i think the novels, like om, the language tifen layers of meaning is at work here. It is likeo a journey in different, like, geographical area. The more you know about chinese religion at that time, the more you see how the author is playing with all this illusions. One other thing could have said relates to the to the existence of continuations and fan fiction. And so as early as 16 forty, somebody writes not a continuation of the novel, but they write a sort of an interpolation in it and publish a separate novel. Then late in the seventeenth century, there's the later journey to the west, which is a kind of a journey to
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