Stories to Caution the World: A Ming Dynasty Collection

Stories to Caution the World is the first complete translation of Jingshi tongyan, the second of Feng Menglong's three collections of stories which were pivotal in the development of Chinese vernacular fiction. These tales, whose importance in the Chinese literary canon and in world literature is without question, have been compared to Boccaccio's Decameron and the stories of A Thousand and One Nights. "The stories...are not only entertaining but also valuable sources of information on daily life and culture in Ming-dynasty China." -- Choice Feng Menglong collected popular stories from a variety of sources (some dating back centuries) and circulated them via the flourishing seventeenth-century publishing industry. He not only saved them from oblivion but elevated the status of vernacular literature and provided material for authors of the great late-Ming and Qing novels to draw upon. As in their translation of the first collection of Feng's trilogy, Stories Old and New, Shuhui and Yunqin Yang include all forty stories as well as Feng's interlinear and marginal comments and all of the verse woven throughout the stories.

Feng Menglong (1574-1646), the most knowledgeable connoisseur of popular literature of his time, is best known for his three collections of vernacular stories, now commonly known as the Sanyan. Shuhui Yang is professor of Chinese at Bates College, Lewiston, Maine. Yunqin Yang is a simultaneous interpreter in the United Nations Secretariat. Together, they translated Feng's Gujin xiaoshuo as Stories Old and New: A Ming Dynasty Collection (Volume 1).