Its influence has gone far beyond the usual genres of fiction, film, art, and theater. The stories provide, even today, a point of reference for codes of honor, social and economic networks, secret societies, and political movements.
Generations of China’s governments have sought to represent themselves as guardians of an often explicitly neo-Confucian order characterized by a fixed and morally grounded political and social order constructed of hierarchical relationships. But “The Water Margin” represents another, equally real and representative, Chinese worldview. In this world, local injustice is the rule, and defense against cruel local authority is a matter of vengeance, stratagem, and violence.
From this universe, itself a highly mediated depiction of the rapidly decaying Northern Song Dynasty in the 12th century, derive fictional worlds of errantry, struggle, and righteousness that have gone through endless narrative and cinematic iterations.
Rebels With a Cause
With printed versions dating back to the 14th century, “The Water Margin” largely follows the adventures of strongmen, innkeepers, footpads, peasants, vagabonds, fishermen, hunters, petty officials, and local gentry. Surrounding these protagonists are the thousands of nameless followers and victims who are knocked off or maimed (just as they might be casually dispatched in Homer) in the novel’s thousand-odd pages.
Women, when they (not so very often) appear, are hard-nosed mistresses, pugnacious sisters, hapless wives, strategizing helpmeets, or murderous innkeepers (one of whom has hit on Mrs. Lovett’s idea of baking humans into pies a full 800 hundred years before her). This also sets it apart from the mainstream of imperial fiction, which is substantially preoccupied with the passions and travails of high-born, talented women and their ambitious scholar swains, not to mention emperors and generals.
In the Ming (14th–17th century) and Qing (17th–20th century) dynasties, the bandits of “The Water Margin” continued to influence all manner of groups operating far from the seat of power, despite periodic attempts to ban the book.
Enduring Legacy
The plot’s political relevance has never gone away. Having been adopted in the 1930s by reformers as a healthily anti-feudal narrative, it was later deployed in a major 1975 communist regime campaign, in which the leader of the Liangshan bandits in the book, Song Jiang, was criticized for accepting the emperor’s offer of amnesty. Had he not given the game away? And was he therefore not guilty of coexistence with forces inimical to the masses, just as party members, late in the Maoist era, would be guilty of capitulationism if their fervor flagged?
It’s commonplace to lament human transience and contrast it with the immutability of nature. But those going in search of the dense marshlands of Shandong—where in the novel crafty fishermen might cause unwary inconvenient minor officials to disappear—will be disappointed. The entire geography of the novel has been altered beyond recognition by river engineering and irrigation.
This of course does not prevent local governments continuing to put up buildings tagged to certain events in the novel, hoping at the same time that the message of righteous rebellion against local authority is never taken too literally. The formidable, impregnable, fortified mountain, Liangshan, rises just short of 220 yards in reality.
The place of “The Water Margin” has moved almost entirely into the imaginary, and it is the situations, the events, the stratagems, and above all the characters—furious and righteous, looking to set the world right—that have left their mark on posterity.
