Skilfully Linked Pearls

A poem that reads the same backwards brings two strangers together. A hanger on

with a talent for ruining betrothals sets out to keep them apart, and very

nearly manages it for fifteen chapters.

About the Book

Wen Xiangru is a gifted young scholar of Suzhou. Miss Fang is the daughter of an

official, and the reversible poem she has written is the finest thing he has

ever read. Between them stands Jia Youdao, whose name means Jia Who Has the Way,

and who has no way at all except mischief: he wrecks the match, and the rest of

the novel is the long road back.

That road runs through a false identity taken up at an inn, an uncle newly

appointed prefect of Jinan, a diviner beneath a pagoda tree who is not a diviner

at all, a poem collection circulating under the wrong name, an examination, a

nurse with a plan, and a young woman who turns to the Buddha rather than accept

the wrong husband. The pearls of the title are the verbal ornaments, linked

poems, reversible poems, poems hidden in other poems, that the plot is literally

strung on.

About This Edition

This complete English translation presents all fifteen chapters together with

the original preface of 1663, rendered directly from the Chinese text. The

preface is restored to the front of the book, where it belongs, though the

surviving text carries it at the end. The original supplies no chapter titles,

so all fifteen are supplied by the translator.

Readers should know that chapter four breaks off in mid sentence in the only

surviving text. The gap is marked where it falls and is not disguised; the story

resumes without serious loss in chapter five. Nothing else is abridged.

Themes and Legacy

• Poems as plot: reversible verse, linked verse and poems that travel alone
• The professional marriage wrecker, one of the great minor villains of the genre
• Assumed names, disguises and a diviner who is a father in disguise
• Examination success as the only door out of trouble
• A preface of 1663 that defends fiction as the heir of the Book of Odes

For Readers Who Love

Yu Jiao Li - Ping Shan Leng Yan - The Fortunate Union - Ding Qing Ren -

Chinese Literature in Translation - Classic Asian Romance

"They were matched by a poem. It took fifteen chapters and one liar to unmatch

them."

Rediscover the great epics, mysteries and chronicles of dynastic China: gods and generals, swindlers and scholars, courtesans, ghosts and emperors, in complete English translations.