Elegant and Vulgar

Elegant and Vulgar is the representative work of the online historical novelist Zeidao Sanchi. Serialized on Qidian from 2012, it runs about 1.78 million Chinese characters in over five hundred chapters. The novel opens in the fortieth year of the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty. The protagonist, Zhang Yuan, is a scholar's son from Shanyin County in Shaoxing Prefecture: his father is a minor clerk in the Zhou Prince's household in Kaifeng, and compared with the wealthy Western Zhang branch, his family is somewhat shabby. He himself suffers from an eye ailment that makes reading and writing difficult. Relying on a photographic memory and the perspective of a time traveler, Zhang Yuan dodges the schemes of family servants and litigation tricksters to protect the family property, while studying the eight-legged essay under the Kuaiji scholar Wang Siren; he climbs the examination ladder from the county test and prefectural test onward. Along the way he falls in love at first sight with the official's daughter Shang Danran and becomes engaged to her, makes enemies of local powers such as Dong Qichang's son Dong Zuchang, and meets all sorts of figures, including the Hangzhou imperial silk commissioner Zhong Benhua. Late-Ming figures such as Wang Siren, Yuan Hongdao, Zhang Dai, and Dong Qichang appear one after another. The appeal of the work lies not in conquest but in the everyday texture and personal charm of Jiangnan in the late Ming: tea tasting and flower arranging, garden visits and lantern fairs, crab banquets and storytelling, bookshop business, the tricks of litigation sharpers, an old monk in business, a famous courtesan worshipping Buddha—elegance and vulgarity interweave into the undertone of "late-dynasty splendor." The title itself sets the elegance of the Caigentan mode against the worldliness of the Jin Ping Mei mode. The book's main line is Zhang Yuan's growth in study, friendship, examinations, and daily life; the ending is somewhat rushed, a regret often noted in readers' reviews.