Many Faces of Mulian: The Precious Scrolls of Late Imperial China

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Notes

1 Baojuan is most often translated as “precious scroll.” Although juan originally meant “scroll,” baojuan do not take this form, so Overmyer preferred to translate the term as “precious volumes.” However, due to the recent string of translations of baojuan by Wilt Idema that refer to them as “precious scrolls” in their titles, the field seems to have settled on that way of translating the term.

2 Katherine Carlitz, “Family, Society, and Tradition in Jin Ping Mei,” Modern China 10.4 (1984): 408.

3 See, for example, this succinctly explained in Dorothy Ko, “Introduction: Gender and the Politics of Chinese History,” in Teachers of the Inner Chambers, Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 1–14; and Emma Jinhua Teng, “The Construction of the ‘Traditional Chinese Woman’ in the Western Academy: A Critical Review,” Signs 22.1 (Autumn, 1996): 115–51.

4 Anne E. McLaren, Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008).

5 Again, on pp. 109–110, regarding an extended translation of internal elixir imagery in relation to Mulian that would likely interest specialists of Daoism in particular, allegorical images that Berezkin notes are already quite obscure in Chinese become more or less meaningless to the English language reader.