The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei, Volume Four The Climax [Paperback]

This is the fourth and penultimate volume in David Roy's celebrated translation of one of the most famous and important novels in Chinese literature.The Plum in the Golden Vaseor,Chin Ping Meiis an anonymous sixteenth-century work that focuses on the domestic life of Hsi-men Ching, a corrupt, upwardly mobile merchant in a provincial town, who maintains a harem of six wives and concubines. The novel, known primarily for its erotic realism, is also a landmark in the development of the narrative art formnot only from a specifically Chinese perspective but in a world-historical context.

This complete and annotated translation aims to faithfully represent and elucidate all the rhetorical features of the original in its most authentic form and thereby enable the Western reader to appreciate this Chinese masterpiece at its true worth.

David Tod Roy(19332016) was professor emeritus of Chinese literature at the University of Chicago. His monumental five-volume translation of theChin P'ing Meiwas completed in 2013. [A] book of manners for the debauched. Its readers in the late Ming period likely hid it under their bedcovers. ---Amy Tan,New York Times Book Review Praise for the previous volumes: [I]t is time to remind ourselves thatThe Plum in the Golden Vaseis not just about sex, whether the numerous descriptions of sexual acts throughout the novel be viewed as titillating, harshly realistic, or, in Mr. Roy's words, intended 'to express in the most powerful metaphor available to him the author's contempt for the sort of persons who indulge in them.' The novel is a sprawling panorama of life and times in urban China, allegedly set safely in the Sung dynasty, but transparently contemporary to the author's late sixteenth-century world, as scores of internal references demonstrate. The eight hundred or so men, women, and children who appear in the book cover a breath-taking variety of human types, and encompass prelcZ