What are the four famous Chinese novels?

Chinese canon1244 words

The short list

Four books. That is the whole canon, and it is unusually fixed — Chinese readers argue about which translations are best, never about which four books belong on the list.

The gap that matters is not the length. It is that the first three are about people acting on a world, and the fourth is about a world acting on people.

Why these four and not others

The label 四大名著 — four great famous works — is a twentieth-century invention, not an ancient one. Publishers in the 1920s and 30s settled on these titles because they sold, and the grouping hardened into fact. Older lists of noteworthy fiction also included Jin Ping Mei and The Scholars, and both have serious defenders.

What made these four sticky is a structural accident. Each one invented a shape that later Chinese fiction could reuse:

• Three Kingdoms invented the loyalty triangle — a man caught between a sworn brother and a ruler's order, choosing badly and being honoured for it.
• Water Margin invented the recruit-the-enemy plot, in which the hero's greatest future ally is today's antagonist.
• Journey to the West invented the party of misfits with complementary powers, dragged toward one goal by an authority none of them respects.
• Dream of the Red Chamber invented the household novel, where the antagonist is money running out.

Every web novel on the site you are reading now runs on at least one of these four engines.

The one that invented xianxia

Ask which of the four is closest to the modern cultivation genre and there is only one answer: Journey to the West.

The outline is a training journey. A monk with no combat ability is assigned disciples who can fight, and the disciples are drawn from the demonic and the divine rather than the human. The monkey, Sun Wukong, begins the book by seeking a master to teach him longevity, learns transformations, and then refuses to accept his rank in heaven — which is a sect dispute with the furniture removed. There is even a body of magical practice behind it. The story's own magic borrows from internal alchemy, whose vocabulary of refining a core inside the body is where the genre's Golden Core comes from.

The demons are not generic monsters either. Many are animals who cultivated for centuries and gained speech, which is exactly how the modern genre treats beasts that have crossed a threshold. And the mountain they are sealed under, the register they are struck from, the title that has to be conferred by an institution — all of it is the sect bureaucracy that xianxia novels now spend fifty chapters explaining.

The one that is actually the best

Dream of the Red Chamber, and it is not close.

This is the book where a wealthy family's decline is tracked in household detail: what a funeral costs, which cousin is owed money, which maid is reassigned when a branch of the family runs short. The protagonist is a boy who would rather write poetry with his female cousins than sit the imperial exam, and the novel is unsentimental about what that preference will cost him.

Two things make it the greatest rather than merely the best-made. First, it is unfinished — the first eighty chapters are by Cao Xueqin, the last forty are a later continuation, and the seam is visible. Readers argue about the ending the way readers of The Mystery of Edwin Drood argue about theirs. Second, nothing in it is fantasy. After three books of magic monkeys and hundred-man battles, the quietest one is the one that lasts.

A note on titles, because it trips people up. The same novel circulates in English as Dream of the Red Chamber and The Story of the Stone, and both are the same book.

What a web novel reader should take from this

Three things transfer directly.

Serial structure. All four were told in instalments, or assembled from them, and all four are episodic by design. The chapter-ending hook, the recurring antagonist who escapes, the filler arc that turns out to matter a hundred chapters later — the technique is older than the printing press in China.

Narrator distance. Chinese classical fiction does not enter heads the way the nineteenth-century European novel does. It shows what people do and lets the reader judge, and it will interrupt to tell you a character's whole family history at the moment he walks on stage. If that sounds familiar, it is because translated web fiction inherited it.

The Jianghu, before it had a name. Water Margin's 108 outlaws on a marsh mountain are the genre's first martial brotherhood: men outside the law, bound by a code the law does not recognise, loyal to each other past the point of sense. The word for that world came later. The world did not.

Where to actually start

Journey to the West, in Arthur Waley's Monkey if you want the short version, or Anthony C. Yu's full translation if you want the whole thing. Waley cuts a third of the book and keeps the good third. Anyone who finds him too loose should read Yu, who is exact and much longer.

Then Dream of the Red Chamber in David Hawkes's translation, which is the one that reads like English prose rather than like a translation. Then Three Kingdoms if you have the appetite — Moss Roberts's version, with the maps open.

Water Margin last. It is the most violent of the four and the one whose structure has aged worst, because the first forty chapters follow future outlaws one at a time before they ever meet.

The four questions readers actually ask

Dream of the Red Chamber, by consensus, and by a wide margin. It is the one Chinese critics discuss the way English critics discuss Shakespeare: a work about family life that somehow carries an entire civilisation inside it. The other three are more fun.

Journey to the West is the ancestor, and the debt is obvious once you look. A monk, a monkey, a pig and a river ogre travel west to collect scriptures, and the monkey fights demons with a staff that changes size. Substitute a sect for the pilgrimage and you have the modern genre.

Journey to the West, in an abridged translation. It is episodic, funny, and needs no historical background. Three Kingdoms is the better book but the harder one, because half its pleasure comes from knowing who is lying to whom and why the lie matters.

Sources & References

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, Four Classic Novels of Chinese Literature — the standard grouping, with dates and attribution for each title.
• Lu Xun, A Brief History of Chinese Fiction (1925) — the criticism that fixed the four in the modern reading order, and the source of most later opinion about them.
• Cao Xueqin and Gao E, The Story of the Stone, trans. David Hawkes and John Minford (Penguin, 1973–1986) — five volumes, with the translator's preface on where Cao stops and the continuation begins.
• Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West, trans. Anthony C. Yu (University of Chicago Press, 2012) — the full translation, with the alchemical vocabulary in the notes.