The Country Where Two Schoolgirls Made the Old Scholar Sweat / 黑齿国：两个少女考倒老学究
A Chinese Gulliver's Travels — Episode 3
From Flowers in the Mirror (镜花缘), Chapters 16–17 · 第十六、十七回 · 黑齿国
By Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales
A coastal kingdom where every citizen — man, woman, child — has skin like polished black lacquer and teeth as dark as their skin. The travelers expect savages. They find a city in which every street corner is a schoolroom, every alley is a quotation from the classics, and two ordinary fourteen-year-old girls in a tea-house can casually ask the visiting scholar from China a question about Tang-dynasty phonology that empties his head before he can finish his cup.
The Story
The travelers have been at sea for another month. Tang Ao (唐敖, the disgraced former Tang court scholar who quit dry land to look for what was beyond the maps), Lin Zhiyang (林之洋, his merchant brother-in-law, who runs the boat and is busy bargaining with locals at every port), and the old helmsman Duo Jiugong (多九公, a retired naval officer, now in his seventies, who has read every travel record ever published and is genuinely proud of it) have left the Country of Two Faces[1]For the previous stop in the journey, see Cathay Tales, Tale 019: The Country Where Everyone Wore a Mask Over the Back of Their Head. behind them. The next island on the chart is one Duo Jiugong has been looking forward to: Hēichǐ Guó (黑齿国), "the Country of Black Teeth."[2]Hēichǐ Guó (黑齿国, "Black Teeth Country") is one of the imaginary kingdoms in Flowers in the Mirror. The name and core idea are borrowed from the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经》, Shanhai Jing), the ancient compendium of mythological geography, which lists a "Country of Black Teeth" as one of the realms beyond the eastern sea. Li Ruzhen takes the bare name and reinvents it: where the Shanhai Jing gives a one-line ethnographic note, Flowers in the Mirror turns it into a full satirical essay on Qing-dynasty male scholarship.
Lin Zhiyang stays on board with the ship's crew to load supplies. Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong go ashore alone.
What they see when they walk into the coastal town stops them on the wharf.
The locals are jet-black from head to foot. Skin the color of fresh ink. Eyebrows, hair, beards — all the same lacquer-black. And when any of them opens his mouth to speak, the teeth inside are exactly the same color as the rest of him — black on black on black, a face that gives the visitor nothing to anchor on.
The clothes are red. Pure, vivid scarlet. The contrast of black skin and red robe is, Tang Ao thinks, strangely beautiful — but you have to learn to see it, he tells himself, because at first it just looks wrong.
Duo Jiugong is not impressed.
A backwater, he tells Tang Ao. He has read about this country. The standard travel accounts describe Black Teeth Country as remote, uncultivated, inhabited by a people too poor and too rough to bother with letters. We will not be staying long, he tells the younger man. I doubt we will even find a decent tea-house.
They walk inland.
The first thing they pass is a school.
It is a small one — twelve or fifteen children, all black-skinned, all in their red robes, sitting on benches in a courtyard while an old teacher walks among them holding a copy of the Analects. The children are reciting in unison. The Mandarin is clean, unaccented, fully grammatical Mandarin — the kind a teacher in the capital would be pleased to hear.
Duo Jiugong slows down. He had not expected this.
They pass another school two streets later. Then a third. The third is a girls' school. A teacher in her fifties is leading two dozen black-skinned girls in a recitation of a passage from the Book of Rites (《礼记》).[3]The Book of Rites (《礼记》, Lǐ Jì) is one of the Five Classics of Confucian education. Memorizing substantial passages of it was a baseline expectation for any candidate in the Qing-dynasty imperial examinations. By the early 19th century, when Li Ruzhen was writing, popular opinion held that most male students memorized the surface text but understood very little of the underlying philosophy — exactly the failing the Black Teeth Country girls' education does not exhibit.
By the time the two travelers reach the central market, Duo Jiugong has stopped commenting. Every shop has a young clerk reading at the counter when no customers are present. Every wall has a quotation pasted up — verses from the Book of Songs, lines from Confucius, character-pair couplets in elegant calligraphy. The market square has, instead of a public notice board, a public poetry board, where citizens are encouraged to post quatrains of their own composition for the neighborhood to read.
Tang Ao is delighted. This is wonderful, he says. This may be the most literate country I have ever set foot in.
Duo Jiugong is annoyed. He had told Tang Ao, on the wharf, that this was a backwater. He has been a sea captain for fifty years and a self-described scholar for sixty. His credibility, in his own estimation, has just taken a blow.
He squares his shoulders.
Well, he says, literacy is not the same as scholarship. Anyone can recite. The question is whether they actually understand what they are reciting.
They take a private room at a tea-house in the literary quarter. The host, hearing they are scholars from the great country of China, sends in two of his most accomplished students to entertain them — as is the local custom for honored guests.
The two students are girls.
The first is fourteen. Her name is Hónghóng (红红, "Red-Red," for her preference for the brightest scarlet robe in the school's wardrobe). The second is fifteen, slightly taller, named Tíngtíng (亭亭, "Slender-Tall"). Both wear their hair in the simple double-loop bun of unmarried girls at study. Both bow with the formal three-step etiquette of disciples greeting visiting scholars. Both speak Mandarin so clean and so educated it makes Duo Jiugong sit up straighter.
The girls pour the tea. They sit. They wait, hands folded, for the visiting scholars to begin the conversation.
Duo Jiugong, recovering his dignity, opens with what he considers a friendly opening question — a soft probe to gauge their level. He asks Hónghóng what she has been studying recently.
Hónghóng dips her head. Recently I have been reading the Mao Commentary on the Book of Songs, and I have run into a small difficulty I would be honored to ask the senior scholar about.[4]The Mao Commentary (毛诗) is the standard 2nd-century BCE commentary on the Book of Songs, attributed to two Han-dynasty scholars surnamed Mao. The "small difficulty" Hónghóng raises is a real category of scholarly problem: the Mao Commentary and the alternative Han, Lu, and Qi commentary traditions sometimes disagree about how to gloss the pronunciation of a single character, and the disagreement can change the moral reading of an entire stanza.
Duo Jiugong nods graciously. Please.
Hónghóng asks about a single character in the third stanza of an ode in the Airs of Bin (豳风) section of the Songs. The character is being read with two different fǎn qiē spellings — two different traditional pronunciation glosses — in two different commentary traditions.[5]Fǎn qiē (反切) was the standard Chinese pronunciation-spelling system before the modern era. It glossed an unfamiliar character by giving two reference characters: the initial sound of the first plus the final sound of the second equals the pronunciation of the target. The system worked beautifully for Tang-dynasty Mandarin but produced famously ambiguous results once vowel and consonant sounds began to shift across centuries — which is exactly the kind of fine-grained problem Hónghóng is raising. One reading makes the line scan as a question. The other makes it scan as a statement. The whole moral interpretation of the stanza, she explains, hinges on which reading is correct. She would like to know which the senior scholar prefers, and on what grounds.
Duo Jiugong opens his mouth.
He closes it.
He opens it again. He says — slowly, with the air of a man buying time — that both readings have merit, that the question is one that has divided commentators for centuries, and that one must consider the broader context of the ode.
Hónghóng waits, polite, for him to actually answer the question.
He does not actually answer the question.
She lets the silence sit for exactly the length of one polite breath. Then she gently provides the answer herself — the standard scholarly position, the textual evidence, the relevant Tang-dynasty phonological argument — and asks him whether he agrees with it.
Duo Jiugong agrees. Vigorously. Sweat is starting on his temples.
Tíngtíng takes her turn.
She has, she explains, been reading the Three Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋三传) — the Zuo, the Gongyang, and the Guliang.[6]The Three Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋三传) — the Zuo Zhuan (左传), Gongyang Zhuan (公羊传), and Guliang Zhuan (谷梁传) — are the three classical commentaries on Confucius's terse chronicle of the state of Lu. They differ in style, length, and interpretive priority; mastering all three is one of the higher-end demands of classical Chinese education, and reconciling their occasional factual disagreements is one of the standard advanced-student exercises. She has noticed that the three commentaries give different dates for a particular eclipse mentioned in the original chronicle. The discrepancy, she says, has been bothering her. Could the senior scholar from the great country of China explain how the three commentaries reconcile this?
Duo Jiugong has not, in fact, read the Guliang Commentary in any depth. He has been planning to, for about thirty years. He has not yet found the time.
He says the question is well asked. He says it touches on a deep problem in classical chronology. He says one must take into account the calendrical reforms of the early Han.
Tíngtíng nods, polite.
She then explains, in three measured sentences, exactly how the three commentaries reconcile the eclipse — citing the original passage, the calendrical adjustment, and the secondary commentary by a fourth-century scholar that resolves the discrepancy. She finishes her explanation. She refills Duo Jiugong's tea.
The sweat on Duo Jiugong's temples has by now reached his collar.
Tang Ao, who has been sitting beside Duo Jiugong drinking tea and saying very little, has not been asked a question yet. He feels his stomach tighten. He has been a court scholar. He passed the imperial examination. He held a senior post before being demoted. By any standard he is one of the most credentialed scholars in the southern province he came from.
Hónghóng turns to him next.
She would like, she says, to ask the elder gentleman about his views on a fine point in the rhyming categories of Tang-dynasty regulated verse. There has been a long-standing debate, she explains, about whether two specific rhyme classes — both ending in vowel sounds that have shifted considerably between the Tang and the present — can be used together in the closing couplet of a lǜshī (律诗, regulated eight-line poem) without breach of metrical rule.[7]Lǜshī (律诗, "regulated verse") is the strict eight-line poem-form codified in the early Tang dynasty. Its rhyme rules, tone-pattern rules, and parallelism rules are some of the most intricate in any literary tradition. The specific question Hónghóng raises — whether two particular rhyme categories can be combined in the closing couplet — is the kind of metrical-theoretical puzzle that only a serious specialist would have an answer to. Some commentators say yes, citing six examples from the Complete Tang Poems. Other commentators say no, citing three. She has been weighing the evidence and would value his opinion.
Tang Ao has — his face is now showing it — never thought about this question.
He is a Tang-dynasty scholar by training. The poems she is talking about are the foundational verse of his civilization. He composed in this form for the imperial examination. He should know.
He does not.
He says — into the long, polite, terrifying silence — that the matter is one on which he would not presume to instruct so accomplished a young scholar. He bows in his seat. He admits, in the formal language of the scholarly compliment, that the student is correcting the teacher.
Hónghóng smiles. The smile is genuine. She is not trying to humiliate him. She thanks him, politely, for the honor of the conversation.
The two girls bow. They leave. Tang Ao and Duo Jiugong sit in the empty room with two empty teacups.
Duo Jiugong is the first to speak.
Let us, he says quietly, return to the ship.
They walk back to the wharf without exchanging another word.
Translator's Reflection
What I love about this episode is that the joke is not on the girls. The joke is on the visiting scholars, and the joke is told without raising its voice.
Li Ruzhen could have written this scene a dozen ways. He could have made the girls arrogant. He could have made them mocking. He could have made them caricatures of female precocity who are eventually put in their place by the wisdom of the visiting elders. Every one of those options would have been the conventional Qing move. He picked none of them.
The girls in this scene are unfailingly polite. They open with the most modest framing available in classical Chinese conversation — "I have run into a small difficulty I would be honored to ask the senior scholar about." They wait. They give the visiting scholar every chance to recover. When he can't, they answer the question themselves, gently, the way a kind teacher answers when a student goes silent. They do not gloat. They do not press the advantage. They refill his tea and move on to the next question.
That is what makes the scene devastating. It is not a beating. It is an examination, and the visiting scholars are failing it without being told.
I had to look up some of the phonology questions to confirm that Li Ruzhen wasn't faking the depth — that the questions he puts in the girls' mouths are real, technical, hard. They are. The Mao Commentary problem about the fǎn qiē gloss in the Airs of Bin is a question that contemporary classical-Chinese scholars still debate. The Tang rhyme-category argument is a real problem in metrical theory. Hónghóng and Tíngtíng are not asking trick questions. They are asking the kind of questions a serious second-year student in a high-quality classical academy might ask. Duo Jiugong, who has been claiming the title of scholar for sixty years, simply has not done the work.
Li Ruzhen — writing in 1818, in a Qing dynasty whose elite male examination culture had become famously rigid and famously hollow — knew exactly what he was doing. Black Teeth Country is the book's most pointed argument that gender is not the limit on Chinese scholarship; effort is. The country where the women read better than the visiting men is the country with universal literacy, public poetry boards, and girls' schools on every other street. The country where Duo Jiugong got his credentials is the country where most of his colleagues, at fifty, have stopped opening books.
The detail that always stays with me is the etiquette. The girls treat Duo Jiugong with absolute respect. They never once acknowledge that they have outscholared him. They send him out the door with the same three-step bow they used to greet him. They leave him his dignity. The book lets him keep it, too — when Tang Ao asks Lin Zhiyang what happened, Duo Jiugong only says the locals were quite well-read, after all.
Lin Zhiyang catches the tone in his voice and does not press. The next chapter, the boat sets sail.
Next tale: A new translation. Coming soon to Cathay Tales.
📜 Original Text in Classical Chinese · 文言原文（《镜花缘》第十六、十七回选段）
【前情提要】 唐敖（武周朝前探花，因徐敬业反武起兵被牵连削籍为秀才，出海散心）、林之洋（唐敖妻舅，行商之人，掌船管货）、多九公（七十余岁老舵工，自负读书甚多）三人乘船出海游历海外诸国。已经过了君子国（人人谦让到坏了生意）、两面国（人人在后脑勺戴张面具）。这一天船到黑齿国——其地国人皆面如黑漆、齿亦漆黑，但举国崇文，街市学馆林立，妇孺皆能咏诗。林之洋留船不下，唐敖与多九公二人入城。以下故事，从两人初进黑齿国学馆所见写起——
唐敖、多九公二人入城游玩，只见街上行人面如黑漆，齿如黑漆，浑身上下，无一处不黑。然衣服却又鲜红夺目。多九公道：「老夫向闻黑齿国乃蛮夷之邦，文教不通，今日一看，倒也十分整齐。」二人前行，但见家家闭户读书，户户书声琅琅；又见街旁悬挂诗联，皆系本国人所作；至于学馆，则更是触目皆是。多九公愈看愈奇，不觉默然。
二人寻一茶馆坐下。馆主见是天朝来客，殷勤献茶，又请其本国学子两人陪话，以彰文教。其一名红红，年约十四；其一名亭亭，年约十五。二女衣红裙，肤如墨玉，齿黑而齐，揖让有礼，言辞温雅。
红红先问九公：「老先生既是天朝读书之人，妾有一字之疑，请教先生。毛诗《豳风》某章某字，旧注两读，反切不同，一作平，一作仄，平则属问，仄则属叙，全章义理由此而分。先生平日读《诗》，作何取舍？」
九公闻言，张口结舌，半晌不能答。徐曰：「此事旧儒议论纷纭，未可遽定。要当通观全篇，方可论其去取。」红红微笑，乃自陈所学：引唐人切韵之书、宋儒训诂之注，指其当作平读，又申其义理，娓娓数百言。九公汗已透领。
亭亭复进而问曰：「妾近读《春秋》三传——《左氏》、《公羊》、《谷梁》——见某年某月日食一条，三传所记日次互异，不知先生何以折中？」九公瞠目，顾左右而言他，曰：「此乃古历推步之事，干支错综，原难究诘……」亭亭不待其完，乃言：「《左氏》据鲁历，《公羊》据周正，《谷梁》据夏正，三家所本各异，故所记互殊。后某朝某儒已有专论，先生想必读过？」九公唯唯，不敢复辩。
红红又顾唐敖曰：「先生为天朝进士，律诗一道，妾有所惑：唐人某韵某韵，本属异部，然杜、白诸公诗中亦或有合用之者，毕竟当通否？此中分合之旨，乞先生赐教。」唐敖向来不甚究心音律，闻言张口不得，乃避席谢曰：「此非老夫所能对，敢请二位高才赐教。」红红敛衽道：「妾何敢当此。」
二女既退，茶亦已凉。九公低声谓敖曰：「此地学问之深，我辈始料不及。归船去罢。」二人无言而出。
林之洋在船上见二人色沮，问其故，多九公良久乃答曰：「此邦读书人，比我们天朝倒还讲究些。」之洋大笑。
【后续走向】 黑齿国之行后，唐、多、林三人继续航海，将经淑士国（满街秀才酸腐讽古）、白民国（人人自称大学问家而胸中实空）、两面国之后又至女儿国（林之洋反被招为王妃，被强行缠足，详 续读 →），其后还要游历轩辕国、小蓬莱等三十余国。最终唐敖在小蓬莱仙山见百花仙姑题诗，悟前因，遂留居仙山不归人世。其女唐小山寻父至小蓬莱，仅得父亲所遗书信，遂归唐土，应武则天才女科举试——此后镜花缘下半部即由百名才女之故事接续。（→ 同丛书姊妹篇：君子国 · 两面国 · 女儿国）
Source: 《镜花缘·第十六回·紫衣女殷勤问字 白发翁渺茫谈骚 / 第十七回·因字声粗谈切韵 闻雁行偶咏来词》— 清·李汝珍. Public domain. 古诗文网 — 镜花缘 第十六回 · 第十七回.
🏛️ Historical Context · 历史背景
Flowers in the Mirror in context. Flowers in the Mirror (《镜花缘》, Jìng Huā Yuán) was published in 1818 by Li Ruzhen (李汝珍, c. 1763–1830), a Qing-dynasty scholar who spent some thirty years working on the manuscript. The novel runs to a hundred chapters in two halves: the first fifty are a Gulliver's Travels–like sea voyage through imaginary kingdoms, each one a satire of some Qing-dynasty social pathology; the second fifty trace the lives of a hundred remarkable young women who pass an empire-wide women's examination called by the empress Wu Zetian. The novel is, taken whole, the most ambitious feminist work of the Qing dynasty — written by a man who had spent his life watching daughters and nieces denied the education his sons received automatically.
Li Ruzhen's phonological scholarship. Unlike the protagonists of his own satire, Li Ruzhen was a serious phonologist. His non-fiction work Lì Shì Yīn Jiàn (《李氏音鉴》, "Master Li's Mirror of Sounds"), published in 1810, is a substantial study of Mandarin phonology and rhyme theory that is still cited by historical-linguistics scholars today. The detailed phonological questions Hónghóng and Tíngtíng put to the visiting scholars in this episode are not invented for satire — they are the questions Li Ruzhen had actually been wrestling with in his day job. The barb of the chapter is that the questions a serious working linguist was asking in 1810 were ones that the average examined-and-degreed Qing-dynasty scholar could not have answered.
Why the satire was safe (barely). Open criticism of the Qing male scholarly establishment was politically dangerous in 1818. The literary inquisitions of the Yongzheng and Qianlong reigns were within living memory. Li Ruzhen's defense was the standard one for politically sensitive Chinese fiction: he set the satire abroad. The Black Teeth Country girls are not Chinese girls. The deficient scholars are visitors from China who have happened to fall short on a foreign coast. The book never directly says that Qing male scholarship is hollow. It only shows what hollow scholarship looks like, in a country full of girls who aren't.
The girls' names. Hónghóng (红红) and Tíngtíng (亭亭) are diminutive doubled names, the kind a Qing girl-child might be given by parents who could not afford or care for full adult names. They are not aristocratic names. The two girls are not princesses or court scholars; they are working-class students at a neighborhood school, two children among many. That is part of the joke. The travelers are not being shown the kingdom's prodigies. They are being shown a Tuesday afternoon at the local tea-house.
Connection to the larger journey. Black Teeth Country is the third in the long sequence of imaginary kingdoms in Flowers in the Mirror whose meaning Cathay Tales has been retelling. See also: the Country Where Politeness Killed Business (Tale 010, the Country of the Refined Scholars, where merchants beg to be given less money), the Country Where Everyone Wore a Mask Over the Back of Their Head (Tale 019, the Country of Two Faces, where the second face is the one waiting for everyone in plain clothes), and the Country Where Men Bound Their Feet (Tale 027, the Country of Women, where Lin Zhiyang himself is the one with the bandaged feet).
For the previous stop in the journey, see Cathay Tales, Tale 019: The Country Where Everyone Wore a Mask Over the Back of Their Head. ↩
Hēichǐ Guó (黑齿国, "Black Teeth Country") is one of the imaginary kingdoms in Flowers in the Mirror. The name and core idea are borrowed from the Classic of Mountains and Seas (《山海经》, Shanhai Jing), the ancient compendium of mythological geography, which lists a "Country of Black Teeth" as one of the realms beyond the eastern sea. Li Ruzhen takes the bare name and reinvents it: where the Shanhai Jing gives a one-line ethnographic note, Flowers in the Mirror turns it into a full satirical essay on Qing-dynasty male scholarship. ↩
The Book of Rites (《礼记》, Lǐ Jì) is one of the Five Classics of Confucian education. Memorizing substantial passages of it was a baseline expectation for any candidate in the Qing-dynasty imperial examinations. By the early 19th century, when Li Ruzhen was writing, popular opinion held that most male students memorized the surface text but understood very little of the underlying philosophy — exactly the failing the Black Teeth Country girls' education does not exhibit. ↩
The Mao Commentary (毛诗) is the standard 2nd-century BCE commentary on the Book of Songs, attributed to two Han-dynasty scholars surnamed Mao. The "small difficulty" Hónghóng raises is a real category of scholarly problem: the Mao Commentary and the alternative Han, Lu, and Qi commentary traditions sometimes disagree about how to gloss the pronunciation of a single character, and the disagreement can change the moral reading of an entire stanza. ↩
Fǎn qiē (反切) was the standard Chinese pronunciation-spelling system before the modern era. It glossed an unfamiliar character by giving two reference characters: the initial sound of the first plus the final sound of the second equals the pronunciation of the target. The system worked beautifully for Tang-dynasty Mandarin but produced famously ambiguous results once vowel and consonant sounds began to shift across centuries — which is exactly the kind of fine-grained problem Hónghóng is raising. ↩
The Three Commentaries on the Spring and Autumn Annals (春秋三传) — the Zuo Zhuan (左传), Gongyang Zhuan (公羊传), and Guliang Zhuan (谷梁传) — are the three classical commentaries on Confucius's terse chronicle of the state of Lu. They differ in style, length, and interpretive priority; mastering all three is one of the higher-end demands of classical Chinese education, and reconciling their occasional factual disagreements is one of the standard advanced-student exercises. ↩
Lǜshī (律诗, "regulated verse") is the strict eight-line poem-form codified in the early Tang dynasty. Its rhyme rules, tone-pattern rules, and parallelism rules are some of the most intricate in any literary tradition. The specific question Hónghóng raises — whether two particular rhyme categories can be combined in the closing couplet — is the kind of metrical-theoretical puzzle that only a serious specialist would have an answer to. ↩