“More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams, and Sorcery” by Zhang Yingyu

Some years back as a graduate student enrolled in a mandatory DEI training for college teaching, I distinctly recall raising a question about dealing with the unabashed misogyny, depictions of sexual violence and child abuse bursting out of the primary sources so often used in the history classroom. Encountering More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams, and Sorcery, triggered the memory, especially when faced with an array of humorous yet disturbing stories about everyday social relations in 17th-century China.

A selection of short stories written by Zhang Yingyu (a late-Ming dynasty work published in 1617, here in translation by the capable duo of Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk at the University of British Columbia), More Swindles presents a series of short stories, each with a moral lesson for readers. Many tales simply deal with petty theft, deception, or common social vices like gambling and drinking, but a few dealing with rape and child abuse—especially those justified in the narrator’s moralizing—are quite horrific.
 

More Swindles from the Late Ming: Sex, Scams, and Sorcery, Zhang Yingyu, Bruce Rusk (trans), Christopher Rea (trans) (Columbia University Press, November 2024)

A volume ostensibly aimed at safeguarding its readers from crooks (the original title in Chinese reads “A new book for foiling swindlers, based on worldly experience”), the stories reflect moral anxieties and values— including the virtues of the victimised widow, antipathy towards monks, vices such as sex, greed, drink, gambling, which lead a man to ruin (xviii). For readers already familiar with Rea and Rusk’s work, More Swindles is the companion volume to a prior volume that first introduced a selection of Zhang Yingyu’s stories to contemporary Anglophone audiences. Comprising forty short stories and four captioned illustrations in the original, More Swindles promises to be a wonderful teaching resource and primer into widespread social norms and anxieties in late-Ming Chinese society, including, perhaps controversially, the extremely patriarchal social norms that structure the narrator’s moralizing at the end of each tale.

The editors have taken the liberty of grouping the forty stories collected in this volume into 23 types, roughly corresponding with the nature of the swindles enacted. Under thematic headings such as “Marriage”, “Women”, “On Boats” and “Money Changing”, the chapters in More Swindles can easily be approached individually, especially as companion readings to a separate lecture or lesson on any specific aspect of Ming-dynasty China. Reading through chronologically, the tales can get repetitive at times, as they all follow a somewhat formulaic pattern relating a story of crime or treachery involving specific people and places, followed by the author’s commentary.

The relaxed prose should make for easy reading while drawing readers into the worlds of late-Ming society in all its complex social relations. As with the first volume, Rusk and Rea have done an admirable job of communicating the tenor of Zhang’s writing, and Zhang’s words leap off the page in this breezy translation. Some stories hold sound advice for the contemporary reader, like “Robbed by Crooks in Broad Daylight While Taking a Dump” which exhorts solo travellers to vigilance. In other instances, the simplicity in the narrative also makes for less-than-ideal stories, where the caricatures of a buffoon seduced by material gain and physical pleasure (for instance: “Incitement to Drinking and Whoring Ruins Health and Reputation”) fall short in terms of narrative tension.
 

Our late-Ming author Zhang Yingyu’s penchant for excessive moralizing inflected with a dose of patriarchy, especially in the face of frank depictions of sexual violence, makes for difficult reading at times. For instance, “A Villain Kidnaps Boys by Touching Their Face” is a horrific story of how a renegade monk turns boys into sex slaves; he is condemned with colorful language. In contrast, another tale of a dual domestic rape—“A Man Rapes His Daughter And Then Tricks Her Mother Into Sex”—concludes with the prosaic point that “women should not lightly visit the homes of their in-laws,” with the important caveat that, in any case, “women’s nature is as pliable as water and just as easily corrupted”. It is in such instances where More Swindles, if employed as a teaching tool, would benefit from the instructor’s interventions to highlight these discrepancies.

As a “landmark Chinese contribution to the literature of fraud” (from the back cover), Rusk and Rea have done an admirable job of producing a readily accessible window into late-Ming society, in all its moral anxieties and perceived failings. With the appropriate interventions, it would make for an excellent teaching resource where students can engage with the dilemmas of a fraying social fabric through the lens of one commentator’s attempts to preserve the values at the core of Chinese society in flux.


Joshua Tan is a Singapore-based historian and researcher.