Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection
ISBN: 9780231545648
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Columbia University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Swindlers and swindling -- China -- Anecdotes; Fraud -- China -- Anecdotes;

The Book of Swindles , a seventeenth-century story collection, offers a panoramic guide to the art of deception. Ostensibly a manual for self-protection, it presents a tableau of criminal ingenuity in late Ming China. Each story comes with commentary by the author, who expounds a moral lesson while also speaking as a connoisseur of the swindle.

Christopher Rea is associate professor of Modern Chinese Literature at the University of British Columbia. He is the translator of The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection ( Columbia University Press, 2017) and the author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (University of California Press, 2015)Zhang Yingyu (fl. 1612-1617) lived during the Wanli period (1573-1620) of the Ming dynasty.

Christopher Rea is associate professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of The Age of Irreverence: A New History of Laughter in China (2015), and the editor of several books, including Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts: Stories and Essays by Qian Zhongshu (Columbia, 2011).

Bruce Rusk is associate professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Critics and Commentators: The Book of Poems as Classic and Literature (2012).