The Plum in the Golden Vase
Ximen Qing, a druggist and moneylender in a provincial Shandong town, buys himself an office, bribes the courts, and brings six wives into one walled compound, where their jockeying over servants, silver, and his attention fills a hundred chapters. The household is kept in inventory detail, funeral costs and gifts of pork and silk and what the maids say in the back rooms, alongside the erotic passages that kept the book banned for most of its life. The first long work of Chinese prose fiction composed by a single author rather than assembled from storyteller cycles, and the direct model for Dream of the Red Chamber.
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Lineage
- reworks ↑ Water Margin
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Genre
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 53% · 9 shared
- 51% · 11 shared
- 51% · 10 shared
- 48% · 11 shared
- 48% · 10 shared
- 48% · 10 shared