The Adventures of Ma Suzhen / East Asian Popular Culture (PDF)

Dr Amy Matthewson, author of Cartooning China: 'Punch', Power, and Politics in the Victorian Era.

Part newspaper shocker, part fact, part invention and many miles from The Dream of the Red Chamber, this is the sort of story people loved to read in early-twentieth-century China - an exciting and amusing example of truly popular Chinese fiction.

Dr Frances Wood, retired curator of the Chinese Collections in the British Library and author of many books, including Great Books of China(2017).

The comic novel, TheAdventures of Ma Suzhen, was written during a highpoint in the popularity of xia "knight-errant" fiction. It is an action-packed tale of a young woman who takes revenge for her brother, Ma Yongzhen, a gangster and performing strongman, who has been murdered by a rival gang in China's most cosmopolitan city, Shanghai. After publication of the book in 1923, the character of Ma Suzhen appeared on stage, and subsequently in a film made by the Mingxing Film Company. The book version translated here, displays a delightful combination of the xia and popular"Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies" genres, with additional elements of Gong'an "court case" fiction. The translation is followed by an essay that explores the background to the legend of Ma Suzhen - a fictional figure, whose exhilarating escapades reflect some of the new possibilities and freedoms available to women following the founding of the Chinese Republic.

Dr Paul Bevan is Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. His current research addresses a variety of themes concerning popular fiction and the visual arts as they appeared in periodicals and magazines published in Shanghai during the first decades of the twentieth century.