In recent decades, historians of European history have produced many studies on the history of emotions. Based on the hypothesis that emotions are neither a biological essence nor a universal fixed attribute, they have sought to trace constructions of human emotionality as reflected in literary and other works in a particular society over time. This new sub-discipline, the study of what is often termed “sentimental culture”, has illuminated the interaction between the articulation of an emotional sensibility and significant social trends of the age, including the rise of humanitarian discourse,Footnote ¹ radical Protestantism,Footnote ² and a destabilizing of sexual norms.Footnote ³ From the new perspective of the cultural history of emotion, the modern idea that emotions express individual inwardness and autonomy now appears to be contingent and culture bound. In the case of China, while there has been an abundance of studies of the cult of qing 情 (‘passion, desire’) in the late Ming, there are few works dealing specifically with the historical construction of emotion in pre-modern China, particularly from a linguistic point of view.Footnote ⁴

A recent study by Ōki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo, Shan'ge, the ‘Mountain Songs’: Love Songs in Ming China, seeks to make the linguistic expression of Chinese emotionality center stage in the study of this key literary text, a collection of folk songs and later imitations, compiled by the well-known man of letters, Feng Menglong (1574–1646). Feng's edited collections of vernacular short stories known as huaben 話本 have been much studied in the West, but there have been far fewer studies of his song collections.Footnote ⁵ The Shan'ge is of great interest in Chinese linguistic and literary history not only for its literary qualities but also because it comprises the largest collection of material recorded in a Wu language before the contemporary period. It is also remarkable for its raunchy graphic treatment of sexual desire and its association with the pleasure quarters of Suzhou.

Ōki and Santangelo's Shan'ge, the ‘Mountain Songs’ can be considered as two books not one, each taking up approximately half the size of this 600-page study. The first “book” consists of a translation into English with full annotation of Chapters 1 to 7 of the Shan'ge song collection. This is followed by an analytic compendium of terms dealing with the emotions derived from those same chapters and preceded by its own separate introduction. The translation is based on the earlier rendition by Ōki Yasushi of the Shan'ge into JapaneseFootnote ⁶ while the glossary with analysis is authored by Paolo Santangelo. In addition, there is an Introduction by Ōki, well known for his works on Ming publishing and the life of Feng Menglong, and a further chapter by Paolo Santangelo, the author of major studies on the history of emotions in imperial China, dealing with the treatment of love, passion and related emotions in the Shan'ge. The collaboration of these two experienced scholars in an investigation of this highly significant text in Chinese literary history makes this volume of unique value to those with an interest in the social mores of late Ming China, the development of Chinese vernacular literature, the history of Chinese sexuality, and the languages of regional China.

The first thing that must be said is that the translation of chapters 1 to 7 of the Shan'ge of Feng Menglong will be a real boon to scholars of the period. This is the first near-complete translation of the Shan'ge into English, although it has been available in German translation thanks to the work of Cornelia TöpelmannFootnote ⁷ and the above-mentioned translation into Japanese by Ōki Yasushi. This English translation has benefited from the elucidation of difficult linguistic expressions in the Shan'ge by Wu language experts, Shi Rujie and Chen Liujing.Footnote ⁸ In this regard, and also in the scholarly depth of its annotations, one can say that this work supersedes earlier translations. This reviewer also applauds the provision of the complete Chinese text side by side with the English rendition, and the addition of over forty images of objects alluded to in the Shan'ge derived from woodblock prints of the age. The combination of image, text and song assists the reader to better experience the sensuality of the original. For example, as a young woman awaits the coming of a secret lover, she likens him to rootless duckweed floating on the waterways. On the parallel page one finds an image of duckweed (huangsi 黃絲) from a contemporary print with its upright stamen and curving tendrils (pp. 94–95). In another example, a male refers to his lover as like a revolving lantern, firing up his passion. Underneath one finds an image of the zoumadeng 走馬燈, a lantern with figures spinning wildly, heated by hot air arising from candle flame (p. 247). The Shan'ge abounds in very homely images, drawn from everyday life, entirely different from the conventional allusions in love poetry in classical language. In one song the woman taunts her would-be lover, who is yet to find an opportunity or the courage to carry out his intention. She tells him that the millstone without an axle turning in its hole will grind in vain. He should be like the wick of a candle which when it melts (with passion) and falls into water is absorbed immediately.Footnote ⁹ An image of a millstone, complete with axle, complements this song wonderfully (pp. 86–87).

The separate chapters by Ōki and Santangelo provide useful explanatory context. In dealing with the perceived “marginality” of the Shan'ge,Footnote ¹⁰ Santangelo observes that the sheer vulgarity of the text, with its constant double entendres and frank expression of sexual desire, was “subversive” of official orthodoxy. Its value for us lies in the power of the Shan'ge “to express the codes of emotion in a new way, and to transmit them to the readers with great immediacy” (p. x). While the use of Wu “dialect” (language or topolect), primarily from the Suzhou region, makes it appear marginal within the canon of classical Chinese texts, he makes the bold claim that the author was seeking “to impose the cosmopolitan culture of Suzhou and the ambiguities of its ‘floating world’ as a model for the intellectual community of the whole empire” (p. x). He believes the songs were recorded mainly for “entertainment” and that the prime readership would have been members of the elite, presumably educated peers of the author/editor, Feng Menglong, who spent much time in the pleasure quarters of Suzhou. The motive for publishing was commercial, in line with other publishing endeavours of the author. While the volume includes songs collected from local circulation, others would have been composed in imitation of these “dialect” folk songs (p. xi).

Whereas Santangelo's analysis focuses more on the association between the Shan'ge and the songs circulating in brothels on Suzhou waterways, Ōki's own assessment is somewhat broader. He gives weight to the words of Feng Menglong in his preface that the songs in the collection belong to the common people and are quite distinct from those accepted in poetic circles. They are known as “mountain songs” (shan'ge, songs sung outdoors) and are composed extempore by farmers and the lower social orders. As such they are treated with condescension by men of letters and scholars (p. 5, citing Feng's preface). Ōki believes there were four main sources for the songs in Feng's collection: specifically, folk songs sung by villagers, folk songs transmitted from villages into urban areas, the songs of courtesans and patrons in the pleasure quarters, and songs in imitation of these composed in literati circles, all within the Jiangnan region. Ōki's assessment is also based on historical sources, which refer to villagers taking part in collective song competitions and songs sung extempore by boatmen of the Wu region, known since antiquity (pp. 11–13). He notes that song fragments can also be found today in collections of folk songs from this region in the contemporary period (pp. 18–19).

I believe Ōki's hypothesis here about the circulation of songs of this type at village level in the late imperial period is quite well-founded. In my own research on Wu ge (Wu narrative songs) I have found associations between story motifs and in some cases common linguistic formulae in Feng's Shan'ge that occur in narrative songs transmitted orally by mostly illiterate villagers into the contemporary period.Footnote ¹¹ The folk songs of this region were sung in a particular style that can be found even today in villages not far from Suzhou. In a recent study, Wang Xiaolong compared Feng's Shan'ge with songs sung in Baimao, Jiangsu province, finding significant structural similarities. In Baimao three main songs are learnt by amateur singers as the basis for extempore composition. Locals were able to sing certain songs in Feng's Shan'ge in their own familiar tunes and rhythmic style.Footnote ¹²

In addition, some songs in the Shan'ge betray an implicit narrative structure akin to that of the Wu songs sung well into the twentieth century. Almost all known Wu narrative songs belong to the genre of siqing 私情, or songs of secret or illicit passion. This refers to affairs conducted primarily by young unmarried women with a lover in a relationship not arranged by the matchmaker and approved by the parents. The woman is highly pro-active in the relationship and often makes the first move. The story begins with falling in love and progresses to courting or willing seduction, a night of love-making, followed by danger, anxiety, separation and interrogation by the mother or relatives. The lovers are caught in the act, usually by the mother or a senior woman, or the girl becomes pregnant. The ending is always tragic, or, from another point of view, punitive. Arbitrary justice is carried out, usually by the head of the family, more rarely by the local magistrate. If the girl falls pregnant she gives birth but the infant son is drowned. The songs end in sorrow and futility with the injury or death of the young lovers. There is no happy reunion in the afterlife, nor any explicit didactic message.Footnote ¹³ In at least one region that I visited (Luxu 蘆墟, Jiangsu), Wu songs used to be sung with a slow downward beat, indicating sadness. A similar tune was used in funeral laments. This tune was so doleful that culture cadres in the region in the present day have chosen to revise the tune to make it happier and thus more acceptable to the contemporary generation, who do not wish to learn unhappy (and hence unlucky) songs.

While of course one cannot extrapolate directly between the “mountain songs” sung in the twentieth-century Jiangnan region and those of the era of Feng Menglong in the seventeenth century, a comparison does provide food for thought. In the first chapter of the Shan'ge, the songs progress through a series of scenes beginning with falling in love and then proceeding to longing for the lover (songs 8–14, pp. 78–83), a secret assignation and love-making (songs 15–17, pp. 84–89), deceiving the mother with comic repartee (songs 20–23, pp. 91–94), suspicion and beatings (song 24, pp. 95–96); caught in the act (song 29, pp. 101–4), pregnancy (song 32, pp. 106–7), infanticide (song 32E, p. 109), intimations of death (see for example song 28A, p. 100), fear of danger (song 31, p. 106), sorrow and a sense of futility (song 33, p. 110). There is no explicit moral, but a clear sense, as one finds in contemporary Wu songs, that a moment of indiscretion, a simple glance or a smile, can lead to a lifetime of unforeseen and possibly tragic consequences (see songs 1 and 2).

This issue brings one to the heart of how to interpret Feng's Mountain Song collection. Santangelo argues that in line with the re-evaluation of qing (‘emotion’, ‘passion’) in the late Ming Gong'an movement, and the new interest in “authenticity” in poetry, one can interpret Feng's enterprise here as a challenge to traditional orthodoxies particularly with regard to “gender differences and family” (p. 32). According to Santangelo, whatever the earliest original source of the oral origins of the songs, when Feng Menglong gathered the materials and published it, he was producing “a brand-new literary work”, which offered “not only a conscious illustration of the language of love but also deliberate portrayal of desire and its fulfillment, relationships and even the essence of human nature itself” (p. 29). He sees the songs as engaging in “irony and playfulness”, portraying a female protagonist who “is not morally torn or ashamed of intimacy or of violating the Confucian rules of conduct, such female protagonists are solely concerned about social decorum and saving face” (pp. 40–41). His view of the derivation of the songs appears to be slightly different from that of Ōki. He notes that the major players in the songs are prostitutes, fishermen, boatmen, artisans, textile workers and the like, with relatively few farmers (p. 38). As for the audience for the printed Shan'ge, he believes this is mainly “literary circles of intellectuals” (p. 44, note 24). He notes further the exceptional nature of the volume, which portrays male–female relations in a “transgressive” way quite distinct from the genre of talented men and beautiful women (caizi jiaren 才子佳人) so common in fiction and opera of the era (pp. 45–47). Santangelo appears not quite sure how to deal with the “contradictory” portrayal of women, as both “sexually active and adventurous, open and uninhibited” but also “long-suffering, beaten, passive or resigned” (p. 48).

There is much that one can agree with here. Feng Menglong was indeed engaging in a remarkable enterprise when he collected his songs and transcribed them in Chinese characters reflecting the spoken language of Suzhou. The publication of these songs from everyday life, expressing in frank terms the language of intimacy, was surely a milestone in the history of Chinese print culture. However, this reviewer is not entirely convinced of Feng's credentials with regard to challenging gender roles and assumptions. Feng's Shan'ge was probably first printed in the period 1618–1619,Footnote ¹⁴ just before the major publication projects for which he is best known, such as the three collections of vernacular short stories (known together as the San yan 三言 anthologies), novels such as Xin Pingyao zhuan 新平妖傳, collections of jokes and other works. Many of these were highly innovatory in that they were composed in a more highly vernacular form than preceding works. However, one thing his vernacular publications have in common is that they were mostly edited or revised renditions of earlier works, and arguably, each type of work was shaped by the particular conventions of the genre as understood by Feng Menglong and his contemporaries. For example, the huaben short stories were often reworkings of earlier tales, including some composed in the classical language. Some of these, too, deal with transgressive human relations and portray strong pro-active female protagonists who fall in love or engage in adulterous affairs. While the author shows apparent sympathy for the dilemmas of the central protagonists, sexual transgression often meets with terrible retribution and many such stories point a moral concerning sexual indiscretion.Footnote ¹⁵ This can leave the reader, at least the modern reader, somewhat baffled with regard to the author or editor's actual intention in the work concerned. The best well-known exempla of this ambiguity is the story known in English as “The Pearl-sewn Shirt”, which is about a woman who commits adultery when her husband is off on his travels as a merchant. The tension and contradictions in Feng's treatment of the female protagonist have been discussed in a well-known study by Patrick Hanan.Footnote ¹⁶ Was Feng Menglong offering a new vista of free sexual expression in his Shan'ge of 1618–1619 only to revise his opinion in his edited compilation of the Sanyan short story anthologies only a few years later? Or, was he simply influenced in each case by the conventions of the different literary genres? Folk songs in Jiangnan, whether sung by villagers, town dwellers, or by prostitutes, were known past and present for their frank expression of sexual desire. Feng Menglong would have been familiar with the yuefu-style folk songs and their imitations, collected by Guo Maoqian 郭茂倩 (?1050–1126 CE), which included a section of some three hundred or so Wu songs, many transmitted from centuries earlier. These comprise short songs, often in the voice of a female lover, and are noted for their highly colloquial flavor and double entendres.Footnote ¹⁷

Both the modern-day Wu narrative songs and Feng's Shan'ge demonstrate sympathy for the predicament of the young lovers but both also reflect the inevitable social exclusion attendant on transgression. Whether the woman concerned is found out, or falls pregnant, she will have lost her reputation and her life will be ruined. Her lover will be sent away, his eyes blinded with lime ash (in some contemporary Wu songs), or sent to the magistrate on a trumped charge for execution. When these folk songs were recorded in different formats in the nineteenth century, the anonymous editor might well add a simple-minded moral not found in the original.Footnote ¹⁸ Mountain songs recorded in the contemporary period do not contain an explicit moral message, but the audience is left in no doubt about the serious consequences of sexual transgression. Similarly, the readers of Feng's Shan'ge Chapter 1 would have enjoyed reading and singing the risqué material, but understood very well the dire consequences for the female lover, at least.

As both Santangelo and Ōki observe, the collection itself is quite heterogeneous. Santangelo says of the women in Chapter 1 that they are “real women” (p. 56), whereas the women of the final chapters appear more likely to be prostitutes. The language becomes cruder as love becomes reduced to the gratification of urgent desire. Chapters 1 to 4 tend to be told through the medium of a woman's voice and comprise four-line stanzas. These songs appear to fit into an implicit narrative of courtship and love. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with sexual desire, are sung from the male point of view, and appear to relate to the sorts of song sung by courtesans and clients in the pleasure quarters (p. 23). Chapter 6 comprises songs about objects, here infused with sexual associations. Chapter 7 contains songs of “middle length”, longer, that is, and more complex than the typical four-line stanzaic structure of earlier chapters. In order to provide a relatively homogeneous collection for the modern reader, Shan'ge Chapters 8–10, dealing with longer shan'ge and popular songs from Tongcheng 桐城 in Anhui, are not included in the translation given here.

The songs in the later chapters portray women as objects used by men and discarded when no longer desired. The tone is one of grievance and complaint, quite different from the eager women of the earlier chapters. Ōki observes that later songs take us far away from “the positive image of women” of the first two chapters (p. 24). Overall, the contradictions identified by Ōki and Santangelo make it difficult to speak of a unified authorial perspective, including an ideology of liberated sexual expression. The songs appear to come from different sources and it is not the intention of the author/compiler to revise them to reflect a coherent point of view. They were produced for entertainment and to assist the joys of the bedchamber.Footnote ¹⁹ Mountain songs circulated in written and printed form to cater to those who sought private pleasure. A fictional work of the era, Huanxi yuanjia 歡喜冤家, relates an episode where a young man reveals an interest in what appears to be a print version of a shan'ge narrative about a secret love affair.Footnote ²⁰ Kathryn Lowry believes that Feng's anthology could be understood as “compositional” in nature, that is, it served as an aid for performance and further composition by its readers, especially within the courtesan culture of Jiangnan.Footnote ²¹ Nor did the text prove a model for the development of a Wu language popular literature. Imitations of the Wu dialect songs were made in the final decades of the Ming, but for several hundred years during the subsequent Qing conquest, Feng's Shan'ge was virtually invisible in Chinese publishing history. The text we know today is based on one rediscovered in Anhui in 1935. At this time it was hailed as the voice of the common people and accorded a favorable niche in the history of Chinese vernacular literature. However, in its own day, it seems highly probable that the Shan'ge would have primarily served as salacious reading and an aid to the composition of erotic songs by both courtesans and their clients amongst the intelligentsia of Jiangnan.

The second “book” in Shan'ge, the Mountain Songs is a compilation in alphabetic order of expressions associated in some way with the emotions drawn from the Shan'ge. The glossary, comprising some 250 pages, is preceded by an introduction written by Santangelo where he explains his categorization scheme and the purpose of the glossary. It contains words that elicit emotions, including appellations, epithets, symbolic descriptions, idiomatic expressions and items deemed to have an emotional resonance such as yuanfen 緣分 (‘predestined affinity’). His goal is to provide the reader with not just a dictionary of these expressions but also to “collect information on the way of representation, evaluation and perception of emotional and imagery [sic] phenomena, in order to re-construct fragments of mental representations of inner and outer reality” (p. 293). He seeks to contribute to the “history of mentality” and open up the different emotional experience of the Chinese in the imperial past, in this way offering “new interpretive patterns” in the study of the history of the emotions (p. 301). Santangelo is aware of the dangers of using literary representations as reflections of actual behavior (p. 301, note 30), but does not linger over these essential differences in this volume.Footnote ²²

On turning to the glossary, the reader will likely be impressed by the sheer volume of the words relating to sexuality and the expression of emotions. All references in Shan'ge for a particular term are given with Chinese script, English translation, and additional explanation. This offers a particular richness that will surely open up new areas for further exploration, especially when examined in tandem with Santangelo's other works on the emotions and sexuality in works of the Ming and Qing period.Footnote ²³ For example, the word ku 苦 (‘bitter’) is glossed with five citations, each one adding an additional layer of nuance. A woman is “bitter to the bottom of my belly” when her lover fails to come; her love-longing is like “the pain of a convict” confined to a solitary bed. Prevented by watching eyes from meeting her lover, she is reminded of the bitter liquid from the amur cork tree. A male lover laments the numerous guests his favored girl has entertained, just like a teapot infused over and over again, leaving only bitter dregs to drink. A wife, thwarted by her husband in carrying out her assignation, feels the sourness of unripe green plums (p. 413). The glossary contains a huge number of words for sexualized parts of the body: mantou 饅頭 (‘steamed buns’) and liang chong shan 兩重山 (‘double-peaked mountains’) for breasts, bang 蚌 (‘mussel’) for the female organ, and so on. It offers numerous imaginative terms for love-making and seduction, for example, cai hua 採花 (‘picking up flowers’) and caoqin 操琴 (‘playing the lute’), chan 鏟 (‘work with a shovel’), chi kuai rou 吃塊肉 (‘eating meat’). When a girl resists the wiles of a man it is like opening an unripe hairy peach (shengmaotao yao chi 生毛桃要喫). While some of these terms are known to compositions in classical Chinese, the majority are fresh, vibrant terms belonging to the Suzhou vernacular. Not all of the terms deal specifically with emotions. One striking image that does is kongbaixiang 空白鯗 (‘holed dried fish’), here glossed as ‘vain rethinking due to unhappy love’. In this volume, Santangelo says little about how this linguistic study of Shan'ge adds to his earlier work on love and sexuality in Chinese culture. No doubt that will be the topic of future study. In the meantime, the reader is left with a rich collection of imagery dealing with emotional intensity.

Shan'ge, the Mountain Songs is a work of remarkable erudition. The authors have availed themselves of the latest scholarship on Wu language to render the Shan'ge collection in clear and often poetic English. The provision of Chinese text, together with relevant woodblock prints, makes reading this book a delectable experience. Scholars of the literature and history of the late Ming period, and anyone with an interest in the expression of love and sexuality in Chinese culture, will owe a debt of gratitude to Ōki Yasushi and Paolo Santangelo in opening up these Suzhou erotic songs for further analysis and exploration.