Morning Bell on the Pillow

Morning Bell on the Pillow is an eighteenth-century vernacular novel of manners from the Qing dynasty, in eighteen chapters. It is attributed to "Compiled by the Awakened Daoist of Yuanshui, with commentary by the Sleepless Scholar of Jintai"; the cover names "the Sleepless Scholar" as compiler. The Qing-era Lingyunxuan printing is the extant edition. The title evokes the idea that "the splendor on the pillow is but a dream; a single toll of the morning bell awakens us," and the book is a cautionary tale built around the rise and fall of a household. The story is set in Dantu County, Zhenjiang Prefecture, south of the Yangtze, during the Zhengde reign of the Ming: the local gentleman Fu Heng, a censor, is old and childless but for a daughter. Unwilling to marry her far away, he takes in as a live-in son-in-law the son of his old classmate, Zhong Zhuoran. Zhong, talented and upright, urges his father-in-law to take a concubine to continue the family line, and Fu Heng takes Jin Gu, who bears a son, Hexian; Jin Gu dies after childbirth, and while the household seeks a wet nurse, the Diao Ren couple buy their way in as servants. Outwardly obedient, the pair scheme at every step: they first sow discord between father-in-law and son-in-law, driving Zhong Zhuoran off in anger, then deceive their master and seize control of the household. Fu Heng, a poor judge of character, falls into one disaster after another—corruption over selling offices, the loss of his seal, theft—and is exiled by the powerful eunuch Liu Jin to the Lanzhou Guard in Shaanxi, and the family scatters. Zhong Zhuoran then wanders the world, endures great hardship, passes the examinations and enters office, wins merit under Governor Wang in suppressing bandits, and in an inn has a chance encounter with the kidnapped young Hexian. In the end the true stolen goods are recovered, the injustice is cleared, the family is reunited, and he returns home in glory. The book's main thread—misplaced trust in a wicked servant, the ruin of a household, a scholar's downfall, and reunion after merit won—urges readers to discern loyalty from treachery and to be careful whom they trust, making it a typical specimen of Qing popular moral fiction. This edition is a simplified-character e-book, prepared from a collectanea edition, totaling roughly seventy thousand characters.