Six Yüan Plays   Translated by Liu Jung-En

Jan, 2007.     From a second hand bookstore in Lüneburg, which I found when searching for an engagement ring.

I took this book because I'm interested in foreign cultures. -Or old cultures. And the Yüan plays were written in China in the 1200s and 1300s. So they show a different culture, -but they still seem so familiar; The people in them are the same as people everywhere. Some are greedy, some virtuous, some foolish, some clever, some liberal with their family, and some dictatorial. The emotions and thoughts are the same, -only the setting is different. -And the possibilities that this setting allows:

When the powerful minister with the emperor's ear has a grudge to settle, he may kill an enemy and his entire family. -And when one single child of that family escapes, it was expected of him to avenge the deaths, by killing the minister's entire lineage. It's a world of emperors, kings, war-lords, feudal princes, and always the good, honest, spotless characters of protagonists.

As the title suggests, this is a collection of six of these plays, out of about 150 that have been saved to this day. I'm too lazy to say that they were written by Chi Chühsiang, Kuan Han-ch'ing, Li Hao-ku and so on, and I don't feel like treating each play separately either.

I found it interesting that at the time, Love was nearly never written about. (There was a note about that in the introduction.) A man might see a beautiful woman, and decide that they should be married, but his actual feelings were never touched on. -Nor hers. One of these plays was a love story though, and was unusual for it's time in dealing with a couple who love each other too much to bear parting. -And so the woman's soul leaves her body, and travels with him, leaving the body sick and (hee hee) dispirited in bed. An other story COULD have been about love, but... it wasn't quite. It was about a pair of immortal souls, who are born into the human world, not knowing they belong together. When they then meet, they recognise they were made for each other. They exchange compliments, and decide they should be married in one year. That's that. It's not... Mushy. It's not sentimental. -Not exactly.

One of the lines that I quite liked was recited by a doctor:
There's no way of bringing the dead to life,
[but] The living can always be doctored to death.
-Very true at a time of leeches and no antiseptic.

I'm not able to think of much else to say. I liked some parts of it, and was entertained. I was surprised that although they mostly didn't treat love in a familiar way, the characters were all realistic and easy to relate to. Not a bad way to pass the time, but not something that I'll especially look for again. (Now... if I could read a collection of Chinese plays from just after or before this period, That might be interesting now.)