Travels, dreams and collecting of the past: a study of "Qiantang meng" (A dream by Qiantang River) in late Imperial Chinese literature

My dissertation primarily investigates the vast literary corpus of “Qiantang meng”

錢塘夢 (A dream by Qiantang River, 1499, QTM hereafter), the earliest preserved

specimen of the Chinese vernacular story of the “courtesan” 煙粉 category, which

appears first in the mid-Hongzhi 弘治period (1488-1505). The story treats a Song

scholar Sima You 司馬槱 (?) who traveled in Qiantang and dreamed of a legendary Su

Xiaoxiao 蘇小小, a well-educated and talented courtesan who supposedly lived during

the Southern Qi 南齊 (479-520). Fundamentally, I am concerned with how and why an

early medieval five-character Chinese poem, questionably attributed to Su Xiaoxiao

herself, developed across the later period of pre-modern Chinese literary history into an

extensive repertoire that retold the romantic stories in a variety of distinctive literary

genres: poems, lyric songs, essays, dramas, ballads, vernacular stories, miscellaneous

notes, biographical sketches, etc. The thematic interest of my research is to evaluate how

travel and dream experiences interactively form a mode whose characteristics could help

develop a clearer understanding of biji 筆記 (miscellaneous notes) as a genre which is

representational and presentational, exhibiting a metadramatic textual pastiche that

collects both fact and fiction. The timeless popularity of QTM storylines reflect and

express the trope of the “travel and dream” experience. This is something of a “living”

complex of elements through which a textual community in later generations can

reconstruct their authorial and cultural identity by encountering, remembering and

reproducing those elements in the form of autobiographical and biographical expression

of a desiring subject. Travel and dream experiences are cross-referenced, internally

dialogical, mutually infiltrating, and even metaphorically interchangeable. They are

intertwined to create a liminal realm of pastiches in which we can better examine how the

literati in the Yuan (1271-1368), Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties

formed their own views about a past which shapes and is shaped by both collective and

individual memory. Such retellings both construct and challenge our understanding of the

complex networks of lexical and thematic exchange in the colloquial literary landscape

during the late imperial period.