Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuǐhǔ Zhuàn)
Woodcut illustration from Outlaws of the Marsh, ca. 15th century
Pearl Buck called her translation of the Shuǐhǔ Zhuàn “All Men are Brothers,” which one might amend to read, “All Men are Brothers, Except Petty Officials Who Frame You in Order to Steal Your Hot Wife (or Job or Land or All of the Above).”
The brothers are a band of outlaws who gathered in the marshes on Mount Liangshan in Shangdong province until the day they could prove their loyalty to the emperor.
There was Sagacious Lu, the tattooed monk who fought well when he was sober, and even better when he wasn’t. There was Wu Song, strangler of tigers, and the Ruan brothers, master of disguise. And there was the lady general they called Ten Feet of Steel.
The Outlaws of the Marsh, aka The Water Margin, is the story of more than a hundred such vigilantes. Based loosely on bandits of the 12th century CE, the Outlaws developed through popular storytelling for some 200 years until it was written down by Shi Nai’an and Luo Guanzhong (although there is some dispute about this). Widely adapted for stage and video games alike, it is known as one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature.
The folk narrative traces the first injustices that brought these men (and three women) to the marsh, their skirmishes with law enforcement, and the battles against the barbarians that won their pardon from the emperor.
The adventures of men with handles like Panther Head and Flea on a Drum fill some 100 chapters and more than 1,200 pages in Sidney Shapiro’s unabridged translation (Foreign Languages Press, 1981).
Like Robin Hood, our bandits share their booty with villagers and pledge their loyalty to a leader who does not know the evil his minions do. Among the bandits’ adventures are cunning thefts, daring prison-breaks, and recruitment tactics that are highly suspect. To snag a man known as “Beautiful Beard,” the bandit Li Kui slays the four-year-old boy that the recruit was baby-sitting — the prefect’s son who loved to play with his long red beard. Fearing he would be blamed for the death, Beautiful Beard joins the bandits.
More than once the outlaws frame a man with desirable skills like forgery or magic so that the marshes are the only place he can turn. It’s disturbing, too, that one of their first acts in the marshes is to establish their ranking. Is this “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”?
Still, when the bandits come to their tragic and triumphant ends, the ghosts that walk the marshes are larger-than-life as all great heroes are. These are Heavenly Spirits and Earthly Fiends incarnate in an age when incendiary graffiti could put a price on your head. Fans of action-adventure will certainly have a grand time with Outlaws of the Marsh.
From the Reader’s Notebook
My brother took one look at my copy of Outlaws and said, “If I can’t finish it on the toilet, I’m not going to read it.”
I said, “You want to see volume two?”
Yes, it’s long. Whether you read an unabridged translation may depend on your appetite for sometimes repetitive action, especially during the battles against the barbarians. (Me, I’ll curl up with five volumes of Dream of the Red Chamber or the giant Genji and wish there was more. As much as I enjoyed the more well-known episodes of Outlaws, I got a little restless toward the end. Of course, people have been enjoying the full story for hundreds of years — and you might be one of them!)
