Scholars and Beauties

Four plays from China's Yuan dynasty in the thirteen century and still alive in the Chinese-speaking world, are translated into English for the first time. Each play tells a love story between a scholar and a beauty. Love-sickness and misunderstandings are some of the themes in these plays. A book concerned with scholars in imperial China must mention the civil service examination system. Kids were home schooled in a small sized class usually consisting of less than ten students. There were tests at different levels and the highest level was the imperial examination, which was held in the imperial court in the capital city. When a student passed the provincial test, he was publically acknowledged as a scholar. (Because girls were forbidden to take tests, scholars were all male.) When a scholar passed the imperial examination, he may be hired by the government as a scholar-official. The top-scoring scholar at each imperial examination was named "zhuangyuan". The imperial examination was the only way for a poor Confucian scholar to become an official. It was also one of the important ways for the emperor to select talents to serve the nation. During the Yuan Dynasty, the imperial examination system was abolished, since the nation was governed by Mongol conquerors who resented Confucianism and degraded scholars to the bottom of the society. However, in the hearts of the frustrated Chinese playwrights, the imperial examination was still of enormous value. They imagined a chance to sit for the examinations and become a zhuangyuan. They imagined honor and glory instead of sitting at home and humbly writing plays. Therefore, when they wrote plays about scholars, large volumes were spent describing the happy feelings upon successes in the examination, as can be seen in this book. Beauties appearing in these four plays include daughters of noble families (Cloud Flower) and ordinary girls (Moon Belle, Moon Flower, and Jade Fairy). As a daughter of the noble family, Cloud Flower (her grandfather was the prime minister) was well educated. She was able to communicate with the scholar in poetry. Even Moon Flower, keeper of a cosmetic shop, was also able to communicate love through a poem. When a beauty's lover became a zhuangyuan, his marriage was, by a big chance, determined by the emperor. In this book, Jade Fairy realized her marriage under the order of the emperor. The other three beauties, Moon Belle, Moon Flower and Cloud Flower, had different happy endings. Moon Belle chose her husband by tossing a silk ball, Moon Flower married her lover after he gained his second life with the help of Bodhisattva Guanyin, and Cloud Flower separated from her husband during a chaotic war and reunited with him after three years. Yuan plays as a whole are highly regarded in the history of Chinese literature, similar to Tang poems and Song poems. The playwrights were gifted, demonstrated not only by their theatrical arts, but also by their poetic skills. In each Yuan play, there are about 400 lines of poetry. Most poems are devoted to love. There are also poems about nature (spring, fall, flowers, wind, etc.), happy feelings and difficult lives, etc. When viewers watch the stories, they will also enjoy the beautiful poems.