With the publication of the second volume, More Swindles, translators Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk (or Rusk and Rea) have made available all 84 tales in Jianghu lilan dupian xinshu 江湖曆覽杜騙新書 (A New Book for Foiling Swindles, Based on Worldly Experience, preface dated 1617, printed in Jianyang, Fujian). Now we have engaging translations of all the scams and swindles that Zhang Yingyu 張應俞 (fl. 1612–1617) compiled into twenty-four types.Footnote ¹ These tales are set in the late Ming (sixteenth to early seventeenth century) in southeastern China, at a time when the economy had become based on silver, the result of imports of the metal first from Japan and later from Spanish colonies in the Americas.

The point of these stories is to demonstrate the myriad ways a person could be cheated—or might avoid being cheated—in that commercial age. Every brief tale names its central characters and the place where the scam occurs. Each one narrates how a patsy in a convincing, often commercial, setting is taken advantage of by one or more con artists who fleece the victim for their own benefit. Usually the goal is financial gain, although enhanced social position and power are sometimes the desired outcome. A few swindles are carried out as revenge for some personal slight or out of jealousy. Many of the perpetrators get away with their crimes, leaving their marks feeling foolish and generally much poorer than before. In effect, the work could serve as a handy how-to manual for prospective thieves. But in offering a litany of warnings for the unwary, Zhang seemingly wanted to forestall, rather than encourage losses to quick-witted crooks.

Each of the twenty-four categories of personal catastrophe and criminal success has several short stories illustrating a central theme. A sage commentary follows each tale; compiler Zhang Yingyu points out how such swindles could have been avoided and the perpetrator at least foiled, if not apprehended. Rea and Rusk characterize Zhang as “a critic keenly interested in the dangers faced by common people, especially traveling merchants” (Book of Swindles, xiv). At the least, the tone of these tales suggests their author’s disgust at the prevalence of deception and heartlessness in his society and a certain degree of scorn for many of his contemporaries, including dull-witted scholars, eunuchs, women, Buddhist monks, and Daoist priests. His comments do demonstrate some admiration for the ingenuity behind the more spectacular capers, however.

A little over half of Zhang Yingyu’s tales were translated in The Book of Swindles; More Swindles completes the lot. Rea and Rusk have chosen to translate everything, without avoiding rough terminology. In general, they adopt a natural-sounding, colloquial style of English; their renderings of conversations are witty and fun to read. They also have remarkable success in finding just the right turn of phrase to capture the euphemistic meanings of slang terms in the original. They do not hesitate to employ vulgar American terms, making the racier parts of the narratives a little surprising for scholarly volumes.

Both volumes begin with concise and illuminating Introductions that analyze the structure, characterization, and psychological insights of the stories. Many stories share stock characters with contemporary fiction and theater, but often with greater insights into human foibles. Rea and Rusk describe the tales’ world, the jianghu 江湖 or underworld, as a realm of types: traveling scholars, merchants, fugitives, hustlers, highwaymen, prostitutes, and the poor and nameless lower class of working people in general, usually separated at least temporarily from supporting families. Zhang Tingyu’s characters are not distinct individuals as much as people who fill particular social roles. A few characters are historical, but facts are not relevant where all characters exhibit common faults. Given the number of tales that warn traveling merchants of potential traps, Rusk and Rea suggest that the intended audience might well have been the rising class of somewhat educated traders (Book of Swindles, xxii).

The Introductions survey the social and economic settings assumed by these stories: the world of long-distance trade and the family values that bound women to the home while men traveled widely for the sake of profit. The problems of a silver economy are examined in both volumes; the second volume includes a long exposition on the varying grades of silver then in commercial circulation (87–93) that may have been copied from a manual designed for merchants (More Swindles, xi). The stories accurately portray the traditional family system, as well as the stereotypes of Buddhist monks and Daoist priests common in that era. The first volume has a pair of maps (x, xi) indicating where these traveling merchants made their purchases and their destinations. More Swindles has a detailed analysis of the four illustrations from the first edition, none of which refers to any story in the collection. Illustrations were conventionally added to works of fiction during the late Ming; these may have been commissioned by the printer to enhance sales, a bit of subterfuge in itself: it takes fairly extensive explaining before Rea and Rusk can connect their content—even metaphorically—with the themes and substance of the stories. Both volumes conclude with finding lists that match translations with their originals in the first edition of 1617, a copy of which is preserved in the Tōyō Bunka Kenkyūjo at Tokyo University.

Many of the tales are amusing, allowing readers to chuckle over how stupid people can be in handling their cash or their goods. One, in Type 1, “Misdirection and Theft” (脫剝騙), is entitled “A Clever Trick on a Pig Seller” (明騙販豬): a pig seller meets a stranger as he travels through a deserted spot on the highway; the stranger suggests taking one pig out of its cage for inspection before settling on a price—but then he sets the pig down and chases it away, circling back to release the other three pigs as a diversion. The livestock merchant does retrieve the three, but the stranger easily gets away with the one (Book of Swindles, 9–10). In “A Fake Carpenter Fixes a Moneychanger’s Desk Drawer” (詐匠脩換錢桌廚) in the same section, a crook notices that a moneychanger leaves his cashbox unattended every day when he goes home for lunch. Disguised as a carpenter, the crook removes the box, telling bystanders that he’s been hired to make a new one, then breaking it open once he is out of sight (More Swindles, 12–13). In a third entry of that category, Encountering the Village Head and Then Stealing a Teapot” (遇里長及脫茶壺), a crook offers to go buy wine and food on behalf of his gullible host, then disappears with the money (More Swindles, 2–5). The story “Acquiring a Bedroll by Secretly Marking It” (私打憂占鋪陳) in Type 11, “Violence” (強搶騙,) narrates an incident on a boat. A naïve young man declares that a notorious crook should be arrested. The “thug” (刁民) in question happens to be on that very boat; taking offense, he stamps his name on the young man’s fine new bedroll, then claims it before the local magistrate, who awards it to him. The moral of this story is that “one ought to be careful before broadcasting the faults of a person one does not know” (More Swindles, 63–65). The intended reader surely thinks, “I would not be so foolish!”

Other tales reveal an unflinching male chauvinism. In the tale “Fleeced After an Affair with a Broker’s Daughter” (姦牙人女被脫騙) in Type 17, “Illicit Passion” (姦情騙), after a passionate affair with a young woman, a young and handsome trader wins permission to marry her without penalty. However, her mother had been willing to kill the young woman over her lost virginity and with it her suitability for the high-class wedding the older woman aspired to. Worse yet, since all his resources have been lost through the judicial system, the handsome young man cavalierly gives her up to another man in return for a matchmaker’s fee (More Swindles, 125–28). The mother’s violence is suggested but not carried out; nor does the young man feel any more obligation to his lover than she does.

Some tales seem like sober rehearsals of common complaints, such as the manipulation of justice when officials are bribed. In Type 15, “Government Underlings” (衙役騙), the story “A Trumped-Up Death Sentence Is Commuted to Exile” (故擬重罪釋犯人) pits two wealthy families against each other. It presents an upright magistrate who will not be bribed, although his underlings happily accept a huge amount of silver for converting a false claim of a capital crime into an equally false lesser offence, with the relatively light sentence of three years of exile for the hapless accused. This keeps the official’s reputation pure, while it satisfies both wealthy families—at least minimally (More Swindles, 96–98).

In the Introduction to More Swindles, the translators warn the reader that they have “saved the worst for last.” That is, this volume “includes more misdirection and theft, more false relations, more robbery and violence, more swindles on boats, more illicit passion, more devious monks and priests, more child abuse, and more sorcery” (More Swindles, ix, x). Indeed, the cruelty recorded here is hard to read. One such tale is “A Gang Blinds and Amputates Children, Leaving Them Maimed” (刺眼刖腳陷殘疾) in Type 19, “Kidnapping” (拐帶騙); it even details the amputation of the foot at the arch, an operation undertaken in the dead of winter, when the child’s foot is nearly frozen, to avoid pain. How the children are blinded is not recounted, thankfully. Children maimed by these gangs are then put out on the street to beg and are regularly beaten or starved if they do not get enough money to support the gang members. In this tale, an old woman recognizes a girl victim five years after her abduction; this kind person alerts the girl’s relatives, and a criminal investigation begins. The crooks bribe the local assistant magistrate to dodge the charge, but when the magistrate himself hears the girl’s cries, he quickly arrests the abductors. The outcome is fanciful: the magistrate binds them in cangues and allows the families of the abducted children to have access to them. Before long the criminals have been beaten to death (More Swindles, 140–43). According to The Great Ming Code (大明律), Article 298, kidnappers should be punished by ninety strokes of the heavy rod—which could easily produce fatal injuries—and permanent exile. If their victims are killed, the perpetrators should be strangled.Footnote ² Thus, the poetic justice here corresponds roughly with the legal regulations of the late Ming.

Despite the claim in the second volume, The Book of Swindles also contains horrendous stories. In a tale about how government personnel, especially eunuch tax collectors, skim off major portions of tax payments, depriving the court and impoverishing merchants and farmers (again Type 19), “A Eunuch Cooks Boys to Make a Tonic of Male Essence” (太監烹人服精髓), Zhang Yingyi introduces a bizarre situation: a greedy Daoist convinces a court eunuch that—for a price—he can brew a tonic that would restore his male member, allowing him to have sexual relations with women. But the tonic requires the liver, flesh, and marrow of young boys. The eunuch’s henchmen buy numerous young boys from poor families in remote villages before his depravity is finally revealed (Book of Swindles, 145–49). Perhaps the worst-sounding story, from Type 21 “Monks and Priests” 僧道騙, is “Eating Human Fetuses to Fake Fasting” (服孩兒丹詐辟谷). A monk claims to live without eating, only consuming water every other day. Ultimately, he is exposed: his prayer beads are made from the fetuses of boy children that he used to make a soup with the water—which requires killing the pregnant mothers as well (Book of Swindles, 179–85). Preposterous as these tales seem, they do reveal the author’s deep revulsion for Buddhist monks and Daoist clerics, a not uncommon sentiment at that time.

So what can we take from this delightful—but often sobering—collection? Perhaps that there are fools, the gullible, and the vulnerable in all places and at all times, and that there are always the greedy, the envious, and the malicious who would take advantage of them. To borrow further lessons from different times and cultures, “What fools these mortals be!” and “There is no new thing under the sun.”Footnote ³ But as a view into the seamy sides of late Ming society, these volumes are invaluable.