The Flowery Notepaper

Introduction

The oldest known wooden-fish ballad book, put into English in 1824 and read by Goethe

The Flowery Notepaper is the oldest wooden-fish ballad book that can be traced, a Ming fragment printed around 1600 and now kept in the Oxford University library, and it is also called the Eighth Book of Genius. It tells of Liang, a gifted young man of Suzhou, and Yang Yaoxian, who fall in love at first sight and write their vows on flowered paper; after many partings, including a false report of his death at the front, Liang is reunited with Yaoxian and with Liu Yuqing, the bride his father chose. Wooden-fish song is a sung storytelling form of the Cantonese region that took shape in the late Ming, and its song books gave rise to dragon-boat songs, naamyam and Cantonese love songs. Peter Perring Thoms put the book into English verse as Chinese Courtship in 1824, published in London and Macao, and Goethe noted in his diary on 3 February 1827 that he was reading it.