Abstract:
Translator’s Introduction
Thus it is that, for the six years now since the Wushen year [1608], I have spent much of my time aboard a junk. As one junk fell into disrepair, I have had another built. Whenever I live in town I become as inflamed as if being cauterised with moxa, only finding release when I climb upon a junk. If when studying at home I can understand not a word of what I happen to be reading, on board a junk I become intoxicated with the copiousness of my reading notes. Or if I haven’t written a line of poetry during the course of a year spent on land, my poetic inspiration surges up again like a spring the moment I find myself within the cabin of a junk ... Such is the power of living on a junk.
Yuan Zhongdao, ‘Hou Fanfu ji’ [Record of My Second “Floating Wild Duck” Junk]
Yuan Zhongdao, the youngest of the three famous Yuan brothers of the late Ming period, never quite achieved either the official success of his eldest brother, Yuan Zongdao (1560-1600), or the literary reputation of the most famous of the three, Yuan Hongdao (1568-1610). To the mind of his earliest biographer, the great Qian Qianyi (1582-1664), his problem in the latter respect was certainly not due to any lack of talent. "Both your poetry and your prose", Qian records himself as telling Yuan on one occasion, "suffer from an excess of talent. Your travel records, for instance, if only you were to edit them severely, deleting more than half their text, could well stand alongside those of the ancients". "Excellent advice", Yuan had responded, "but although you may well be able to do this to them, I cannot, and I am myself forever fearful of the extent to which the gush of my inspiration tends to overflow the banks".
Yuan Zhongdao's diary, entitled Youju feilu [Notes Made Whilst Travelling and at Repose], Book One of which is translated here, is a remarkable work, perhaps in part by virtue of the superfluity spoken of by Qian Qianyi. Its thirteen books provide a detailed record of the years 1608-18,a period during which both Yuan Zhongdao's father and his beloved brother Hongdao died, whilst Zhongdao himself belatedly achieved the examination success long expected of him and took up the first of his official posts. Above all, the diary tells of the pleasure Yuan derived from his riverine travels throughout some of the most scenically beautiful parts of southern China, of the friends he encountered along his way and the private collections of painting and calligraphy that he was given access to. As such, it affords us a unique glimpse into the material, social and emotional world of a noted member of the scholarly elite of the late imperial period in China.
Yuan Zhongdao's collected works, entitled Kexuezhai ji [Collection of the Snowy White Jade Studio] and including his diary, was first published in his own lifetime, in 1618. The present translation is based on the version found in Qian Bocheng (ed.), Kexuezhai ji (Shanghai: Guji chubanshe, 1989). Reference has also been made to a recently published and lightly annotated version of the diary, Bu Wenying (ed.), Youju feilu (Shanghai: Yuandong chubanshe, 1996). A partial translation of Book One of this diary is included in Stephen Owen (trans.), An Anthology of Chinese Literature: Beginnings to 1911 (New York & London: W.W. Norton, 1996), pp. 823-26.
