Getting Classical Chinese Literature Before The English-Speaking Public At Last

Maddalena Poli explores the new series from Oxford University Press, Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature.

SOCIAL DISGUISE IS A famously powerful trope. Once you start paying attention, you see it everywhere, in classic literature and modern culture alike. In the Odyssey, Odysseus disguises himself as a beggar to return home unnoticed and take revenge on his wife Penelope’s drunk suitors; in Shakespeare’s Henry V, it is only by disguising himself that King Henry gets to hear what’s on his soldiers’ minds. Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (1881) comes to mind as well: in the story, Tom Canty, the child of a very poor family, bears a striking resemblance to the future Prince of Wales, which allows them to temporarily swap places and set in motion a series of entertaining misunderstandings. There is a biblical example too: in John 7, Jesus disguises himself to hear what people think of him in Jerusalem. In modern culture, superheroes like Batman are another perfect example of the theme: it is precisely because their identities exist outside of assigned social conventions that they achieve what their alter egos cannot. Not to mention John le Carré’s spy stories, where the individual spy gives up their identity to serve their country. And what is Cinderella if not the story of a woman who had to disguise herself in order to be noticed finally for the princess she was?

Stories like these question the limitations of social boundaries and how social identities constrain our reality. Every society has experimented with this idea. A famous case in Chinese literature comes from 17th-century writer Pu Songling (蒲松齡), who penned a fictionalized account of the behavior of a real monarch, Zhengde (正德, or “Rectified Virtue,” who reigned from 1505 to 1521). Causing a headache for officials and guards who had to protect him, Zhengde liked to travel in disguise throughout his realm to gain insights into the real world, a world far removed from the flaunted conventions of imperial life. Pu uses this habit as the plot device in his work The Emperor of China in a House of Ill Repute: Songs of the Imperial Visit to Datong, where the emperor doubles as a common soldier and enjoys visiting some revenge on his enemies. Among various plot turns, Zhengde encounters a prostitute, whose luck changes at the end of the story when Zhengde returns to his role of emperor and takes her with him as his concubine.

Many readers unfamiliar with the Chinese literary landscape will not have heard of this book even though Pu Songling is one of the most celebrated writers in China and was cited by Chinese writers throughout the 20th century. That so few outside of China have a chance of encountering Pu’s work speaks to the structural imbalances that shape global literary circulation. One major reason is the lack of translations—a predicament that continues to prevent Chinese literature from participating more fully in world literary histories.

The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature has been created with the intention to overcome this barrier. The series’ benefactors, Hsin-Mei Agnes Hsu-Tang and her husband Oscar Tang, are well-known patrons of art, who have also long supported the field of Sinology in the United States with donations and endowments for research hubs such as the Tang Center for Early China at Columbia University. The Hsu-Tang Library was established with the aim of promoting translations of literary works written in Chinese from the Zhou dynasty (circa 1046–256 BCE) to the end of the last empire, the Qing, in 1911. Its editors aspire to publish translations that are scholarly and yet do not detract from the pleasure of reading for the sake of reading. From an academic point of view, resources to support translation projects are particularly welcome. Translations are often not considered research outputs, which disincentivizes scholars from working on them. When it comes to Chinese studies, this creates a vicious cycle: without accessible translations, educators are bound to rely on what has been translated already, and their syllabi risk being repetitive. Students, in turn, only learn about a handful of works (typically, Confucius’s Analects and the Daoist writings of Lao Tzu, which are not exactly compelling reads without supplementary explanations). Outside of academia, access to Chinese premodern literature is limited to a dozen or so titles, unlike bookstores in China and Taiwan, whose shelves are filled with translations of works by authors from the United States, Europe, Japan, and many other places. If only for its goal of making more Chinese literature available in English, the Hsu-Tang Library deserves praise.

The series includes volumes of poetry, philosophy, and tales. For example, An Anthology of Poetry by Buddhist Nuns of Late Imperial China (2023) is the first complete translation of a collection of poems and writings by Buddhist female masters from the 17th century. These poems bring modern readers closer to their lives and religious experiences. One of my favorite poems is a reflection by Xingkong, a woman from a wealthy family who was not too thrilled with becoming a nun: “I’ve left the world and entered the convent. / My body is pure, but my heart is not. / During the night the gusts of wind and rain / Sound like someone knocking at the door!” In the collection, she is presented as a negative example, someone who fights the monastic lifestyle. To me, the poem speaks of a relatable tension between conforming to social structure and following one’s desires.

Another volume gathers philosophical notes and reflections written in the ninth century by a certain Master Incapable, after whom the collection is named. Master Incapable is ambiguously described as someone who cannot do and yet is eminently wise and learned. By implication, this text questions what it means to be capable, here understood as the ability to function in society. This is a paradox associated with Daoist thinking: true freedom and learning come from not acting (the well-known concept of “wuwei”). It is only by letting go of worldly matters and social engagements that one achieves a deeper, and therefore truer, understanding of the human condition. The preface, in fact, tells us that the master’s writings have been secretly obtained and published by a friend. This is in line with his persona: Master Incapable is uninterested in teaching others. The invitation here is to take all that follows not as a book of answers about the human condition but rather as the starting point of your own meditations. In the first piece, for example, Master Incapable reflects on the limitations of the human perspective: we define ourselves as “different” from other animals, but the standards by which we differ are set by ourselves. “It is only because humans do not understand these sounds that they claim that animals cannot speak,” says Master Incapable. This reminds me of philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s claim that because humans define intelligence, only humans can be then defined as intelligent. The author of Master Incapable, whoever that may be, left us with reflections on the limitations of personal experience and mental phenomena (the long-debated “qualia”), all in Chinese fashion.

With eight volumes already available and more in the pipeline, there is plenty for the curious to explore. Like all series, the overall result is uneven, with some volumes more successful at engaging the layperson, especially when it comes to the introductions. Each volume is bilingual, with the original text divided into sections presented on the verso (left) sides and the English translations on the recto (right) sides. Footnotes are kept to a minimum to avoid overwhelming the eye while reading. More distracting are choices to retain pinyin transliterations in English. Terms like “the jinmao year” or the “jiao sacrifice” are not intelligible: to the layperson, they mean nothing; those with some Chinese linguistic knowledge will want to see how they’re written in Chinese, and even then, they may have to look these terms up anyway.

Yet the biggest conundrum that the series faces, I would say, is not one of editing but one of marketing and participation. Having “smartly scholarly and eminently readable” editions is a good start, but it remains just that if the work is not forcefully advertised. Lack of engagement with this material is not really a result of contained distributions. High schools in the United States and Europe by and large include little history or literature outside of the Euro-American traditions; when they do, the focus is on modern times. The fetishized way in which the “Orient” is still presented as an (often negative) “other” is equally unhelpful in trying to convince the public that The Plum in the Golden Vase (金瓶梅) is a story of love, death, and hubris as compelling as the Iliad.

In an ideal world, the pursuit of knowledge would require no justification. Literature invites us to reflect on what it means to be human, and it exposes us to worlds that we would not otherwise experience. Chinese literature is no exception. I made a point above to show how Chinese literature explores the same themes that recur in works and studies more familiar to those growing up in Europe and the United States: the Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, comics, and the philosophy of mind.

Indeed, from my own experience teaching in US colleges, I can list several reasons why students find Chinese literature compelling once they are exposed to it: it challenges inherited monolithic views of China, such as the equation between Chinese culture and Confucianism as a way of life that has never changed since its inception 2,000 years ago; it shows how diverse and yet at once repetitive humans are in their answers to life’s big and small questions; and it exposes students to different language systems and their constraints on poetic expressions. There is a robust, albeit inconspicuous, presence of Sinologists in US institutions who will be able to rely on the Hsu-Tang Library’s volumes to introduce students to more premodern Chinese works. In this sense, the series’ “smartly scholarly” studies will be well loved within educational circles.

But considering falling college enrollments and decreased interest in reading books, I begin to suspect that answers to promoting premodern Chinese literature cannot come solely from academic circles. The Hsu-Tang Library has already moved in the right direction by starting a podcast that features scholars discussing their volume for the series, but it is not available on any major listening platforms (even while many other series by Oxford University Press are). The launch of this series should have included events hosted in a more public setting than the University of Oxford China Centre to attract an audience beyond just Sinologists, which is ultimately a stated goal of this project. To the same end, the Hsu-Tang Library should invest into turning these hardcover editions into affordable paperbacks with running translations for those not acquainted with classical Chinese language and flood public libraries (and maybe even bookstores) with them to increase the chances that readers come across these texts serendipitously. (De Gruyter’s Library of Chinese Humanities, a project analogous to the Hsu-Tang Library, makes all of its titles available via open access, but print versions are available only in 21 university and college libraries worldwide, a distribution similar to the Hsu-Tang Library books.) Popularization involves some degree of oversimplification, but it also has its upsides; an important one is the power to decouple a sense of alienation often attached to the cultures of “others.” We need to make Chinese literature part of the conversation first and foremost because it includes thoroughly enjoyable works, which happen to be written in Chinese. Only then may the wealth of Chinese literature be noticed and become a gift to the people Amy Tan’s blurb calls the “passionate readers of world literature.”