The Golden Lotus is a picture of family life in a polygamous household, told with extreme frankness and wealth of detail for which it would hard to find a parallel in any other piece of fiction in the world.

Pearl Buck called this work "The greatest novel of physical love which China has produced."

It is now published unexpurgated, giving for the first time a complete and full translation into English.

Admired in its own time for its literary qualities and biting indictment of the immorality and cruelty of its age, it has also been denigrated as a "dirty" book for its sexual frankness. It centres on Ximen Qing, a wealthy, young, dissolute, and politically connected merchant, and his marriage to a fifth wife, Pan Jinlian, literally "Golden Lotus." In her desire to influence her husband and, through him, control the other wives, concubines, and entire household, she uses sex as her main weapon. The Golden Lotus lays bare the rivalries within this wealthy family while chronicling its rise and fall. It fields a host of vivid characters, each seeking advantage in a corrupt world. The author of The Golden Lotus is Lanling Xiaoxiaosheng, whose name, a pseudonym, means "Scoffing Scholar of Lanling." His great work, written in the late Ming but set in the Song Dynasty, is a virtuoso collection of voices and vices, mixing in poetry and song and sampling different social registers, from popular ballads to the language of bureaucrats, in order to recreate and comment mordantly on the society of the time. This edition features a new introduction by Robert Hegel of Washington University, who situates the novel for contemporary readers and explains its greatness as the first single-authored novel in the Chinese tradition. This translation contains the complete, unexpurgated text as translated by Clement Egerton with the assistance of Shu Qingchun, later known as Lao She, one of the most prominent Chinese writers of the twentieth century.

Publisher: Routledge & Kegan Paul

Year: 1972

Condition: Very good blue cloth hardcovers in very good dust jackets, there is some foxing on the flyleaf in all 4 volumes otherwise unmarked, well bound and bright pages.

The Golden Lotus 4 Volumes by Chin P'ing Mei Translated by Clement Egerton, 1972 HC/DJ