The Vinegar Gourd

In Chinese, jealousy tastes of vinegar. This whole household is pickled in it.

This is a novel, not a collection: twenty chapters following one marriage from

the first quarrel to the last will. Cheng Gui is a wealthy Hangzhou man with no

son and no spine. His wife, Lady Du, is clever, articulate, tireless and utterly

determined that no other woman will come near him, and the book's comedy comes

from the sheer ingenuity she brings to a campaign her husband is too frightened

to lose.

The opening chapter sets the target plainly. A man is born upright and stubborn,

the storyteller says, reads his books, grows a spine, refuses to yield an inch to

anyone including his own parents, and then he takes a wife and shrinks like a

snail that has met salt and vinegar. The book names its own ancestors, the play

The Lion's Roar and the tract Fear of Wives, and then announces that this

household will outdo both.

Around the couple stand the maid Cuitai, whose position in the house is exactly

as unstable as it sounds, the sharp and useful servant Zhou Zhi, the loyal

Cheng Mao, and Du Biao, the son of the wife's line, who turns from a domestic

irritant into a genuine threat. Lady Du takes her jealousy through every

available channel: household discipline, family opinion, sutras and religious

vows, a spectacular episode among the gods, and finally the courts, where the

paperwork piles up like a siege. The last chapters bring an heir, a reckoning and

something close to remorse.

This complete English translation presents all twenty chapters, rendered directly

from the Chinese text.

The traditional editor's comment printed after each chapter, one or two pointed

sentences that judge what has just happened, is translated and kept in place

rather than dropped, and the opening lyric of chapter one is given as verse. The

preface signed by the Master of the Drunken Moon of West Lake at the Bigeng

Studio is translated in full and restored to the front of the book. Nothing is

abridged.

Themes and Legacy

• A full length comedy built entirely out of one marriage
• Jealousy, concubinage and the pressure to produce an heir in late imperial China
• Household politics: maids, servants, stepsons and the balance of terror
• Satire aimed at husbands at least as much as at wives
• One of the very few Chinese novels devoted to the theme of the jealous wife

For Readers Who Love

The Lion's Roar / Domestic satire / Ming and Qing comic fiction / Chinese novels

in translation / Asian classics

"A comedy about a man who is afraid of his wife, written by someone who found that funny and also true."

CONTENT NOTE FOR LISTING

This is a comedy of marriage, not an erotic novel. The tone is farcical and

satirical throughout. There is some coarse language and a small number of crude

anatomical jokes, and the plot turns on adultery, concubinage and a maid taken

into the household, but the sexual content is glancing and mostly implied. A

handful of characters in the source text are marked with lacunae where the

original woodblock was damaged. Suitable for adult general readers. Recommended

listing note: contains bawdy humour and adult themes.

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