Chen Chen
1615–1670
Biography
Chen Chen (1615–1670) was a writer from Wucheng, in what is now Huzhou in Zhejiang, who lived through the fall of the Ming dynasty and the rise of the Qing. He used the courtesy name Xiaxin and the pen name Yandang Shanqiao, which can be rendered roughly as “woodcutter of Yandang Mountain”. He travelled widely when young. After 1644 he joined Gu Yanwu and others in the Jingyin poetry society, a circle of men who opposed the new dynasty and hoped to bring the Ming back. The other works he is known to have written, including a miscellany and a book of poems, are lost.
His lasting book is Shuihu houzhuan (水滸後傳), usually called the Later Water Margin: a sequel in forty chapters to the classic Water Margin, which is traditionally credited to Shi Nai'an. It follows the Liangshan heroes who survive the original story. They take up arms against the Jin, the Jurchen power in the north, and then go overseas to Siam, where Li Jun is made king and a new state is founded. The book is full of utopian hopes and of the wish to escape a conquered homeland. Chen wrote it in his later years, and it was published around 1664. He presented the text as the work of an unknown loyalist of the Song who lived under Yuan rule, and he signed the commentary with his pen name.
The sequel matters because it reads as a lament for the Ming. The critic Hu Shih took the grief and anger over the fall of the Ming as its central theme, and its verse suggests a hope for a new refuge for loyalists in a foreign land. Its artistic quality is uneven, but the book was read in nineteenth-century Japan and had an influence on its fiction. On this site the sequel appears as the forty-chapter Chinese text, beside the Water Margin that the site holds under Shi Nai'an's page, so readers can see how a later writer answered an earlier classic.
This biography was written by a language model. The sources below are where to check it; treat details with care.
Books
水滸後傳
by 陳忱
The surviving outlaws of Liangshan scatter in the last years of the Song and sail south to found a new refuge overseas. Chen Chen's sequel to the Water Margin is a book of loyal exile written after the fall of the Ming. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period as…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.