The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei: Volume One: The Gathering: 1 (Princeton Library of Asian Translations, 56) - Softcover

One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 1994 "[A] book of manners for the debauched. Its readers in the late Ming period likely hid it under their bedcovers."--Amy Tan, New York Times Book Review "[I]t is time to remind ourselves that The Plum in the Golden Vase is not just about sex, whether the numerous descriptions of sexual acts throughout the novel be viewed as titillating, harshly realistic, or, in Mr. Roy's words, intended 'to express in the most powerful metaphor available to him the author's contempt for the sort of persons who indulge in them.' The novel is a sprawling panorama of life and times in urban China, allegedly set safely in the Sung dynasty, but transparently contemporary to the author's late sixteenth-century world, as scores of internal references demonstrate. The eight hundred or so men, women, and children who appear in the book cover a breath-taking variety of human types, and encompass pretty much every imaginable mood and genre--from sadism to tenderness, from light humor to philosophical musings, from acute social commentary to outrageous satire."--Jonathan Spence, New York Review of Books "David Tod Roy enters with zest into the spirit and the letter of the original, quite surpassing ... other earlier versions."--Paul St. John Mackintosh, Literary Review "Reading Roy's translation is a remarkable experience."--Robert Chatain, Chicago Tribune Review of Books "What Roy has already accomplished [in this volume] is enough to establish his translation as definitive... A tremendous achievement."--Charles Horner, Commentary

In this first of a planned five-volume set, David Roy provides a complete and annotated translation of the famous Chin P'ing Mei, an anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel that focuses on the domestic life of Hsi-men Ch'ing, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines. This work, known primarily for its erotic realism, is also a landmark in the development of the narrative art form--not only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context.