Surprising Stories to Make One Slap the Desk

This is a famous collection of erotic stories from the Ming Dynasty. Ling Mengchu (1580-1644) was born into the Ling clan of Wuxing, Zhejiang province. The Ling family had supplied numerous officials to the empire. No doubt the Ling family prospered on land rents and agriculture. In addition family members were actively engaged in the printing business with a local specialty of books in polychrome. He was a lover and promoter of popular literature. He compiled two volumes of short stories called Surprising Stories to Make One Slap the Desk, or Two Volumes of Slapping for short. He wrote most of the 78 stories in them, though the material came from earlier folk tales. Ling's short stories were a detailed study of his 17th century moral world. A new factor that Ling Mengchu insisted on was empiricism, an objective study of what existed before the eyes of the observer. In the prefatory material to his first short story collection he insisted it was infinitely more difficult to paint a likeness of a dog or horse one had actually seen than to render a ghost or goblin had never observed. Later, a man who called himself the Old Man Hugging the Jar selected 40 from the nearly 200 stories in the Three Volumes of Words and Two Volumes of Slapping and put them together in a book entitled Wonderful Sights of Ancient and Modern (Jin gu Qi Guan), which was to become more popular than the five original books. Ishi Press has launched a program where we are reprinting long out of print books in Chinese. This is one of the books. These are books that we believe are no longer readily available in China but nevertheless should be preserved. These titles are concerned primarily with Chinese traditional medicine including Chinese herbal medicine and acupuncture, Chinese massage, Chinese literature and Chinese history plus the Holy Bible translated into Chinese. These books are all entirely in Chinese. Some are in Simplified Chinese. Others are in Traditional Chinese. These are not translations except that the titles have been translated into English. Thus far, all of these books were first published before 1998 but after 1949.