The stories of this monkey cycle have an impact because they are, they are there in everybody's lives. The story is a promoted it's one of the bits of pre modern culture that the communist party after 19 forty nine is rather keen on. A china's current leader, she jim ping, is clearly a fan too. Its big in australia. Its dubbed into english, so as well as being huge in japan. There are new t v or film adaptations in the sinophone world every few years. Pop stars incorporate the stories into their lyrics. So the thing has the capacity to go beyond the context in which it was created, which, after all, is one
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great novels of China’s Ming era, and perhaps the most loved. Written in 1592, it draws on the celebrated travels of a real monk from China to India a thousand years before, and on a thousand years of retellings of that story, especially the addition of a monkey as companion who, in the novel, becomes supersimian. For most readers the monk, Tripitaka, is upstaged by this irrepressible Monkey with his extraordinary powers, accompanied by the fallen but recovering deities, Pigsy and Sandy.
The image above, from the caricature series Yoshitoshi ryakuga or Sketches by Yoshitoshi, is of Monkey creating an army by plucking out his fur and blowing it into the air, and each hair becomes a monkey-warrior.
With
Julia Lovell
Professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
Chiung-yun Evelyn Liu
Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
And
Craig Clunas
Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Trinity College, University of Oxford
Producer: Simon Tillotson