Dale R. Johnson - A Glossary of Words and Phrases in the Oral Performing and Dramatic Literatures of the Jin, Yuan, and Ming

Yuan dynasty fresco of a dramatic performance, dated 1324. Preserved in the Shuishen Monastery attached to the Guangsheng Temple in Hongdong, Shanxi Province. Source: Yuanren zaju zhu, edited by Yang Jialuo, Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1961 A GLOSSARY OF WORDS AND PHRASES IN THE ORAL PERFORMING AND DRAMATIC LITERATURES OF THE JIN, YUAN, AND MING by DALE R. JOHNSON CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN ANN ARBOR Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities / Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program Michigan Monographs in Chinese Studies Series Established 1968 Published by Center for Chinese Studies The University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104-1608 2000 The Regents of the University of Michigan All rights reserved The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Publications and Documents in Libraries and Archives ANSI/NISO/Z39.481992. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Johnson, Dale R.

A glossary of words and phrases in the oral performing and dramatic literatures of the Jin, Yuan, and Ming = [Chin Yan Ming chiang chang y hsi ch wen hseh tzu hui] / Dale R. Johnson, p. cm.(Michigan monographs in Chinese studies, ISSN 1080-9053 ; 89) Parallel title in Chinese characters. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-89264-138-X 1. 2. 2.

Folk literature, ChineseDictionariesChinese. 3. Chinese languageDictionariesEnglish. I. Title: [Chin Yan Ming chiang chang y hsi ch wen hseh tzu hui]. Title. III. Series. Series.

PL2592.5 .J64 2000 792.03dc21 99-058183 ISBN 978-0-89264-138-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-472-03823-7 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-472-12780-1 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-472-90176-0 (open access) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ To all my treasures: Isebill, Nils, Lura, Araceli, little Matias, and little Tomas, who just entered our world. CONTENTS This glossary was actually the brainchild of Professor James I. Crump, who started it back in the late 1950s, if memory serves me correctly. It was a project he called The Capitol Dialect. I began collecting materials that might be used in a similar project in the early 1970s, but was distracted by my obsession with prosody and structure in the arias of the Yuanqu xuan and the Yuanqu xuan waibian; apart from cutting and pasting entries culled from some of the early works listed in the Osaka index, I made little progress. It was in the early 1980s after my work on prosody and structure was published that my mind again returned to the project.

Jim Crump and I jointly applied for grants to fund it, but we were thwarted when financial support was not forthcoming. I then took up the project on my own. I have enjoyed Jim Crumps encouragement and support through all the intervening years, and he, probably more than any other person, is to be credited with persuading me to halt the entry gathering process in order to publish it. A more interested and loyal supporter one could not hope to have, and I owe him an enormous debt of gratitude for his faith that it would be completed. I would also like to thank him for his recent help in arranging financial support for the glossary project, and our sincere thanks to the Council on Cultural Planning and Development (Wen-chien hui) of the Republic of China, which provided the actual funds. Professor Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania was also enormously helpful.

He shared with me Chinese computer software, with which I have been able to create the hundreds of characters in this work that cannot be found in standard word processing systems. He also served as expert consultant on matters of the Mongol and Uyghur languages. To him I am grateful because I sense he is a kindred spirit in the world of dictionary makers and always ready to offer his services. Jerome P. Cavanaugh deserves much credit for his role as my personal book scout. On his many book-buying trips to China, he brought back the latest works on Yuan music dramas and in this process not only kept me up-to-date on new works in the field, but provided a steady stream of materials he thought I would find useful.

Thanks are due to Cynthia Ning for sending me copies of her unpublished translations of Yuan music dramas. And I am grateful to the late Sheila Hough and also to Penelope Kenez. Sheila devoted many hours to looking for typographical errors and awkward phrases in the definitions. Penelope, whose patience never flagged, endured hours and hours of checking and rechecking the numbers in the textual citations. Her keen eye also caught many other kinds of errors as we slowly plowed through the manuscript. Profound thanks to my editors at the Center for Chinese Studies: Terre Fisher, my Minerva with a keen eye, who with dogged dedication steered this work on to match her high professional standards, but always with a generous dose of charm and humor; and the amazing Mona Logarbo, my professional dictionary editor, who checked all the see references not once, but twice, ever revealing her wisdom about entries that she could not read in the original.

I am especially grateful to calligrapher and friend Wang Dongling of the National Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou for the exquisite brushwork that graces the title page. Thanks also to Walt French, who played an absolutely critical role in the final production of the manuscript, giving up a holiday weekend to help me print out the final pages. Last but not least, my wife Isebill deserves credit for having supported me for more than a decade when my mental energies were preoccupied with ruminating about this glossary. She is blessed with a well of patience that never runs dry. This work covers the oral performing and dramatic literatures of China written over the four hundred year period spanning 12001600 A.D. It contains approximately 8,000 entries based on the reading notes and glosses found in various dictionaries, thesauruses, glossaries, and editions of works that broadly include ballad medleys , comic farces , Yuan music dramas , Ming music dramas and