Interweaving a star-crossed romance with the decline and fall of the Ming dynasty in mid seventeenth-century China, The Peach Blossom Fan by Kong Shangren (1648-1718) is a masterpiece of world literature. This sweeping musical play and historical drama encompasses the pleasures and passions of courtesan culture, the allure and pitfalls of political idealism, court intrigues, and the horrors of war. While the play recounts the death of the Ming dynasty through the love story of its two main characters--Hou Fangyu, a young scholar, and a courtesan named Li Xiangjun (or, "Fragrant Princess")--its cast of characters also includes various military commanders; a villain who is also a playwright; an ambiguous mediator who is also a painter, a storyteller, and a singing teacher; an officer who becomes a Daoist; and a ritual master who is both onstage and a member of the audience.

As the play takes the readers inside the choices, dilemmas, and emotional turmoil of its diverse characters, it asks probing questions: How and why did the Ming dynasty, almost three hundred years old, come to an end? In the last decades of the Ming dynasty, China was struck by a series of plagues, famines, and natural disasters. What is the scope of human agency during historical cataclysms? The play is filled with performances of songs, poems, and scenes from other dramas that warn against the impending fall of the dynasty; however, all of their messages went unheeded. What forces shape memory and political judgment? This compelling, readable, and faithful translation of the play includes an introduction on interpretive perspectives and the life and times of the playwright Kong Shangren as well as explanatory notes and a preface for each scene that serve as guides for the reader.

Kong Shangren (1648-1718) was a Qing dynasty dramatist and poet. He was a 64th-generation descendant of Confucius and had a distinguished career as a scholar-official. His fame rested largely on his authorship of The Peach Blossom Fan.


Wai-yee Li is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Her previous books include The Promise and Peril of Things, Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge, Women and National Trauma in Late Imperial Chinese Literature, and, as co-editor with Wiebke Denecke and Xiaofei Tian, The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE-900 CE).