Ping Shan Leng Yan

[5] Classical Chinese scholar and Yale professor Chloë Starr lists Ping Shan Leng Yan along with Yu jiao li and Haoqiu zhuan as one of the three best-known examples of the caizi jiaren genre.

[6] Miss Shan Dai, a beautiful girl, is so talented that she passes the challenging tests set by her tutor and impresses her father, an imperial official.

Miss Leng Jiangxue, also a talented young woman, is sent from a poor family to be Shan's maid, on the way sees a striking poem written by an impoverished student, Ping Ruheng.

[7] The plot climaxes in a poetry contest in which the two young ladies defeat Ping and Yan in a competition to write the best poem, and in the end their marriages are approved by the emperor himself.

Here, the characters, Song Xin (C: 宋 信, P: Sòng Xìn, W: Sung Hsin) and Dou Guoyi (T: 竇國一, S: 窦国一, P: Dòu Guóyī, W: To Kuo-i), plagiarize poems written by Ping and Yan and pretend to be poets.

Cover of Ping Shan Leng Yan , from the Hanan collection, Harvard-Yenching Library, Harvard University.
Pages from chapter nine of the novel