SOURCE: Hsia, C. T. “Chin P'ing Mei.” In The Classic Chinese Novel, pp. 165-202. New York: Columbia University Press, 1968.

In this excerpt, Hsia uses the story of Lotus, a novel within the novel Chin P'ing Mei (The Golden Lotus), to illuminate the strengths and the moral attitude of the text. The extreme obscenity of some portions of the novel are, for Hsia, a key aspect of its forceful “moral realism,” and they represent some of the best writing in the work.

One cannot expect a work to possess ideological or philosophical coherence when it manifests such obvious structural anarchy. Yet, before one can properly appreciate the finer aspects of Chin P'ing Mei, one must attend to its often mutually contradictory moral and religious assumptions. On the whole, the novelist shares those ambivalent attitudes commonly seen in the colloquial tales of the Ming period: outward conformity with Confucian morality...