Huaben

In the development of Chinese fiction, the huaben are heirs of the zhiguai xiaoshuo, chuanqi, bianwen (Buddhist tales), and are the predecessors of the stories and long-length novels of the Ming.

The Tales of the Serene Mountain (Chinese: 清平山堂話本; pinyin: Qīngpíng Shāntáng huàběn), published in 1550 by Hong Pian, a bibliophile in Hangzhou, is the oldest known printed collection of Song huaben.

It originally contained 60 huaben texts from the Song and Yuan dynasties, but fewer than half have survived, almost all considered of low quality.

In form, a poem often served as prologue, another at the end gave the moral of the story, and the body of the tale included passages in verse.

As educated scholars with considerable literary talents but no means of support, they collected and edited earlier stories and wrote new ones which appealed to the new public.

Although they used the storytellers' oral conventions of the earlier huaben, their new stories were sophisticated and self-conscious works of art to which these authors proudly signed their names, rather than publishing anonymously, as did the novelists.

As Shuhu Yang, the recent translator of the first two volumes, comments, the "Three Words" collections provide a "vivid panoramic view of the bustling world of imperial China before the end of the Ming; we see not only scholars, emperors, ministers and generals, but a gallery of men and women in their everyday surroundings – merchants and artisans, prostitutes and courtesans, matchmakers and fortune tellers, monks and nuns, servants and maids, likes and dislikes, their views of life and death, and even their visions of the netherworld and the supernatural".

[2] Around 1640, an anthology, Jingu Qiguan (Curious Shows New and Old), comprising some forty stories extracted without acknowledgment from Ling and Feng's works, was so successful that the names of these two authors were eclipsed until they were rediscovered in the 20th century by scholars such as Lu Xun.

Hu Shih, Lu Xun, and Jaroslav Průšek among others believed in the Song origins of these stories; while Kōjirō Yoshikawa, Patrick Hanan and others disagreed.