Yu chuang yi zhen ji 雨窗欹枕集 [The "Rain Outside the Window" and "Slanted Pillow" Collections]

Two vols. Small 8vo, orig. dark blue wrappers, orig. title slips, orig. stitching. [China]: n.d. but 1934.




A facsimile edition of this collection of fiction in the huaben 話本 style. Sometimes translated simply as "vernacular short story," this form of Chinese narrative originated in the Song dynasty. Some scholars maintain that the stories originated as "prompt-books" for storytellers, but this theory has been disputed.


Our book is the result of fortuitous discovery. In 1929, a Beijing publisher issued a series of huaben based on a Ming edition carrying the imprint Qingping shan tang 清平山堂. This imprint had been used by Ming publisher Hong Pian 洪楩 in the Jiajing period (1522-66). The reprinted huaben collection, however, was incomplete. Then, in 1933, Ma Lian, the editor of our book, was in his hometown of Ningbo preparing to return to Beijing. "One day, I by chance bought a bundle of incomplete books. Unexpectedly, when I was going through the material, I found Huishi zhimeng 繪事指蒙 and twelve huaben, all of which had been published by Mr. Hong!" There was no overlap between these stories and the reprinted Qingping shan tang collection, but "the page centerfold and the style of the characters were identical to it," allowing Ma to conclude that they indeed sprung from a single published series.


The provenance of the book turned out to be one of the great book collections of late imperial China. "As I was going through the titles written on the bottom edges of the books, I noticed that their style of writing and form resembled those held in my hometown's Tianyi ge 天一閣 library." Searching through several catalogs of the Tianyi ge holdings, Ma found records of the Rain Outside the Window and Slanted Pillow collections dating from 1802. In a later catalog from 1808, the two books were not mentioned, allowing him to conclude that his copies must have left Tianyi ge in that short span of years. He decided to have the two collections reprinted as one work.


Ma Lian (d. 1935), author and book collector, focused especially on vernacular fiction and popular religious texts. He held lectureships at several universities in Beijing.


The title slips are in the calligraphy of iconoclastic intellectual Qian Xuantong 錢玄同 (1887-1939).


Fine and fresh set.