The aristocrats of these clans of the streets are Ji Gong’s warriors. Dyed through and through with righteousness (yi 義), they are the moral police of the Beijing streets, the elder-brother patriarchs of the Beijing hutong. In reality they are an odd mismatch of bodyguards, martial-arts stage-performers, and bandits. But, of course their mismatch-outsider status is a point of pride, all of them suffering from a failure to know their place in society. These warriors call themselves men and women of the “water-ways and greenwood” (jianghu lülin 江湖綠林). As outsiders they are proud to know each other by secret signs: an arc made by a weapon, an odd word used in greeting, some trick of appearance; with a simple gesture, kinship is recognized. Ji Gong himself is the chief among his band of defiant rogues. His skills are the most powerful; he is the godly (shen 神) version of this cast. But with his magic, lowly characters, though banished from power, are sanctioned—literally—by an eccentric, though intrinsically lucid, divine authority. The Complete Tales make something magical and deeply moral out of the city and its clash of circumstances. Guo Xiao ting, along with the centuries of performers of the Ji Gong epic, manufactured in this book a comic bible, appropriating a saint who was out and about in their midst, and clearly available: for, as the Song biographer has told us, Ji Gong was conveniently out of work.
In 1900, the same year that Guo Xiaoting published his second installment of The Complete Tales of Lord Ji, the city of Beijing was under siege. The forces of Germany, Japan, England, Russia, the United States, Italy, and France had taken Beijing; they had marched through the massive city gates, taken control of the foreign legation, and seized the Imperial Palace. The army of foreign soldiers had driven out the court; in April of that year, the Empress Dowager fled the palace dressed as a peasant. Nor did the troops stop there; they had arrived to punish the Boxer rebels. These rebels were a band of the displaced poor that had attacked Christian missions “to save China.” Indeed, the Boxers had an implacable hatred of foreigners. Thus, there followed a vicious European response; this was divine retribution. Emperor William II of Germany declared, “Peking should be razed to the ground!” When the troops left for China, he urged his men, “Show no mercy! Take no prisoners.”18 Nor did they; foreign troops razed villages and executed thousands of peasants and peasant soldiers.
Not that this chaos was isolated. As the century ended, massive failures marked China’s political life. In 1894 sections of the empire were ceded to Japan, and Germany in the same decade received sections of Shandong. From the court to the bureaucracy, to universities, to fine estates of educated gentry, all the structures of a well-policed world were in disarray: leading to the year 1911, when 2,000 years of dynastic governance convulsed in failure, toppling like a mountain into revolution and civil war. China was at one of the most terrible tipping points in history.
Within this maelstrom, in 1900, Guo Xiaoting wrote his second installment of The Complete Tales of Lord Ji. In these violent years Guo takes us, with apparent insouciance, through an odd-fellow comic narrative. Ji Gong is the curbside comedian of China. He typically plays the fool; temple statues portray him with an idiot’s grin. But from that vantage point he is a master of the fine art of ridicule, as he exposes the grand as grandiose. And if he is a fool, he is a holy fool. Meir Shahar, in his wonderful book Crazy Ji, has linked Ji Gong to other lunatic eccentrics in Chinese religion. “Crazy shamans, eccentric Daoists, wild Buddhists, and carefree poets” have all “played an important role in the religion and art of China.”19 Ji Gong’s madness has obvious method. It invokes the elemental, engaging what Robert Torrance called “the subversive and even anarchical sense of life.”20 He is a comic hero whose outrageous laughter evokes the sense of nature’s raw authority; Crazy Ji conveys a sense of “heightened vitality, of challenged wit and will.”21
The horrors of 1900 notwithstanding, Ji Gong’s brand of comedy had an audience. Tales of rogues—or picaros—was a booming industry. For the entire Qing Dynasty, into the time of civil war of the 1910s and 1920s, readers loved the picaresque. Popular presses in Beijing and Shanghai produced the tales of Monkey, the comical demon-queller from Journey to the West; other episodic tales were also popular. Journeys to the North, to the South and to the East were available as well.22 Still more rogues emerged from these original adventures. Pigsy from Journey to the West had his own story cycle. The band of heroes from the Enfeoffment of the Gods had dedicated readers. Even the magistrate Judge Bao appeared in these story cycles as a comic eccentric, a master of disguise.23 Of course, readers and listeners thrilled to the epic cycle Shuihu zhuan, or Water Margin. They knew precisely the weaponry, the costumes, the strategies, and the famous lines of all 108 heroes. When Russian diplomat Egor Petrovich Kovelevsky perused the bookstores of Beijing in 1850, he found that the “back rows of the (book) shops are usually crowded with novels … The greatest fame is enjoyed by the old novels, which are reprinted in hundreds of editions.”24 He was right, as we know from the numbers. Aside from the storyteller scripts and storyteller imitations, there were the smoothly narrated novels, and then there were reprints, sequels, and spin-offs, with single chapters expanded into new books entirely. This was a good crop to harvest. No wonder Guo Xiao ting came out with The Complete Tales of Lord Ji, Part II, in 1900.
The picaresque tales that flew off the back shelves were not always well received by the court, however. Imperial censors, in fact, found the “old novels” to be deeply troublesome. Light-hearted and comical though they may be, novels were considered polluting. Censors looked at fiction and saw rebellion. Novels had a terrible reputation. Water Margin, though a favorite throughout the Qing, was subjected to heavy-handed censorship. Ambassador Kovelevsky, in his visit to the Beijing bookstore, may have noticed the numbers, but he did not notice the laws. The Laws and Codes of the Great Qing (Da Qing lǜli 大清律例) labeled the book “licentious”; adventure tales undermined that well-ordered cityscape laid out in the police survey. The Qing legal code was clear: “All bookshops that print the licentious story Water Margin must be vigorously sought out, and the work prohibited. Both the woodblocks and the printed matter should be burned. In case [it is discovered that] this book is being made, and … should [an official] himself engrave it, he shall be stripped of office entirely.”25
If the officials monitored publishers, they monitored ordinary citizens as well. The reading public for these tales of adventure had an official category: “stupid” (yu 愚). Those who bought vernacular texts or who listened to storytellers were called yufuyufu (愚夫愚婦)26—stupid men and stupid women. This official view was more than demeaning, it was damning. The word “stupid” (yu 愚) had the connotation of politically dangerous, as in stupefying, deluding, or corrupting. Officials laced their descriptions of local leaders with such terms, accusing them of yumin (愚民), deluding the masses. The empire’s unsavory elements were bracketed together: the practitioners of cults, the malcontents, the tumultuous, as well as the writers and readers of fiction.
This fearful view of popular fiction was not without real bite. Popular fiction and all books were monitored with malign precision. Censors had terrible means at their disposal. When the Abbreviated History of the Ming History was published, censors were repelled by some few passages. The author foolishly linked the Manchu people to other “barbarian” peoples. The book itself was quickly suppressed, but the censorship was extended. Those connected with the project were tracked down. The publishers were tried, convicted, and executed, and “those who had merely purchased the book” were punished as well. “Seventy individuals were put to death and their families exiled, their estates confiscated.”27