The Fortunate Union

In 1761 this became the first Chinese novel Europe ever read. Here it is again,

complete, in modern English.

Thomas Percy's version travelled across eighteenth century Europe and was read

by Goethe, and for a long time it was the whole of what Western readers knew

about Chinese fiction. The book itself deserves better than a curiosity. It is

fast, funny, argumentative, and much stranger than its reputation.

About the Book

Tie Zhongyu is a young scholar so delicately handsome that his neighbours call

him Tie the Beauty, and the joke is in his surname, because Tie means iron and

his temper is the iron, not his face. He is generous to poor friends, freezing

to rich ones, and he will not marry, because a friendship can be ended and a

marriage cannot. When his outspoken father, a Censor at court, sends up one

memorial too many and is thrown into the prison of the Board of Punishments,

Tie rides for the capital. On the road he picks up the case that put his father

there, a licentiate's betrothed daughter carried off in daylight by a marquis,

and a young husband running for the Long Stream to drown himself because there

is no office in the empire that will hear him.

Shui Bingxin is his match and in places his superior. Left alone while her own

father is banished to the frontier, she outmanoeuvres the persistent Guo Qizu

three times over, by swapping a horoscope card, by walking into his trap and

walking straight out of it again, and by sending him home in triumph with a

sedan chair full of stones. When he counterfeits an imperial decree to take her

by force, Tie Zhongyu happens to be passing. Guo has him poisoned for it, and

she brings the dying stranger into her own house and nurses him there behind a

curtain, which saves his life and costs her her reputation for the rest of the

book.

What follows is stranger and better than any of it. A palace eunuch borrows an

imperial errand, two scrolls of plum blossom to be inscribed, and turns it into

a marriage trap, because plum and matchmaker sound alike. A bought censor

memorialises that the marriage is a defilement. And so the Emperor sends for

them both, questions them himself in the side hall, and settles by decree what

no court and no neighbour could settle. The wedding candles are lit three

times in this novel, and only the third lighting is real.

About This Edition

This new complete English translation presents all eighteen chapters, about

127,500 words, rendered directly from the Chinese text. Nothing is abridged or

moralised away. The argument scenes, the memorials and the imperial decrees are

kept at full length, and the poems and lyrics that open and close the chapters

are translated as verse. The Chinese text carries no chapter title couplets at

all, only bare chapter numbers, so the descriptive two part headings in this

edition have been supplied in English, in the register of a genuine chapter

couplet. Where Percy worked partly at a remove and through an incomplete

manuscript tradition, this edition follows the Chinese text throughout, with no

gaps and nothing cut short.

Themes and Legacy

The best known example of the scholar and beauty romance

A heroine who wins by strategy, evidence and nerve

Marriage, reputation and the price of being publicly right

Abuse of rank, forced marriage, and appeal to authority

Slander, official corruption, and what it costs to report the truth

The first Chinese novel translated into English, 1761, and a founding text of

European interest in Chinese literature

For Readers Who Love

Dream of the Red Chamber, Chinese Classical Fiction, Jane Austen,

Eighteenth Century Novels, World Literature in Translation

"Read in Europe before anyone there had read anything else from China."

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