Ling Mengchu

Ling Mengchu (

In addition family members were actively engaged in the printing business with a local specialty of books in polychrome. The Wucheng area was adjacent to the commercial and cultural areas of Hangzhou and Suzhou where reading materials were in increasing demand. Ling Mengchu was certainly a merchant businessman and also certainly a traditional scholar with civil service ambitions.

The business motive of the Ling family was originally discussed by Ling Mengchu’s contemporary Xie Zhaozhe (谢肇浙 1567-1624) in his Wu zazu (五雜俎 - Five Assorted Offerings). Such were the times. Ling repeatedly failed at the examinations and did not take a government post until he was fifty-four. Ling would finally perish in fighting against the Li Zicheng led rebels in 1644.^[2] He is frequently associated with Feng Menglong.

Works

Ling’s Two Slaps collections of short stories (Slapping the Table in Amazement and Slapping the Table in Amazement, vol. 2) comprise a detailed composite portrait of his 17th century moral world, offering tales of virtue, vice, and adventure. Sometimes racy, often outrageous, and wildly imaginative, they have remained popular reading for centuries. While focusing on extraordinary events, the narratorial attitude alternates openness toward the unorthodox with reflexive Confucian conservatism, a mix also found in contemporaneous works such as Feng Menglong's Three Words trio of story collections and Zhang Yingyu's The Book of Swindles. Ling was most strongly influenced by Feng Menglong, whose success he acknowledged as having emboldened him to publish commercially.

In the prefatory material to his first short story collection he insisted it was infinitely more difficult to paint a likeness of a dog or horse one had actually seen than to render a ghost or goblin one had never observed (a quotation from Han Feizi).

Notes