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 sense of probity. Even small gestures are governed by the sense of a refined doctrine. Decorum reaches to the smallest scale: “Even though at first the monk looked like nothing more than a beggar, to save Zhao Yuanwai’s face Li Guoyuan could not do otherwise than go forward to offer a ceremonial greeting.”16 As with the rites (li) of fine society, this is the li of the counter-tradition, constituting a powerful bond, clan-like and rigorous. Shopkeepers, courtesans, and monks—denizens of Beijing—use the words “sister” and “brother” deliberately. “When Li Guoyuan saw that it was Zhao Wenhui, he immediately went forward, raising his clasped hands in greeting, and said, ‘I have been looking forward to seeing you, Elder Brother.’”17 These kinship terms color the fabric of the novel; they signal bonds that, once made, are never broken. Loyalty was paramount.
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
