Yesterday I talked here about how Water Margin is one of the 4 classic Chinese novels and how it's anything but dry and boring, in fact it's a vivid, graphic, colorful adventure story: https://twitter.com/sl_huang/status/1316803792139149313

but you wanna know something even MORE fun.... https://twitter.com/sl_huang/status/1316970238655737856

Sometimes people talk about the "4 classic Chinese novels" (Water Margin, Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Dream of the Red Chamber).

Sometimes they expand that list to 6 classic novels, and if they do they include The Scholars and a book called Jin Ping Mei

You see, a couple hundred years after Water Margin was written -- our vivid, colorful, bandit adventure story --

a couple hundred years later, someone wrote

an erotic

fanfic

of it.

And that erotic fanfic became one of the other classics of Chinese literature. I shit you not.

I haven't read Jin Ping Mei (yet.... my library only has parts 2 and 4 of the English), but I think I read somewhere that it includes 72 (!!!) detailed sex scenes that involve every kink under the sun

like EVERY kink

it's SUPER DUPER porny (and yes it has been banned a lot!!)

It apparently takes the characters from Water Margin in the steamiest affairs in that book (which aren't very steamy, WM isn't big on explicit sex) & then gives them EVERY POSSIBLE sexual proclivity

I'm not SURE it's the first known porn fanfic but it's a pretty good guess!

And I say again it is one of the SIX CLASSICS OF CHINESE LITERATURE

The Chinese know how to do classic literature, yo.

So yeah, my retelling of Water Margin is not even close to the first or the wildest or the most famous.

(This also means that if any Water Margin fanboys come at me for Disrespecting The Source Material with all my Icky Genderflipping / Queerness / etc, then I am going to build trebuchets to launch missiles at them made out of fucking copies of Jin Ping Mei. LMAO)

Addendum: Jin Ping Mei was written circa 1600ish & we don't know who wrote it. There are lotsa theories

My pet theory, which afaik NO academics share, is that it's a woman--like, a bored sexually unsatisfied housewife. Because yeah

(eager to read & see if I still think so!)

But as much as I'm delighted and amused by it being erotic fanfiction, I should add that it is ABSOLUTELY known for being an incredible narrative masterpiece. From the wiki page, Princeton University Press says it was:

"a landmark in the development of the narrative art form..."

and "...with the possible exception of The Tale of Genji (c. 1010) and Don Quixote (1605, 1615), there is no earlier work of prose fiction of equal sophistication in world literature."

There's a reason it's one of the six classics of Chinese literature!

So anyone who dumps on porny fanfiction as inherently worthless? wrong for so many reasons but also SO IGNORANT

And next time someone DOES dump on erotica or fanfiction or erotic fanfiction I will be happy to lend my Jin Ping Mei trebuchets. =)