Jin Ping Mei - Evaluation

Evaluation

For centuries identified as pornographic and officially banned most of the time, the book has nevertheless been read surreptitiously by many of the educated class. Only since the Qing Dynasty has it been re-evaluated as literature. Structurally taut, full of classical Chinese poetry and surprisingly mature even as early fiction, it also deals with larger sociological issues—such as the role of women in ancient Chinese society, and sexual politics—while functioning concurrently as a novel of manners and an allegory of human corruption.

Author Li Yu called it along with Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Water Margin, and Journey to the West one of the Four Marvelous Masterpieces (四大奇書). Acclaimed Qing critic Zhang Zhupo described it as "the most incredible book existing under the heavens" (第一奇書), and in the 20th century, influential author Lu Xun also held it in great esteem.

The story contains a surprising number of descriptions of sexual objects and coital techniques that would be considered fetish today, as well as a large amount of bawdy jokes and oblique but still titillating sexual euphemisms. Some critics have argued that the highly sexual descriptions are essential, and have exerted what has been termed a "liberating" influence on other Chinese novels that deal with sexuality, most notably the Dream of the Red Chamber.

The British orientalist Arthur Waley, in his Introduction to the 1947 New York edition translated by Miall, advances his strong personal opinion on the author being Xu Wei, a renowned painter and a well-known member of the "realistic" Gong-an school of writers, and objects to the traditional attribution to Wang Shih-Chêng on the grounds of the latter's totally different and more traditional artistic point of view. Waley also suggests a comparison of the several poems present in the Jin Ping Mei to the poetic production of Xu Wei, and draws attention to the fact that the circulation of the work from Soochow in the XVIII century began from the only known complete copy of a manuscript in the possession of the Xu family, attributed to a scholar of the Jiajing period; which would, Waley observe, perfectly fit Xu Wei himself.

The "morphing" of the author from Xu Wei to Wang Shih-Chêng would be explained by the practice (quoted by Liu Wu-Chi in his An Introduction to Chinese Literature) of attributing "a popular work of literature to some well-known writer of the period".