Mirage

Mirage

Hardback (08 Dec 2021)

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Publisher's Synopsis

The young son of the head of the Chinese traders' association, the men licensed to deal with foreign merchants in the port of Guangzhou, is suddenly burdened with responsibility for his powerful family upon his father's sudden death. A latter-day Baoyu, but with far stronger sexual impulses, the son learns both to tame his own libido to some degree and to conduct himself prudently in the Guangzhou society of his time. All of this appears in a comparatively little-known and little-studied novel called Shenlou zhi, which is here translated for the first time.The novel was actually first published in 1804, several decades before opium became a factor in the China trade. It is not only by far the earliest novel to deal with that trade, but also one of the earliest accounts of it. Furthermore, it has been found to be closely connected to events that occurred in Guangzhou and the outbreak of rebellion in Huizhou. This strikingly original work develops the culture of adolescence that was first described in Honglou meng and also relishes, in its account of the rebellion, the romantic conventions of Shuihu zhuan.

Book information

ISBN: 9789629965815
Publisher: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
Imprint: The Chinese University of Hong Kong Press
Pub date:
Language: English
Number of pages: 450
Weight: 1594g
Height: 229mm
Width: 152mm
Spine width: 15mm