Yuletide again!

[telophase]

The author notes are now live on my story Three Jade Mice, so you can go look and see what elements are real, as in I pulled them from Chinese history or mythology, and which aren't. :)

But I'm copying them here also, so you can read them without putting too much load on the server. The Peking Gazette is one of the TWO NIFTY THINGS I discovered that I couldn't post about without potentially giving away my fandom. :) The other one is below the cut...

(And feel free to comment to let me know someone's actually out there reading. My inbox has been so quiet lately it feels I'm writing in a void...)



Thank you very much to kate_nepveu for beta services, and to mscongeniality and Chomiji for plot-noodling!

The tale of the three jade mice and the Golden Silk Cat is a Chinese folktale I ran across that is meant to explain how the Cat Bridge in Hangzhou got its name. In it, a treasure hunter identifies a cat belonging to an old stonemason as a Golden Silk Cat and manages to buy it from him. He and his assistant set off after three jade mice that are inexplicably frolicking on top of a temple but lose them when the Golden Silk Cat turns them into inert jade figurines. The assistant forgot to bring a net and the mice smash to smithereens on the pavement. Unfortunately I can't tell you the name of the book I found it in, as I got it through itnerlibrary loan and returned it before making a note of the title. Oops!

The Peking Gazette is the world's oldest continually published newspaper, having been started during the Tang Dynasty, when the Master Li and Number Ten Ox saga is purportedly set. If you search in Google Books you can find several collections of the newspaper from the late 19th century translated into English, scanned, and made into PDFs. I took the Kaifeng story from the 1873 edition. [Note: Or go here, which has six editions from the 19th century posted as PDFs.)

The Ming Dynasty is a treasure-trove of short stories and fairy tales. Master Li's silver-changing con is one of them. I took it from "The Swindler Alchemist," found in Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations, edited by Y. W. Ma and Joseph M. Lau.

[Note: SECOND COOL THING below!]

Digital Maps of Old Beijing (http://dsr.nii.ac.jp/beijing-maps/index.html.en) is where I found a nifty Google Earth app that contains a 250-year-old map of Beijing (formerly Peking) overlaid on the current city. I found the three temples there. I have absolutely no idea what the scale is, so it may be physically impossible for Ox to run to all three places in one night, and I don't believe any of them existed during the Tang Dynasty. But as the canon merrily mixes together elements from all over time and space, I figured I could do the same.

It bothered me that the only woman with a speaking role I have is a bit of a shrieking harridan, but then I realized that as a woman without any surviving male relatives in that time and in that place, she has every right to be panicking about her future. Plus, the story is told from Ox's point of view and he wouldn't necessarily think about her situation as he usually emphasizes with peasants instead of the slightly higher class of genteel-but-poor city folk. I think she's earned every shriek.

And finally, I recommend everyone with a hankering for nifty weird stuff look for Chinese anecdote collections such as In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record (original Sou-shen Chi), edited by Kenneth DeWeskin and J. I. Crump, Jr. and Chinese Chronicles of the Strange: The 'Nugao ji' by Duan Chengshi, translated by Carrie E. Reed. These are examples of a genre that eventually developed into stories such as those found in Pu Songling's Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, and basically represent compendiums of short accounts of News of the Weird set down by scholars through the centuries. You get everything from omens to two-headed calves to fox stories to Taoist tricksters to ghost stories to fairy tales, all of them wonderful. I got Yang Wei's posthumous appearance to his mother, warning of an official's impending death, and his afterlife promotion, from one of them.

Comments

[ruffwriter.livejournal.com]

(I know what you mean about writing into a void... I felt the same way about some of my Yuletide fics this year.)

I don't know the fandom you wrote it, but your story was so fun, and I loved all the different references to folklore. It made me want to know more about the canon!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The canon is wonderful! :D Yeah, there are problems - there's the issue of female characters in the series, as well as the question of how far it goes over into the cultural-appropriation side of things, as Hughart takes all sorts of Chinese mythology and history and Western stereotypes of the East and throws it in a huge blender, then pours it out on the page - but I think it's still worth reading. The first book, Bridge of Birds, is better than the two sequels. BoB is very fairy-tale in feel, while Hughart manages to lose that and goes a bit more for the grotesque in his next two, but I'd still have been looking for more if I'd read one of those two first.

[chisotahn]

:o Oh! Oh, my, I love those books. <3

Er. Well. Book. I've only read Bridge of Birds, as the other two are a bit challenging to find, but I loved it. :3

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

That google earth app is so awesome! And clearly, the universe wants me to read the canon.

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

I didn't read this when I went through Yuletide myself last week because I wasn't familiar with the original. (I tend to wait for recs to read things I'm not familiar with.)

I loved it. :) Especially love the Awesome Things you linked to here in your notes!

:)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :D The best part of this is that it gave me an excuse to reread In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record and search out a couple more compendiums. China's legends and folklore are fascinating. Often quite insane, but always interesting. XD