Zhang Shiwu (simplified: 张十五, traditional: 張十五, pinyin: Zhāng Shíwǔ, jyutping: zoeng1 sap6 ng5) was an itinerant storyteller from the north whose performance at Niu Family Village, and the talk over wine that followed it with Guo Xiaotian and Yang Tiexin, opens The Legend of the Condor Heroes.
Biography
Zhang Shiwu was a thin man of about fifty in a faded blue cotton robe who told stories to the beat of clappers and a small drum. Passing through Niu Family Village on the Qiantang River one autumn evening, he performed The Faithful and Chaste Ye Sanjie (叶三姐节烈记) for the villagers, a tale of a family destroyed by Jin soldiers, and lamented that the Song court fled before the Jin and left the common people to suffer.
Guo Xiaotian, hearing that he came from the north, invited him to drink at the village tavern kept by the lame Qu San. Over the wine Zhang Shiwu blamed the loss of the north on the emperors Huizong, Qinzong and Gaozong and their treacherous ministers, quoted Yue Fei’s verse, and joked that had they been born sixty years earlier they could have gone to Lin’an and seized Qin Hui themselves. When Qu San remarked that the real culprit behind Yue Fei’s death might not have been Qin Hui, Zhang Shiwu agreed that it was Emperor Gaozong, and recited Gaozong’s letter of submission to the Jin from memory. When the talk turned to the present chancellor, Han Tuozhou, he grew cautious and warned the two men to be careful what they said. He left very drunk, heading east towards Lin’an and murmuring lines from Yue Fei’s Man Jiang Hong. He does not appear again.
Personality and traits
Zhang Shiwu was well read in history and outspoken about the Song court’s failures, but prudent about naming the men in power in his own day.
Behind the scenes
Zhang Shiwu does not appear in the 1st edition, which opens instead with the poem “Beyond the hills are hills, beyond the towers are towers” (which Zhang Shiwu recites in the revised text) and a narrator’s summary of the Song’s retreat south. In his afterword Jin Yong lists the opening storytelling by Zhang Shiwu among the episodes he added when revising the novel, explaining that traditional Chinese fiction grew out of oral storytelling and that opening with a storyteller showed that the novel had not forgotten its origins.
See also
- Niu Family Village
- Guo Xiaotian
- Yang Tiexin
- Qu Lingfeng — Qu San, the tavern keeper