Mouse vs Cat in Chinese Literature Read online

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  to ‘behead’ or cut open a rat, suspend it in the middle of the house and chant an exorcistic prayer.”2 The simple texts of such prayers are still included in works of the Tang dynasty (618–906). This ritual execution of a rat may perhaps also be the background of another often-quoted anecdote about the

  thievish nature of rats, which is included in Sima Qian’s biography of Zhang Tang (d. 115), one of the “harsh officials” of the Western Han dynasty:

  Zhang Tang hailed from Du. His father was an aide for the Chang’an [mar-

  ketplaces]. Once, when he went out, he left Tang, then only a child, in charge of their lodgings. When he returned, a rat had stolen the meat, and the

  enraged father administered a beating to Tang. By digging out its hole, Tang caught the thieving rat together with what was left of the meat. He accused the rat and had it bastinadoed, whereupon he took down its statement in

  writing. Following interrogation and trial he discussed the fitting punish-

  ment. Bringing out both the rat and the meat, he conducted a judicial dis-

  memberment in front of the hall. When his father saw this, and also noted

  that his phraseology was like that of an experienced judicial officer, he was amazed and from then on had him clerk law-cases.3

  The exorcist rituals would survive into late-imperial and modern times,

  even though they had then changed into the “wedding of the mouse,” in which the dismemberment of the rodents was left to the cat. It is less clear, however, whether the rat’s unfortunate encounter with the law as told in the biography of Zhang Tang had any impact on the origin of the late-imperial story of the court case of the mouse against the cat, which also ends disastrously for the rodent.

  R apacious R ats

  Because of their thievish nature, mice and rats from an early date became a common image for rapacious officials. The earliest example of this image is found in The Book of Odes (Shijing), China’s oldest collection of poetry. The materials in The Book of Odes date from roughly the period 1000–600 BCE

  and range from ritual hymns to festive songs. In the “Airs of Wei” section, we encounter a song called “Big Rat.” In the translation of Arthur Waley the first stanza of this song reads:

  Big rat, big rat,

  Do not gobble our millet!

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  ch a p t e r 1

  Three years we have slaved for you,

  Yet you take no notice of us.

  At last we are going to leave you

  And go to that happy land;

  Happy land, happy land,

  Where we shall have our place.4

  This translation reflects the interpretation of this song in the earliest preserved layer of commentary on The Book of Odes, the so-called Small Prefaces.

  The relevant “small preface” reads: “The ‘Big Rat’ was directed against heavy exactions. The people brand in it their ruler, levying heavy exactions, and silkworm-like eating them up, not attending well to the government, greedy

  and yet fearful, like a great rat.”5

  That seems straightforward enough, so this interpretation has been fol-

  lowed by the overwhelming majority of commentators in imperial and in

  modern times. Still the song has engendered considerable controversy among

  scholars. One issue concerns the species of rodent that is intended by the

  expression “big rat.” Some commentators have noted that common mice and

  rats don’t eat “sprouts” and have tried to identify a more suitable candidate.6

  Other scholars have tried to link this song to a specific tax increase in the state of Lu in the year 596 BCE, which would make this the youngest poem

  in The Book of Odes, but yet other scholars reject that hypothesis because the song is included among the “Airs of Wei” and this state of Wei was annihilated by the state of Jin in 661 BCE.7 One modern scholar has argued that the song reflects the attitude not of the population at large (they never would dare speak up in such a disrespectful manner to their ruler) but that of a high-ranking vassal who has decided to shift his allegiance to a different lord.8

  One recent proposal, which is perhaps most interesting to us, suggests a

  completely different reading. Instead of interpreting the song as a complaint of the peasants addressed to their lord, it proposes to read the song as a prayer of the peasants to the rodents in their fields, asking them to leave, before the farmers are forced to take more drastic measures.9 Such a prayer would be

  comparable to the prayers addressed by officials to tigers, alligators, and other threatening animals throughout the history of imperial China, imploring

  these animals to leave the territory under their administration and allowing them a set period before taking drastic action. A prayer inviting rats to leave, for instance, is encountered in the following song, which in modern times

  was still performed by farmers in Qinghai when they sacrificed to rats:

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  Of birth-year images you are the first,

  So you must be the common people’s friend.

  The common people see in food their heaven:

  If crops are poor, then old and young will starve.

  We sacrifice to you here in this field

  And pray that you will understand our worries:

  Go far away and feed on trees and grasses—

  Don’t sink your teeth into our millet plants!10

  If one is willing to follow this interpretation, the translation of the song from The Book of Odes has of course to be adapted. The first stanza might then be rendered as follows:

  Great rat, great rat,

  Don’t eat our millet.

  Three years we have slaved for you.

  Now go away, we’ll send you off.

  Leave for that happy land;

  That happy land, that happy land—

  So we shall have our place.

  But even if we accept this new interpretation of the function and the con-

  tent of this song, the rats would still be seen as rapacious thieves, and the fat granary rat continued to be a common image for corrupt officials who thrive while the common people suffer. This comes across clearly in the following

  poem by the ninth-century poet Cao Ye:

  Government Granary Rats

  The rats in the state granaries: they are as big as bushels

  And do not flee when they see people opening the doors.

  The soldiers have no rations and the common people starve—

  Who ships the grain day in day out into that maw of yours?11

  Throughout the later dynasties, too, writers would decry the rapaciousness

  of rats. Their complaints would not be limited anymore to the theft of grain but would also extend to the destructiveness of rodents in ruining textiles and paper.12 Quite often, as we will see, such complaints were combined with bitter laments about the laziness of cats.

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  ch a p t e r 1

  If rats and mice steal food t
o eat, they also steal other objects, the disappearance of which can create divisive suspicions among members of the

  same family or neighbors. Xie Cheng’s (182–254) lost History of the Later Han Dynasty (Hou Han shu) is said to have included the following anecdote: “Li Jing was the slave of the minister of the kingdom of Zhao. In the hole of a rat he found stringed pearls and eardrops that were linked together. When he

  asked the head clerk about these, the latter replied, ‘Her ladyship the wife of the minister lost these three pearls some time ago. Because she suspected

  her son’s wife of stealing them, she had him divorce that woman.’ Jing then took the pearls to the former minister and handed them to him. The minister was ashamed and urged the divorced woman to come back.”13

  The mid-seventeenth-century playwright Zhu Suchen made use of a com-

  parable plot element in his Fifteen Strings of Cash (Shiwu guan; also known as Double Bear Dream [Shuangxiong meng]). In one of the play’s subplots, a poor student lives next door to the family of a rice merchant, his ugly son, and the latter’s bride-to-be. Because rats are damaging his books, the student buys rat poison and puts it inside pancakes. These are taken next door by the rats through a hole in the wall, where they are eaten by the merchant’s son, who dies. At the same time, the rats take a piece of the gold jewelry of the bride-to-be to the student’s room. When the student takes it to his neighbor to buy some rice, the merchant recognizes the object and accuses the student of conducting an affair with his daughter-in-law-to-be and murdering his son. In this play, no actual rats come onstage; one only hears them moving and squeaking

  backstage. In another subplot of the play, a thief called Lou the Rat (Lou Ashu) commits a murder that later is pinned on the student’s brother.14 All ends

  well when a perspicacious judge arrives on the scene at the last moment to

  clear the brothers of the murder charges and see both of them married.

  The sheer terror even the thought of a rat might inspire is well brought out by a set piece on a nightmare from modern Henanese storytelling:

  Last night when the evening drum had sounded midnight I had a dream,

  And in my dream I saw a rat that had become a monster:

  That rat weighed in at more than a hundred pounds,

  That rat measured more than ten full feet in height.

  It had caught a man still alive holding him in its maw;

  It ripped him in two as it swallowed him whole.

  But while this rat was dining on that man’s flesh,

  There arrived four cats that also were monsters.

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  Filled with fear, the rat ran off so as to save its life,

  But the cats followed in hot pursuit, not letting up.

  They cornered the rat until it had no place to hide

  And wriggled its way into a big slippery oil bottle.

  Once the rat had wriggled its way inside the bottle,

  The cats sat down all around while softly purring.

  This dream that I had was truly strange and weird,

  It scared me so much I was shivering all over and couldn’t sleep till dawn.15

  Deserving Mice

  If mice and rats eat people’s grain, they may well do so because they feel

  entitled to it. In the rice-growing regions of southern China, contemporary folktales still relate that mice and rats are entitled to their share of the crops because once, long ago, one mouse had made it possible for people to survive after the gods had decided to punish mankind for its lack of gratitude. One of these local tales reads:

  The story goes that once upon a time—a long, long time ago—grain was

  growing everywhere, and all kinds of grains and beans were in abundant

  supply. The people only had to eat whenever it pleased them, and they actu-

  ally didn’t have to plow or to sow. But the human heart is insatiable, and the people did not feel any gratitude for this rich gift, but just ate their fill and became only more lazy. The gods and immortals in heaven became angry

  and concluded that the people on earth had to be punished. So they sent one heavenly immortal down to this world and he collected all the grains under

  heaven in one huge bag, which he took with him back to heaven.

  This heavenly immortal did not pay sufficient attention, as one mouse

  had sneaked into his bag and even chewed a small hole in its bottom. In this way some of the five kinds of grain trickled out of the bag. When the people had found these grains that had leaked out of the bag, they used them as

  seed they planted in the earth so the food grains once again could grow. In this way the seeds of the five kinds of grain were preserved among mankind

  and the people did in the end not have to die of starvation. But from that

  time on, people could not just eat their fill but had to rely on plowing and sowing to get their meals.

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  ch a p t e r 1

  Now, because the mouse had done mankind such a favor, people allowed

  it to eat from the grains they planted. That is the reason why even today mice still rely on the merit of their ancestor and eat people’s grain, and it seems to them the proper thing to do.16

  Such folktales in particular were current in the rice-growing areas and may well be connected to legends that are current among some of the national

  minorities in southern China in which is envisioned an even larger role for mice and rats in saving mankind from destruction or in the creation of the world.17

  In stories that appear to originate from northern China, mice and rats

  claim they are entitled to a share of the crops because of their service to the state. In one such account, mice save Emperor Li Shimin (r. 627–649)

  of the Tang dynasty and his troops from starvation during a campaign on

  the Korean peninsula by transporting grain, and in yet another account they save the same emperor from a foreign assassination plot by chewing through

  a huge wax candle presented by barbarians and in which is hidden a large

  explosive. Such stories may well have developed from tales that reached

  China from Central Asia in Tang-dynasty times. The Tang-dynasty monk

  Xuanzang (600–664) recounted in his travel diary how the king of Khotan

  had been saved from defeat when local mice, in one night, had chewed

  through all the strings and strips of his enemy’s weapons and armor, making these totally useless.18 A Buddhist legend of the Tang dynasty records how

  the tantric monk Amoghavajra (704–774) in 742, at the request of Emperor

  Xuanzong (r. 712–756), saved the Chinese-held city of Anxi in Central Asia

  from a siege by five barbarian nations by invoking the aid of Vaishravana,

  whose golden mice destroyed the weapons of the attackers by gnawing

  through the strings of their bows and crossbows.19 In Indian iconography

  Vaishravana’s animal is actually a mongoose, but when Vaishravana became

  popular in China as the Heavenly King of the North Li Jing, his iconic ani-

  mal was understood to be a kind of shu, so the transformation of the mongoose into a rodent is not so miraculous.20 We will reencounter Vaishravana’s mongoose/mouse in a discussion of the White Mouse Demon in the next

  chapter.

  Per for ming Mice

  In order to survive as thieves, mice and rats had to be smart
. The famous

  Song-dynasty poet Su Shi (1036–1101) expressed his grudging admiration in

  a declamation piece on a mouse that played dead to avoid capture:

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  Rhapsody on the Smart Mouse

  Once, when Master Su was seated at night,

  He heard the sound of a chewing mouse;

  By beating on his bench he made it stop,

  But after it had stopped, it started again.

  He ordered his boys to bring a candle:

  It came from a bag but that was empty.

  Yet he heard the sound of chewing teeth,

  And that sound did come from the bag.

  So he said, “This must be a mouse that could not escape once it had been

  locked inside!”

  When he opened it and looked inside,

  It was still and nothing could be seen,

  But when he searched by the candle’s light,

  He found inside a mouse that had died.

  His boys said, surprised,

  “This is the one that chewed just now,

  So how can it so suddenly have died?

  So what was the sound a moment ago?

  Could it perhaps have been its ghost?”

  When they held the bag upside down,

  It fell on the floor and ran off,

  And even the nimblest of the boys

  Was incapable of catching it!

  Master Su heaved a sigh and said, “How strange! This must be the smartest

  mouse ever! It was locked inside a bag and it could not make a hole because the bag was too sturdy. So it chewed without chewing in order to attract our attention, and died without dying to escape by dissembling.

  I have heard that of all living beings

  None is more intelligent than man:

  They disturb dragons and fight krakens,

  Mount the turtle and hunt the unicorn.

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