The Book of Swindles 杜騙新書 (1617 preface) is said to be the first Chinese collection of stories about fraud. Addressed primarily to traveling merchants of the late Ming era, the work offers eighty-odd tales of swindles attempted and accomplished, most of which are followed by an author’s comment that drives home the lesson for the traveling businessman. The work’s combination of alarmism about endemic bad faith in society and got-to-hand-it-to-‘em acknowledgment of the con artist’s skill chimes with certain concerns our own age. The Book has been translated into English as The Book of Swindles (Columbia, 2017) and More Swindles from the Late Ming (Columbia, 2024).
While mostly written in simple classical Chinese, the original work presents a host of challenges for the scholar-translator. The Book has multiple titles. The table of contents don’t match the contents. Entire stories are missing from some copies. Multiple stories share traces of a common, obscure, origin. Other stories drop in a word or two of local slang. Printer errors abound. Here and there appear unmarked puns, allusions, subtexts, and intertexts. Translations of the work into modern Chinese mislead. The author, Zhang Yingyu, is an enigma. In this talk, co-translators Bruce Rusk and Christopher Rea will talk about how they identified and navigated these and other challenges, and share wise, wise words for scholars treading into similarly perilous terrains.
This talk is free and open to the public. No registration is required.
Date & Time:
Thursday, January 16, 2025 | 12:30pm – 1:30pm
Location:
CK Choi Building, Room 120, 1855 West Mall, Vancouver
Speakers
Bruce Rusk is a cultural historian of China who studies the Ming (1368–1644) through mid-Qing (1644–1911) periods. His work focuses on textual studies, literary culture, writing systems, and the history of trust and authenticity. He is an associate professor in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Christopher Rea is a literary and cultural historian whose research focuses on the modern Chinese-speaking world. He is a Professor of Modern Chinese Literature in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.
This event is co-hosted by the Department of Asian Studies at UBC and the Centre for Chinese Research at UBC.
