became his concubine, and spent more time drinking and gambling. And the people who tried to rip him off because they thought he was poor met horrid ends. So not without any social commentary.
Lovely series and great practice.

[Leke Salihu · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found the reading experience frustrating, mainly due to the translation.

The biggest problem being how Chinese names, nicknames, and places are handled. Instead of a consistent approach, the translation oscillates between leaving some names in pinyin and partially conveying others into English. The result feels awkward, unnatural, and at times even jarring. This breaks the flow and makes the story far less immersive that it could have been.

I don’t doubt the translator’s effort, but the outcome is neither fluid nor enjoyable. The story itself may well have merit, but in this form, it doesn’t shine. As it stands, I can’t recommend it.

[Ring Chime · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not nearly as good as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. A very 'id-like' work, but without the strangeness or weirdness of sensations and imagery that makes such kinds of fiction fascinating, nor as sensually or visually written to really tickle the brain as other 'id-like' pieces. There's lots of tried and true tropes in Chinese fiction which Pu Songling used, and I think that the kind that he used in this work were the more boring sets of tropes. It's a piece without tension of any kind as you read it. A lack of tension is fine in a short story, but dangerous in a more extended one. There's some clever wordplay here and there, but I don't think its enough to elevate the piece above other examples of the genre in Chinese fiction. It's sort of like Feng Menglong's short stories, but a bit more stretched out over multiple chapters, where it would already be over much quicker in one of Feng Menglong's, and there are some of those short stories in Feng Menglong's collections which are a bit more interesting. There's also the ease of 'disposing' in short stories that can actually make someone look at the whole package more favorably over a single more extended piece with multiple episodes. There are multiple fox spirit and ghost stories in Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, maybe some are hits for someone and some are misses, but you don't remember the misses necessarily or the bad variants in a short (really short) story collection, and the good pieces sit with you while the other pieces that, because he's a good writer, are at worst: meh, rather than awful. It's in truth, the very, shortness of much of the stories in Strange Tales and how many there are with similar subject matter that allows this. The differences are more punctuated in a writer's pieces which are different the shorter they are, while in more extended short stories (in comparison), such as Calvino's Cosmicomics, the short stories are just long enough that you're forced to see Calvino doing the same thing repeatedly in a more stretched way that for me, made me look at his work less charitably. I suppose somewhat paradoxically, the longer the piece stretches for, the more sameness one gets from the same author.