Thus, though the original tale and early versions of Ji Gong tell of Hangzhou life, where the famous Lingyin Monastery presides, the 900-years-later version—our version—though set in Hangzhou, has the look, smells, and—above all—sounds of Beijing. Within Guo Xiaoting’s tale and John Shaw’s translation, not only does the monk Ji Gong emerge, but so also do the lives and places of Guo Xiaoting’s own world. We see the alleyways and temple grounds, the lowlife and high ambitions of the men and women of China of the late 1800s and early 1900s, a curbside capsule of the late Qing Dynasty as it teetered on the brink of collapse.
Six years after Guo Xiaoting published a second installment of the Ji Gong tales, the Outer City District Police for the city of Beijing compiled a survey.3 In 1906 the “First Statistical Survey of the Security Administration” (Jingshi waicheng xunjing zongting diyici tongjishu 京師 外城 巡警 總廳 第一次統計書) reported that there were 347 restaurants, 308 courtesan-entertainer halls, 301 inns, 246 teahouses (where operas were performed), and 699 opium dens: all in a single district of Beijing. These were not the only place where people gathered. Temple complexes housed thousands of religious clerics and disciples and offered holiday fairs and popular performances. Grand compounds served the thousands of visiting merchants; they used the extensive banking institutions4 to monitor their investments. Businesses of all levels dominated the streets of Beijing; at the turn of the century, when Ji Gong was published, there were over 25,000 commercial establishments.5 Of course, the poor numbered in the thousands: soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and programs for temporary employment helped some.6 The police did not simply observe this activity; Beijing was the most policed city in the world. A network of officers supervised the city through the night in a series of watchmen’s contacts. “The beating of drums, bells, and bamboo boards enabled policemen to be part of a sweep through the streets and lanes … part of an elaborate choreographed system … that kept officers always within earshot of each other.”7 Members of the British Macartney mission in 1793 complained of being kept awake by the continual clapping and clopping.8
This was a city of size and scale. Foreigners were astounded; Father Pierre-Martial Cibot thought Beijing “the most peopled in the universe.”9 The estimates varied from one to three million inhabitants, depending on the inclusion of the extensive suburbs. The inns and restaurants, so carefully recorded by security officials, reflected this scale. One restaurant, a “publick house” visited by the Scotsman John Bell, was “the largest of that sort I ever saw; and could easily contain six or eight hundred people. The roof was supported by two rows of wooden pillars … the great part was filled with long tables, having benches, on each side, for the accommodation of the company.”10 Traders, artisans, factory workers, bosses and laborers, and the institutions—from temple compounds to marketplaces, big and small—shaped the nature of Beijing. This was a city with a city ecology: a city that had its own order and rhythm, with thriving subcultures of interlocking occupations. To be sure, the Manchu dominated the capital—laws were becoming increasingly strict on separation of races—but city patterns held the contours of life in Beijing.
Thus for Guo Xiaoting’s audience, The Complete Tales of Lord Ji presents a tour of the places, sounds, and customs of Beijing on the brink of the twentieth century. Readers would have been quick to hear the Beijing slang; shopkeepers lived and worked in and among the neighborhood hutong (the Beijing term for alley); a sly Daoist monk would be likely to yuan (Beijing slang for “cheat,” a word that is at the heart of many plot twists). Red fruit (hongguo)—sweetened hawthorn fruit—was a Beijing snack available in the novel; and Beijing buildings, not the palaces or temples, but the sihefang—courtyard homes—sheltered the novel’s residents.11 If the city sights and sounds matched the Beijing cityscape, so did the characters. Some were generic city dwellers, but some were clearly northerners familiar to a nineteenth-century reader. Pipe smokers greeted one another in teahouses; pipe smoking was a popular diversion never seen in Hangzhou of the Song Dynasty.12 A typical Beijing entertainer—the pingshu performer—makes his appearance in the novel. This artist was a typical northern “clapper-style” teller of rough-and-tumble tales of heroes and bandits.13 And if the citizens of The Complete Tales were northerners, they were also plain people. A few rich and mighty sit on the narrative outskirts—usually to threaten, occasionally to reward; but workaday Beijing is the setting, and Beijing citizens the cast.
Beijing is clearly the common man’s city. Though great walled compounds dominated old Beijing, Ji Gong’s Beijing is permeable. It is a city with a horizontal sight line; traded goods move through the streets like fish through shoals. When a precious talisman disappears from a friend’s keeping, Ji Gong learns of its progress. The talisman was stolen by members of the White Coin Gang, and then sold to the manager of the Old Studio Antique Shop (for 30 ounces of silver); then it is sold to Prime Minister Qin (for 500 ounces of silver!). Finally, it is taken through the gate of Prime Minister Qin’s estate and hung in the upper story of a fine pavilion. This slick circulation is managed, Ji Gong is told, “in a matter of hours, while you were drinking with your friends.”14 As goods move, so do travelers. As readers, we are on foot in this vital city; no need for the grander forms of travel. When Ji Gong threads his way through this peculiar urban marriage of Hangzhou and Beijing, we can follow him at a good crisp walk.
Enter the ghost.
His skin was a light sickly purple in color, his eyebrows heavy and long, shading his widely spaced eyes. With his hands he dragged the long chains with which he was bound and the heavy lock that fastened them together. His tangled hair was tied in a loose knot and his beard was like trampled grass.
Prime Minister Qin gazed at him. “Alas!” Yes, it was his adoptive father and patron, Qin Guai, returning home as a baleful ghost!…
“My old father!” exclaimed Prime Minister Qin. “I thought that you would have been in heaven long ago. Who would have thought that you could still be suffering in the underworld!”
Qin Guai answered, “Son, for your father’s sake, while you are yet in the world of light occupying your high position, return to the path of virtue before father and son-in-law go down in the stormy sea.”15
You might expect an evasive view of morality in The Complete Tales of Lord Ji, for these characters rely on peasant cunning. But the mournful voice of Qin Guai’s ghost tells another story. Ji Gong has here summoned an agent of retribution laced with the terrors of filial guilt. And despite the low humor and humble streets, the moral code of Ji Gong is rigorous, his punishments sure and certain. The retribution meted out in this scene is exquisitely personal. The ghost-father shames the avaricious son; a wrenching humiliation abases the prime minister. Indeed, if the Confucian bureaucracy named itself a moral patriarchy with the Son of Heaven residing at the top, the horizontal landscape of nineteenth-century Beijing had its parallel forms of rectitude. Beijing life occupies, in The Complete Tales, a moral landscape, where a harsh and deeply ingrained vision shapes events, although these codes may have varied from what the Emperor recommended.
Ji Gong governs an ad hoc clan of the righteous oppressed. He pulls the threads of karmic connections, wrestling the high and mighty out of their compounds. Abuse of office, sexual violence against the weak, humiliation of the ordinary, and even the never-trivial crime of snobbery are always punished. The code is simple: decency. Though none of the characters is grand, all of them are armed with a pitch-perfect