Michigan Classics in Chinese Studies – serie

China’s most outrageous character—the magical Monkey who battles a hundred monsters—returns to the fray in this seventeenth-century sequel to the Buddhist novel Journey to the West. In The Tower of Myriad Mirrors, he defends his claim to enlightenment against a villain who induces hallucinations that take Monkey into the past, to heaven and hell, and even through a sex change. The villain turns out to be the personification of his own desires, aroused by his penetration of a female adversary’s body in Journey to the West. The Tower of Myriad Mirrors is the only novel of Tung Yüeh (1620–1686), a monk and Confucian scholar. Tung picks up the slapstick of the original tale and overlays it with Buddhist theory and bitter satire of the Ming government’s capitulation to the Manchus. After a nod to Journey’s storyteller format, Tung carries Monkey’s quest into an evocation of shifting psychological states rarely found in premodern fiction. An important though relatively unknown link in the development of the Chinese novel, and a window into late Ming intellectual history, The Tower of Myriad Mirrors further rewards by being a wonderful read.

First published in 1932, Pan Chao is perhaps the earliest work by an American scholar on a Chinese woman intellectual. Alongside the story of Pan’s life, Nancy Lee Swann sketches the Eastern Han period when Pan lived and wrote, her family background, and the literary milieu of which she was a part. In addition, Swann provides translations of writings definitively identified with Pan that survive from the years when she was active (ca. 89–105 a.d.). While Pan is well known for her contribution to the great Han-shu, of special interest is her treatise on the moral training of women, in which she makes a plea for girls to be given the same education as boys and points to principles that led young women to success in ancient China. Swann also includes memorials, short poems, and an essay, all of which demonstrate Pan's rhetorical skills and her concerns at the Han court. A considerable work of scholarship, Pan Chao is grounded in Swann’s detailed knowledge of the history and literature of the late Han. Swann includes the Chinese text for shorter works and a comprehensive list of primary sources on this important early scholar.