Wu Song

Introduction

One of the Wang school's four ten-chapter Water Margin books in Yangzhou storytelling, perfected by Wang Shaotang

Wu Song, also called the Ten Chapters of Wu Song, is one of the four ten-chapter books of the Wang school Water Margin in Yangzhou storytelling, the others being Song Jiang, Shi Xiu and Lu Junyi. Yangzhou pinghua is told in the Yangzhou dialect, arose in the early Qing, and entered the first national list of intangible cultural heritage in 2006. Wang Shaotang came from a family of storytellers, learned from his father at seven, first performed at nine, and at twelve began his professional career with the family's Wu Song book. He developed the four ten-chapter books into their mature form with a telling style described as sweet, sticky, sharp and hot, and a popular saying paired him with Mei Lanfang as the one storyteller everyone should hear. His performance text of Wu Song was edited and published in the 1950s. His granddaughter Wang Litang spent eight years recording and transcribing the four books, which were published in full in 1995 and run to more than four million characters.