The Taiping guangji (Extensive records of the Taiping
era) is a collection of some 7,000 tales and anecdotes
compiled by government fiat during the
early years of the Song (Sung) dynasty—a period
(976–983) known as the Taiping or “Reign of Great
Tranquility.” The collection was made from some
500 sourcebooks, more than two-thirds of which
are no longer extant. Most of the tales were composed
during the preceding TANG DYNASTY and earlier,
and a large number of them are concerned
with supernatural elements: There are gods and
other deities, Taoist magicians, marvelous animals
and plants, fairies and magic spells, portents from
heaven, and, of course, ghosts. The collection remains
quite a popular source for fantastic tales.
The Taiping guangji, however, were very nearly
lost to posterity, despite the good work of the efficient
editor Li Fang, who had compiled the collection
in some 18 months. Prose fiction was not
considered a serious form of literature in medieval
China, since fiction was thought of as misleading
and likely to lead to vice and dishonesty. Fiction
was known as xiaoshuo (hsiao shuo; insignificant
tellings). Prose tales could only gain credibility if
they were purported to be historical. The fantastic
tales of the Taiping guangji were beyond such a
designation.
The Taiping guangji had been one of three large
compilation projects initiated by order of Emperor
Taizong (T’ai-tsung) during the early Song years,
but when objections were raised to the collection,
claiming that the compendium would be useless to
students, plans to publish the collection were
abandoned, despite the fact that printing blocks
for the collection had already been produced. The
text was preserved in manuscript, however, and the
collection was finally printed during the Ming dynasty.
Bibliography
Idema,Wilt, and Lloyd Haft. A Guide to Chinese Literature.
Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies,
the University of Michigan, 1997.