with poems.  But most of all, it was written in everyday language, not in the language of the gentry.  To this day every Chinese knows and reads with enthusiasm Shui-hu-chuan ("The Story of the River Bank"), probably written about 1550 by Wang Tao-k’un, in which the ruling class was first described in its decay.  Against it are held up as ideals representatives of the middle class in the guise of the gentleman brigand.  Every Chinese also knows the great satirical novel Hsi-yu-chi ("The Westward Journey"), by Feng Meng-lung (1574-1645), in which ironical treatment is meted out to all religions and sects against a mythological background, with a freedom that would not have been possible earlier.  The characters are not presented as individuals but as representatives of human types:  the intellectual, the hedonist, the pious man, and the simpleton, are drawn with incomparable skill, with their merits and defects.  A third famous novel is San-kuo yen-i ("The Tale of the Three Kingdoms"), by Lo Kuan-chung.  Just as the European middle class read with avidity the romances of chivalry, so the comfortable class in China was enthusiastic over romanticized pictures of the struggle of the gentry in the third century.  “The Tale of the Three Kingdoms” became the model for countless historical novels of its own and subsequent periods.  Later, mainly in the sixteenth century, the sensational and erotic novel developed, most of all in Nanking.  It has deeply influenced Japanese writers, but was mercilessly suppressed by the Chinese gentry which resented the frivolity of this wealthy and luxurious urban class of middle or small gentry families who associated with rich merchants, actors, artists and musicians.  Censorship of printed books had started almost with the beginning of book printing as a private enterprise:  to the famous historian, anti-Buddhist and conservative Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072), the enemy of Wang An-shih, belongs the sad glory of having developed the first censorship rules.  Since Ming time, it became a permanent feature of Chinese governments.

The best known of the erotic novels is the Chin-p’ing-mei which, for reasons of our own censors can be published only in expurgated translations.  It was written probably towards the end of the sixteenth century.  This novel, as all others, has been written and re-written by many authors, so that many different versions exist.  It might be pointed out that many novels were printed in Hui-chou, the commercial centre of the time.

The short story which formerly served the entertainment of the educated only and which was, therefore, written in classical Chinese, now also became a literary form appreciated by the middle classes.  The collection Chin-ku ch’i-kuan ("Strange Stories of New Times and Old"), compiled by Feng Meng-lung, is the best-known of these collections in vernacular Chinese.

Little original work was done in the Ming epoch in the fields generally regarded as “literature” by educated Chinese, those of poetry and the essay.  There are some admirable essays, but these are only isolated examples out of thousands.  So also with poetry:  the poets of the gentry, united in “clubs”, chose the poets of the Sung epoch as their models to emulate.