The more things change,the more they stay the same.

“What’s the oldest scam in the book? Nobody knows, but at least we have the oldest book about scams in China. It’s called The Book of Swindles, and finally, after four hundred years, Rea and Rusk have presented us with a vivid and entertaining new translation of this classic. Even the chapter titles—’Eating Human Fetuses to Fake Fasting’; ‘Swindling the Salt Commissioner While Disguised as Daoists’—are as priceless as anything else produced during the Ming dynasty.”

— Peter Hessler

This is an age of deception. Con men ply the roadways. Bogus alchemists pretend to turn one piece of silver into three. Devious nuns entice young women into adultery. Sorcerers use charmed talismans for mind control and murder. A pair of dubious monks extorts money from a powerful official and then spends it on whoring. A rich student tries to bribe the chief examiner, only to hand his money to an imposter. A eunuch kidnaps boys and consumes their "essence" in an attempt to regrow his penis. These are just a few of the entertaining and surprising tales to be found in this seventeenth-century work, said to be the earliest Chinese collection of swindle stories.
The Book of Swindles, compiled by an obscure writer from southern China, presents a fascinating tableau of criminal ingenuity. The flourishing economy of the late Ming period created overnight fortunes for merchants—and gave rise to a host of smooth operators, charlatans, forgers, and imposters seeking to siphon off some of the new wealth. The Book of Swindles, which was ostensibly written as a manual for self-protection in this shifting and unstable world, also offers an expert guide to the art of deception. Each story comes with commentary by the author, Zhang Yingyu, who expounds a moral lesson while also speaking as a connoisseur of the swindle. This volume, which contains annotated translations of just over half of the eighty-odd stories in Zhang's original collection, provides a wealth of detail on social life during the late Ming and offers words of warning for a world in peril.

About the author

Christopher Rea is an associate professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia and a rabid fan of Monty Python.

"The Book of Swindles" is a 400-year-old Chinese collection of stories about fraud, and especially the perils faced by merchants traveling in the southern reaches of empire during the late Ming dynasty.
"The Age of Irreverence" is a history of how China laughed its way into the modern age. It traces an unruly current in modern Chinese culture, following the stories of whimsical poets, vaudevillian entrepreneurs, renowned revilers, twee essayists, winking farceurs, and self-promoting jokesters--as well as the vocal opponents who tried to tame them. The Association of Asian Studies awarded "The Age of Irreverence" the Joseph Levenson Book Prize (Post-1900 China) in 2017. A Chinese edition was published by Taiwan's Rye Field press in 2018.
"The Business of Culture" is a study of cultural entrepreneurship that traces the rise of cultural personalities, tycoons, and collective cultural enterprises in China and Southeast Asia, from Tianjin and Shanghai to Hong Kong and Singapore.
"Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts," is a translated collection of stories and essays by Qian Zhongshu, twentieth-century China's paragon of urbane wit and acerbic satire.
"China's Literary Cosmopolitans" offers a comprehensive survey of the literary oeuvres of two of China's leading scholar-writers, Qian Zhongshu and Yang Jiang, and explains their contributions to the notion of literary cosmopolitanism.
"Imperfect Understanding: Intimate Portraits of Modern Chinese Celebrities" features fifty witty and idiosyncratic pen sketches, written in English by a Cambridge-educated author born in the Dutch East Indies, of Chinese cultural celebrities in the 1930s.

Sunday,October 28 at 8:00pm

60RMB(includes a drink)

Book a seat at: https://yoopay.cn/event/98803519