Jin Ping Mei

Lore & Background

Jin Ping Mei is framed as a spin-off from Water Margin. The beginning chapter is based on an episode in which 'Tiger Slayer' Wu Song avenges the murder of his older brother by brutally killing his brother's former wife and murderer, Pan Jinlian. In Water Margin, Ximen Qing is killed by Wu Song; in Jin Ping Mei, he dies from an overdose of aphrodisiacs administered by Jinlian to keep him aroused. The intervening sections, however, differ in almost every way from Water Margin.

Reader's Guide

Jin Ping Mei is considered a landmark in the development of the narrative art form, noted for its surprisingly modern technique. David Tod Roy calls it, with the possible exception of The Tale of Genji and Don Quixote, an earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature. The novel has been described as a 'milestone' in Chinese fiction for its character development, particularly its complex treatment of female figures. For centuries identified as pornographic and officially banned most of the time, the book has nevertheless been read surreptitiously by many of the educated class. The early Qing dynasty critic Zhang Zhupo remarked that those who regard Jin Ping Mei as pornographic 'read only the pornographic passages.' The American scholar Andrew H. Plaks ranks Jin Ping Mei as one of the 'Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel' along with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Journey to the West, which collectively constitute a technical breakthrough and reflect new cultural values and intellectual concerns.

Did You Know?

• The novel takes its name from the three central female characters: Pan Jinlian, Li Ping'er, and Pang Chunmei.
• Ximen Qing has 19 sexual partners and there are 72 detailed sexual episodes, but these account for less than 3 percent of the novel's over one million words.
• The identity of the author remains unestablished, with proposed candidates including Xu Wei, Wang Shizhen, Li Kaixian, Tang Xianzu, and Bai Yue.
• The novel contains extensive quotations and appropriations from vernacular stories, pornography, histories, dramas, popular songs, jokes, and official gazettes.