History of Love (Volume One)

Qing Shi is not a simple anthology of love stories but a carefully curated and commented collection of tales of feeling drawn by the Ming literatus Feng Menglong from notebooks, fiction, and historical biographies across the ages, organized under the rubric of "qing" (love, feeling, sentiment). This Zhonghua Book Company edition, with its rigorous collation and clear typesetting, offers readers a reliable text close to the original. As an editor, I believe the book's value far exceeds its appearance as a "story collection." Beyond compiling, Feng Menglong often voices his views in "The Historian of Love Remarks," and these comments profoundly embody his progressive idea of "using the true feelings between men and women to expose the false medicine of the orthodox moral code," elevating "qing" to a height from which it could confront rigid ritual propriety—a strikingly avant-garde stance for its time. Reading Qing Shi is not only to encounter one moving classical love legend after another, such as Hongfu fleeing by night or Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai transforming into butterflies, but also to understand, through Feng Menglong's perspective, the profound reflections on human nature, emotion, and ethical relations in late Ming intellectual currents. Its style appeals to both refined and popular tastes, and its narration is concise and vivid; it has literary value for appreciation and is also valuable material for the study of Chinese social history, intellectual history, and folklore. For modern readers, the book's portrayal of the myriad phases of emotion can still resonate and provoke thought about love, marriage, and the essence of human nature.