Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Page 5
appeals to King Yama.
Late-imperial beast epics in China are not limited to accounts of the court case of the mouse against the cat. As mentioned above, other animals, too,
appeal to King Yama. The formal procedure of a court case always seems to
have held great attraction to authors of beast epics East and West. But the same kind of attraction is offered by other highly structured social events, such as weddings and funerals.51 Some texts show animals, for instance, a fly and a mosquito, engaged in a formal debate.52 And as one would expect on
the basis of the popularity of warfare in many genres of popular literature, we also encounter works that show animals, not only mice and cats but also
the many kinds of insects, confronting each other in a drawn-out war.53 But if dumb animals are allowed to speak and act, there is of course no reason
why other living beings such as plants should not be allowed to do the same.
Late-imperial China also witnessed the flourishing of a narrative and dra-
matic literature in which the characters carry the names of herbs and other medicines, a genre that would appear to be without any counterpart in Western traditions.54
About This Book
In animal fables and beast epics, a unique tension is created by the need to present the protagonists not only as rational beings in a highly specific social This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:26 UTC
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context but, at the same time, as animals.55 By giving animals the power of speech, the authors of animal fables and beast epics, East and West, also have to incorporate the animals’ viewpoint into their work. While from a human
standpoint rodents are first of all pests, the little creatures—like all living beings—want only to survive. When speaking to a judge, the animals of
course present their own acts and motives in a most flattering light. The
mouse will present itself as an innocent victim of the cruelty of the cat, play down the damage it causes, or even claim it is entitled to a share of the harvest.
The cat may play down its pampered existence and present its persecution of mice and rats as a duty only unwillingly accepted.
The focus of this book is a study of the legend of the underworld court
case of the mouse against the cat in its many versions, represented by translations of a few selected texts. But before the cat and the mouse turned into the main characters of an underworld court case tale, these animals (and the animosity between them) already had a long history in Chinese culture. Few
animals lived in such close proximity to humans as the rodents and cats that shared their homes and could be observed at close quarters. The authors and performers of adaptations of the court case of the mouse and the cat drew on the cultural tradition in which they lived in portraying the two protagonists of their tale, mining an extensive body of earlier lore. A brief introduction to the most salient aspects of rodents and cats in chapter 1 outlines the development of their treatment in literature from earliest times into the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).56 One should keep in mind that premodern Chinese, like their
European counterparts, did not systematically distinguish between mice
and rats. Both can likewise be designated as shu (and its variants shuzi, laoshu, and haozi), which is translated interchangeably as “mouse” or “rat” in the following pages depending upon context. Shu is defined in China’s earliest dictionary as “a small furry crevice-dwelling animal,” and in view of this
broad definition it comes as no surprise that not only many other small
rodents that are distinguished by contemporary systematic zoology may be
classified as some kind of shu, but also animals such as weasels and martens that actually are among the most voracious predators of rodents. Of course, if distinctions had to be made, Chinese observers were fully capable of doing so, but this classification should go a long way to explain why the weasel and the marten in some versions of the court case narrative are introduced as
relatives and comrades of the rodents. The Chinese word for cat ( mao) comes with its own problems, as it originally appeared to refer to a large and ferocious wildcat that might be captured and kept to chase rodents but would
have been difficult to breed in captivity. Scholars still debate the date when This content downloaded from 129.174.21.5 on Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:04:26 UTC
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the domestic cat made its home in China, but most likely it arrived not earlier than the beginning of the first millennium and only slowly became more
common. A long Chinese tradition associates the importation of the domestic cat with the advent of Buddhism, and one widely known legend credits the
holy monk Xuanzang with the introduction of the animals to China, not only
to protect the rice stores of the monks against depredations by mice and rats, but even more to protect the holy sutras from destruction by the same rodents.
From the beginning of the first millennium BCE, mice and rats have been
decried as brazen thieves, the lowest of the low, pests that had to be killed off and exorcised at all costs, or at least to be pacified so these rodents would not wreak too much damage. This negative image of mice and rats, however, was
complicated by the fact that the shu occupies the first place in the twelve birth-year animals of the Chinese zodiac, which were also deities in charge of the twelve-year cycle and protectors of the men and women born in their
year. Mice and rats were also venerated for their amazing fertility, which at the same time inspired hatred and disgust. Cats, whether the captured wildcat
or the house-bred domestic cat, were first of all appreciated as mousers, and their well-known daytime laziness therefore occasioned many complaints
about their dereliction of duty. But cats were also kept as pets, in particular the ornamental long-haired “lion-cats” that were bred from as early as the
twelfth century. Whether as mousers or pets, cats were prized possessions.
The desire to determine the outer characteristics of good mousers produced
handbooks on cat physiognomy ( xiangmao jing) from the thirteenth century onward. From the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we also have three
encyclopedic compilations of cat lore: Wang Chutong’s (1729–1821) Chronicle of Cats (Maosheng); Sun Sunyi’s (1783–1820) A Small Record of CricketSnatchers (Xianchan xiaolu); and Huang Han’s (middle of the nineteenth century)
Garden of Cats (Maoyuan).57
Mice and rats were not kept as pets in premodern China, and the rare
person who refused to kill these pests because he or she was born in the year of the rat was held up to ridicule, so we have no compilation of rat lore by rat lovers.58 But mice and rats are covered in considerable detail (as are cats) in the animal section of general encyclopedias. Such encyclopedias exist of systematically arranged excerpts from earlier writings, in some cases followed by an anthology of relevant documents, essays, and poems. No tradi-
tional encyclopedia was more comprehensive than the Imperial y Sanctioned Complete Col ection of Pictures and Writings from Past and Present (Qinding gujin tushu jicheng), edited by Jiang Tingxi (1669–1732) and printed in 1728.59
Once we enter the twentieth century, however, sympathy often shifts from
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the cat to the mouse. Several modern authors of the first half of the twentieth century wrote works in which the cat is the villain. The best known of these cat-haters/mouse-lovers most likely is Lu Xun (1881–1936), who in his “Dogs, Cats, and Mice” (Gou mao shu), the opening piece of his childhood memoir
Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk (Zhaohua xishi) of 1928, recalls how the family cat had killed his pet mouse, and he follows this with a description of his fascination for a New Year print depicting the wedding of the mouse.60
The wedding of the mouse was a minor annual festival first mentioned
in Qing-dynasty sources and still widely observed in the early twentieth
century at some date around New Year’s Day: people (especially children)
would go to bed early so as not to disturb the wedding of the mouse, because otherwise rodents might cause no end of trouble during the coming year.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the best-known legend of the
wedding of the mouse tells the story of the selection of a suitable groom:
when their daughter has reached marriageable age, the parents want the most powerful person in the world as her groom. They first approach the sun, who declines because, he claims, the clouds that can cover him are more powerful than he; the cloud declines the offer of marriage in favor of the wind; the wind declines in favor of a wall; and the wall declines in favor of a mouse as it can undermine the wall by making holes at its base. As the mice, the most powerful animals on earth, still fear the cat, they offer their daughter in marriage to him, and on the day of the wedding he lovingly stores his bride in his stomach. This story appears at a rather late date in China, and also made its way to Korea and Japan, but clearly derives from South Asia, where it was already included in the Panchatantra (in which the mouse marries a mouse and no cat makes its appearance). This story, the annual festival, and related New Year prints have been studied widely by Chinese scholars in
the years since World War II.61 Various tales connected to the wedding of
the mouse are the subject of chapter 3.
In the adaptations of the story of the underworld court case of the mouse
against the cat, the mice often fondly remember the former days of glory of their race, when in human shape the Old Mouse Demon wielded power in
the Bottomless Cave and the Five Rats rampaged through the Eastern Capi-
tal, Kaifeng. While the rodents wisely don’t often mention this connection
in their statement to King Yama, the cat in its testimony will frequently refer to its role in the suppression of the Five Rats. Doing so, it also will have to confess to its momentary oversight that allowed one rodent to escape and
repopulate the world with its kind and condemned the cat to an eternity of
chasing mice and rats. Because the stories of the Old Mouse Demon wooing
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Xuanzang and of the Five Rats upsetting Kaifeng figure so centrally in the
background of the adaptations of the court case, chapter 2 is devoted to a
discussion of these two tales. The story of the Five Rats is represented by a full translation of the earliest-known prose version of that tale.
Chapter 3 contrasts the legends concerning the wedding of the mouse
with the tale of the court case of the mouse against the cat as we know them from the middle of the Qing dynasty and later. While the first legend occurs frequently in the popular art of New Year prints and engendered few texts,
the second legend was only rarely depicted in prints but circulated widely in many genres of ballads and prosimetric texts. Chapter 3 explores texts that circulated already in the nineteenth century and concerned only the court
case. Chapter 4 looks at the various ways in which the tale of the court case was developed by elaborating details of legal procedure and/or providing
prequels. One common type of prequel deals with the disturbance of the
wedding of the mouse by the cats, while yet another concerns the war between the mice and the cats, a theme that in the Chinese context cannot be traced back beyond the early nineteenth century. This discussion leads to an examination of A Tale without Shape or Shadow, a prosimetric adaptation of the court case preceded by accounts of the disrupted wedding of the mouse
and the following war of the mice against the cats. This text at one time
enjoyed considerable popularity in northern China (especially Shanxi), but
apparently circulated only in manuscript. The earliest-known manuscript
dates from 1841. The chapter includes a full translation of A Tale without Shape or Shadow.
Chapter 5 discusses modern reformulations of the antagonism of mice
and cats. One of these, an anonymous Minnanese (Minnanhua) ballad from
the early 1920s, still includes the final confrontation before the bench of King Yama, but precedes this with a long account of meetings and conferences in
which the mice and the cats try to achieve some kind of peace settlement,
which eventually of course breaks down. This invites a reading of this adaptation as a satire on the many peace conferences and their failures of the early decades of the twentieth century outside and inside China.
Modern authors writing on felines and rodents on occasion invented their
own plot. Bao Youfu in 1908 published A New History of the Rats (Xinshu shi), a long fable in classical Chinese, in which the rats (descendants of the tiger!) stand for the degenerate Chinese nation of the final decades of the nineteenth century, which is threatened by a cat representing Russia and
its imperialist ambitions. Of course, the author invented a happy end in which the rats and their allies kill the cat—eventually the rats turn into tigers again.
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This chapter also takes a closer look at “The Admonition by the Cat” (Maogao) of 1925 by the modern poet Zhu Xiang (1904–1933). In this poem the cat is
not summoned to defend its behavior in court, but expounds its life philosophy to its son in the time that is left before their noontime meal. The cat’s life philosophy here is not a tale of duty, but a self-delusional account of noble descent, sprinkled with Confucian platitudes and self-serving references to Western science. The cat’s son turns out to be an equally impractical devotee of romantic love, who hopes that “universal love” will bring about world
peace. If these cats are caricatures of different generations of Chinese intellectuals, the dog that shoves them rudely aside in the final lines and gobbles up their food can be identified with Western imperialism. The chapter is
concluded by a short discussion of two novels that were published in the first decade of the twenty-first century, one devoted to the inner working of the world of mice and one devoted to the deadly power struggles within the
society of cats.
These chapters are followed by an epilogue that traces the theme of the
war between the mice and the cats from its earliest appearance in the fifteenth century BCE throughout the Near East and Europe and later in China and
Japan.
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1
Thieving Rats and Pampered Cats
F rom t h e mom e n t h u m a ns sta rt e d to fa r m a n d stor e
&nb
sp; grain, mice and rats have been seen as pests. Early Chinese documents repeatedly refer to mice and rats as robbers and thieves. If these sources rarely distinguish between species of rodents, they do draw attention to their habitat. The “altar rats” ( sheshu) that burrow their holes in the altar to the local god of the soil (a small artificial hill) are difficult to smoke out and kill with out destroying the altar, and the “granary rats” ( cangshu) that make their home in the large grain pits and granaries of the state are described as fat, haughty, and fearless. The young Li Si (d. 208 BCE), who would eventually become the leading minister of the First Emperor (d. 210 BcE), was inspired by the sight of granary rats to pursue an ambitious career, as we learn from an anecdote in his biography in Sima Qian’s (second half second century BCE) Records of the Historian (Shiji):
Li Si was a native of Shangcai in Chu. In his youth he served as a petty clerk in the province. In the privy of the clerks’ quarters he saw how the rats ate the filth and how, when people or dogs came near, they were always alarmed
and terrified. But when he entered the granary, he saw how the rats in the
granary ate the heaps of grain and lived under a big roof, never having to
worry about people or dogs. Li Si sighed and said, “Whether a man turns out to be a worthy or a good-for-nothing is like these rats—it all depends on the surroundings he chooses for himself!”1
Of course, the Chinese tried to free themselves of mice and rats, and they
used every means at their disposal, from poison and traps to dogs and cats, as well as magic. Several early sources contain detailed descriptions of a rat exorcism that was to be conducted in the first month of the year. “During
that month at dawn before the sun came out, the head of the household was
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