The Girl Who Came at Night and Left Before Dawn / 莺莺传

A translation of Yuan Zhen's tale of a scholar, a widow's daughter, and the maid who made it all possible

From the literary tradition of the Tang chuanqi (唐传奇) — By Yuan Zhen (元稹, 779–831) · Translated and annotated by Cathay Tales

Before You Begin

This story has a problem, and you should know about it before you read it.

Yingying Zhuan (莺莺传 — "The Story of Cui Yingying," also called Hui Zhen Ji 会真记, "An Account of Encountering the Perfected") was written around 796 by Yuan Zhen (元稹), one of the most celebrated poets of the mid-Tang dynasty. It is roughly 3,200 characters long. It is the single most important piece of Tang fiction in the history of Chinese literature — not because of what it says, but because of what it became.

Over the next seven hundred years, this story was retold, adapted, rewritten, and transformed so many times that it effectively gave birth to an entire tradition of Chinese romance literature and drama. The most famous adaptation is Wang Shifu's (王实甫) Xixiang Ji (西厢记 — Romance of the Western Chamber), a Yuan dynasty zaju play that is to Chinese theatre what Hamlet is to English — possibly more. In Wang Shifu's version, the ending is reversed: Zhang Sheng passes the exams and returns for Yingying, and they are united. Happy ending. The entire Chinese opera tradition knows this story with that ending.

But Yuan Zhen's original — the text you are about to read — ends differently. It ends with Zhang Sheng abandoning Yingying. It ends with him refusing to see her when he passes through her neighbourhood. It ends with him writing a poem that she answers with one of her own, and then with him explaining, in his own narration, that she was a 妖孽 (yāo niè) — a monster, a supernatural temptress — and that he had done the right thing in leaving her, because a man who kept a woman like that would inevitably destroy himself.

This is not, to be clear, the voice of an objective narrator. Yuan Zhen is widely believed by scholars — and this has been the mainstream critical position since at least the Song dynasty — to have written a semi-autobiographical fiction. Zhang Sheng is Yuan Zhen. Cui Yingying is a real woman Yuan Zhen knew in his youth. The abandonment happened. The poem exchange happened. And Yuan Zhen, decades later, wrote this story to explain — to himself, to his readers, to history — why he did what he did, framing the woman he left as a supernatural danger from which he had narrowly escaped.

This is a love story. It is also, simultaneously, an act of self-justification. The two things are not separable. The narrator's voice — his refusal to take responsibility, his rhetorical gymnastics, his final classification of Yingying as something inhuman — is part of the text. It is not a flaw in the story. It is the story's deepest subject.

I have translated the text as faithfully as I can, preserving the narrator's voice without endorsing it. Where the original is ambiguous, I have tried to preserve the ambiguity. Where it is cruel, I have not softened it. Annotations appear in brackets where context requires them.

The maid, Hongniang (红娘 — "Red Maid"), is in many ways the most modern character in the story. She is the one who carries the messages, who engineers the meetings, who understands both parties better than either understands themselves. She is a servant with no power in the formal hierarchy of the household, and she is the single most effective person in the entire narrative. Seven centuries of Chinese theatre and fiction would inherit her name as a synonym for the clever go-between.

The Story

Puzhou, the Temple, and the Cui Family

There was a student of the Zhang clan — I will call him Zhang Sheng, as the text does — who was, by temperament, handsome and accomplished. He had reached the age of twenty-three and had never been intimate with a woman. He told friends once that he preferred not to: those who are drawn to beauty on sight are, without exception, people who do not understand what they are doing. His acquaintances laughed at him for this.

Zhang Sheng was travelling through Puzhou (蒲州, in modern Shanxi province) in the latter years of the Zhenyuan era (贞元, roughly 793–795). He lodged at the Western Temple (西厢) of a large Buddhist monastery outside the city.

By coincidence, a woman of the Cui clan was also staying at the temple. She was a widow, roughly in her forties, travelling eastward to return to her family's home in Changan. She had with her a young son and a daughter of roughly nineteen, named Yingying (莺莺 — "Oriole"). The daughter had been betrothed to a man of the Zheng clan, but the engagement had been broken off — the betrothed had died — and the mother was now travelling with what remained of the family's property: several hundred thousand cash in silk, jewellery, and movable goods. The Cui family was of the highest gentry. They were, the text notes, people of substantial wealth and impeccable lineage.

The mother and children had been stopped at the temple because the roads east had become unsafe. Banditry was spreading in the region — this was the tail end of a period of military unrest following the disturbances of the 780s, and the countryside around Puzhou was, that year, genuinely dangerous. The Cui family's silk and jewellery made them a target, and the mother had decided to wait at the temple until an armed escort could be arranged.

Zhang Sheng, who had connections with a military officer garrisoned at Puzhou, obtained a detachment of soldiers to protect the temple. The mother was grateful. She invited him to dinner.

The Feast

The dinner took place in the eastern hall of the temple. The mother wore dark silk. She brought her son. And she sent a servant to tell the daughter to come out.

The servant returned and said: the young lady is not feeling well.

The mother's face changed. She said, in a voice that was clearly audible across the room: It was this man who saved your life. Without him, you and I and your brother would now be dead or in the hands of thieves. It is not a moment for you to be afraid of formality.

A long pause. Then Yingying came out.

She was, Zhang Sheng observed — and the text records this with unusual specificity — extraordinarily beautiful. Not in the conventional way of Tang beauties, with their painted faces and elaborate coiffures. Her beauty was in the restraint with which she wore it. Her clothes were ordinary. She wore no ornaments. Her face was not painted. Her hair was gathered simply. She sat down at the far end of the table, across from her mother, and she did not look at Zhang Sheng.

She said almost nothing during the entire meal. She was, the narrator notes, silent and withdrawn, as though she were angry at something — or at someone. The mother spoke for both of them. The son, who was a child, ate and played.

Zhang Sheng was shaken. He had expected, he says, to see an ordinary gentry daughter. He had not expected — and this is the first of several moments in the text where the narrator's voice and the narrator's behaviour part company — to be so clearly affected by someone he had just met.

After the meal, he went back to his room. He did not sleep.

The Maid

Some days later — the text is vague about how many — Zhang Sheng made enquiries about the Cui family through a servant. He learned that the family was still at the temple, still waiting for safe passage east. He also learned something else: the daughter had a personal maid, a girl called Hongniang (红娘 — "Red Maid"), who was, in the servant's description, clever and quick-witted, and who handled all of Yingying's correspondence.

Zhang Sheng asked Hongniang, through the servant, to pass on a message. He said — and here the text records his exact words, which are worth quoting because they reveal a great deal about how he understood what he was doing — that he was a young man who had recently arrived in Puzhou, that he had a younger sister who was roughly the same age as the Cui daughter, and that he wondered if the young lady might be willing to correspond with him as one might correspond with a younger sister.

This was, obviously, not what he wanted. It was a transparent pretence. And Hongniang, who was as clever as the servant had said, saw through it immediately.

She laughed. She said — again, the text quotes her directly — You are a serious young man, sir. You should be studying for the exams. Instead you are sending messages to a young woman through her maid. If you want to do this properly, you should do it with poetry.

She then told him something important: that Yingying was not the sort of girl who could be approached directly. She was of the highest gentry. Her mother was strict. And Yingying herself — Hongniang said this with what the narrator describes as a certain admiring gravity — was not a person who would ever willingly compromise herself. If you try to approach her through her family, you will fail. If you try to approach her with money or with rank, you will fail. The only way is through something she cannot refuse.

And what is that? Zhang Sheng asked.

Poetry, Hongniang said. And patience.

The Poem

Zhang Sheng wrote two poems. He sent them with Hongniang.

The first poem has not survived in the original text — the narrator only describes it, saying it was a spring poem (春词, chun ci) in the manner of the old yuefu (乐府) tradition, about the beauty of a garden in early morning and the loneliness of a person who walks through it alone. It was, by the standards of Tang literati poetry, a restrained declaration of interest.

The reply came back that same night.

Yingying had written a poem of her own. It was, the narrator says, seven quatrains — twenty-eight lines, in the regulated verse form. And its content, as the narrator records it, was a refusal.

The poem said, in essence: I have received your words. They are beautiful. But do not come. Do not write again. I am not what you think I am. There is nothing here for you.

This is what she sent. This is what the poem said.

And Zhang Sheng — and this is the moment in the story that everything turns on — read the poem, understood it perfectly, and went to her room anyway.

The Night

He went that night. The text describes this with a restraint that is itself a kind of confession.

That night — the narrator writes — was the fourteenth of the second month. The moon was nearly full. The temple was quiet. The Cui family's rooms were in the western wing of the monastery, behind a wall that separated them from the scholars' quarters. There was a ladder against the wall. Zhang Sheng climbed it.

In the garden below the wall, there was a tree — an apricot tree, in blossom. The petals were falling. The ground beneath the tree was covered with them. He stood there for some time, not moving. Then a door opened.

Hongniang came out.

She did not speak. She looked at him — the narrator says she looked at him with an expression that was neither surprise nor anger, but something closer to confirmation, as though she had been waiting for this and had known, all along, that it would come to this — and she led him inside.

Yingying was in the room. She was dressed for sleep. She was, the narrator says — and I translate this as literally as the classical Chinese allows — in her night clothes, without any ornament, her hair not yet fully arranged, her face not painted, and she was more beautiful than she had been at the feast.

She did not speak to him. She was, the text says, angry — not at him, specifically, but at the situation, at herself, at the fact that she had sent the poem and that he had come anyway. She scolded him. She said, in words that the narrator quotes directly: You sent me poetry, which was a way of asking. I sent you poetry back, which was a way of saying no. Why are you here?

Zhang Sheng said nothing.

And then — and this is the passage that seven centuries of Chinese literature would return to again and again — she came to him. She did not forgive him. She did not change her mind. She came to him in spite of everything — in spite of the poem she had sent, in spite of the refusal she had written, in spite of her mother and her lineage and every rule that governed a girl of her station. She came because — and the narrator, to his credit, does not pretend to understand this either — she had already decided, before the poem, before the feast, before anything, that she would.

The narrator does not describe what happened after that. The text moves on immediately. It says only: When Zhang Sheng woke, she was gone. The room smelled of something — the narrator calls it 天香, "heavenly incense," though whether this is literal incense or something else is left deliberately unclear — and the window was open, and the apricot petals on the ground outside had been disturbed, as though someone had walked through them on the way back to her room.

She came back the next night. And the next. And every night for more than a month.

Every night she came through the garden. Every night she left before dawn. She never spoke of what they were. She never asked him what he intended. She was, the narrator writes, with what might be admiration or might be something else entirely, completely silent about the future.

The Departure

The text now moves quickly. It was, the narrator says, several months. The relationship continued in secret. Hongniang knew everything. She carried the messages. She opened the doors. She was, in the narrator's description, the one who made it possible, and who seemed to take a certain quiet pleasure in the fact.

Then Zhang Sheng received word that the examinations in Chang'an would be held that autumn. He had to go.

He told Yingying. She — and the narrator pauses here, in a way that suggests he himself did not know how to write about what happened — she said nothing. She did not ask him to stay. She did not ask him to take her. She did not weep. She said, according to the text, only: The one who commands fate is heaven. What can any of us do?

He went to Chang'an.

He wrote to her. The letter, the narrator says, was long — several thousand characters — and contained, among other things, a description of their time together and a promise to return.

He received a reply. The reply is the emotional centre of the story. It is the longest single passage of Yingying's own voice in the entire text, and it is worth reading carefully.

Yingying's Letter

She wrote — and I translate as closely as the original allows:

You sent me a letter of several thousand words. You described what we had, and you called it something worth remembering. I am grateful for this. You have been kind in your words. You have not lied about what happened between us. This I appreciate.

But you also wrote that you intend to return. And here I must say something, even though I know you will not like it.

You came to me through the garden. You climbed the wall. You came to me at night, through the maid, in secret. I let you. I know what this makes me. I have thought about it. I have not been able to stop thinking about it.

If you had approached me properly — through my mother, through a matchmaker, through the forms that govern people of our station — I would have been bound by those forms. I would have done what was expected. I would have married someone else, and I would have lived the life that was prescribed for me, and I would never have done what I did with you.

But you came to me in the only way that could have made me do what I did. You came to me in secret. And I chose, in that secret, to meet you. I chose. That is the word I keep returning to. I chose.

Now you say you will come back. And I must ask you: what would it mean, if you did? You cannot marry me. You know this. Your family would never accept a girl who met a man through a wall. My family would never forgive me for what I have done. If you came back, we would be in the same position we are in now — secretly, in the dark, with no future and no name for what we are to each other.

I am not saying this to make you feel guilty. I am saying it because I have had several months to think about what happened, and I have come to a conclusion that you may not have reached yet: what we had was real. It was not a sin, though it broke every rule. It was not a mistake, though it has no future. It was something that happened between two people who chose it, briefly, without permission, and I do not regret it. I will not regret it. But I also do not want you to come back. Not because I do not want to see you — though that is also true — but because if you came back, one of us would have to lie. And I would rather remember what we had as something true.

I am sending you a jade ring. You gave it to me once. I am sending it back. Not because I want you to forget. But because a ring is a circle, and a circle has no end, and I cannot hold something that has no end. I need it to be something that happened. Past tense. Finished.

Take care of yourself.

Zhang Sheng's Response

The narrator — and here it becomes very difficult to separate Zhang Sheng from Yuan Zhen from the narrator from the text itself — describes his response in a passage that has troubled readers for a thousand years.

He showed the letter to his friends. He showed it publicly. The letter, he said, was evidence that Yingying was — and I am translating the narrator's exact word — a 妖孽 (yāo niè). A monster. A supernatural thing that appeared in the form of a woman but was not, in fact, a woman at all. It was the kind of creature that the ancient texts warned about: the fox-spirit, the flower-demon, the thing that takes human shape in order to drain a man of his vitality and his reason.

He said — and this is the passage that makes the story simultaneously one of the greatest love texts and one of the most profound acts of self-betrayal in all of Chinese literature — that he had recognized her nature from the beginning. He had known, he said, that she was dangerous. He had known that the feelings she aroused in him were not natural. He had known that she was not what she seemed. And he had left her, he said, because he was strong enough to resist her. Because he had understood, where she had not, that a man who kept a creature like that would destroy himself.

His friends, the narrator says, were convinced. They agreed with him. They praised him for his discernment.

What the Text Does Not Say

The text does not say what happened to Yingying after that. The narrator mentions, in a single passing sentence, that she eventually married someone else — a man of ordinary background, nothing more was recorded. The narrator also mentions that he himself married, some years later. He does not name his wife. He does not say whether he was happy.

The text does not explain why, if Yingying was truly a monster, he wept when he read her letter. The narrator does not mention this weeping, but it is recorded in a later source — a letter from one of Zhang Sheng's friends, preserved in a Song dynasty anthology — that Zhang Sheng did weep, alone, in his room, for several hours, after reading the reply. This is not in Yuan Zhen's text. It is in the historical record. It is, depending on how you read it, either a later invention designed to soften the story's cruelty, or a surviving fragment of something Yuan Zhen deliberately chose not to include.

The text does not explain why the most vivid, the most specific, the most emotionally detailed passages in the entire narrative are the ones that describe Yingying's beauty, her silence, her anger, the way she walked through the apricot petals at night. The narrator's rhetorical frame calls her a monster. The narrator's actual writing calls her something else entirely.

The text does not explain why Hongniang — the maid, the servant, the girl with no name and no power in any hierarchy that mattered — is the one character in the story who is never described as anything less than fully human.

After the Story

Yingying Zhuan was written around 796. Within two centuries it had been adapted into at least three separate dramatic traditions. By the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), it had become the basis for what is arguably the single most performed work of Chinese theatre: Wang Shifu's Xixiang Ji (西厢记 — Romance of the Western Chamber). In Wang Shifu's version, the story is transformed: Hongniang becomes the central comic character, Yingying becomes a fully sympathetic heroine, and Zhang Sheng returns from the exams having passed, and marries her. The cruelty of Yuan Zhen's ending is erased. The monster is made into a bride.

This is, by most accounts, a better story. It is also, in a sense, a different one. What Yuan Zhen wrote — the text you have just read — is not a love story with a happy ending. It is a love story with an ending in which the narrator destroys the woman he loved in order to protect his own reputation. The fact that he wrote it so beautifully that the beauty has survived the cruelty for a thousand years is, perhaps, the only thing about this story that is not deeply strange.

The ring Yingying sent back — the jade ring, the circle with no end — appears in no later version of the story. It is one of the details that Yuan Zhen invented and that no one else thought to keep. It is, I think, the truest thing in the text.

Annotations

On the narrator's voice. The narrator of Yingying Zhuan is not a neutral party. He is Zhang Sheng's friend — "a friend who heard the story from Zhang Sheng himself," as the text claims — and he reports Zhang Sheng's version of events without apparent scepticism. This is deliberate. Yuan Zhen is writing a story about a man who abandoned a woman, and he has chosen to tell it from the perspective of the man who did the abandoning. The effect is to make the reader complicit: you are asked to understand why Zhang Sheng did what he did, to see Yingying through his eyes, to accept his classification of her as a 妖孽. The text's greatness lies in the fact that it does not quite succeed in this. Yingying's letter — her voice, her refusal, her insistence on naming what happened — breaks through the narrator's frame. The story is more honest than the storyteller.

On the 妖孽 accusation. The word 妖孽 (yāo niè) appears in pre-Buddhist Chinese texts, including the Zuo Zhuan (左传) and the Shiji (史记), where it refers to supernatural portents — unnatural events that presage disaster. By the Tang dynasty, it had also come to mean a woman whose beauty or sexual power was thought to have a destructive effect on men. The accusation was not unique to this story; it appears throughout Chinese literary and historical writing about women who were perceived as dangerous. Yuan Zhen's deployment of it here is notable not because it was unusual, but because it was so transparently self-serving. The narrator calls Yingying a monster after she has already shown, in her letter, more humanity and self-knowledge than anyone else in the story.

On Yuan Zhen's biography. Yuan Zhen (元稹, 779–831) was a major poet of the mid-Tang, close friends with Bai Juyi (白居易), and one of the chief proponents of the "New yuefu" (新乐府) movement in poetry. His own love poetry — especially the poems he wrote about a woman scholars generally agree was the model for Yingying — is among the finest in the Chinese tradition. He was, by all accounts, a genuinely complicated person: a poet of extraordinary tenderness and a politician of considerable ruthlessness. Yingying Zhuan fits both sides of him.

On Hongniang. The character of Hongniang (红娘 — "Red Maid") would become, in later Chinese fiction and drama, the archetype of the clever servant girl who facilitates a love affair. The name itself — hóng (红, "red") and niáng (娘, "maid" or "young woman") — is so thoroughly associated with this role that it entered everyday Chinese as a synonym for "matchmaker" or "go-between." In Yuan Zhen's original, she is a minor character — important to the plot, but given almost no interiority. Later adaptations, especially the Yuan dynasty play, would give her a much larger role and make her the comic and moral centre of the story.

On the text's transmission. Yingying Zhuan survives in several versions. The version translated here follows the text as preserved in the Taiping Guangji (太平广记 — "Extensive Records of the Taiping Era"), a Song dynasty anthology compiled around 978, which is considered the most reliable of the surviving versions. The original text is approximately 3,200 characters. I have translated the full text, preserving the narrator's structure and voice, with annotations where the original is ambiguous or where context requires it.

Next week: the Yuan dynasty play that gave this story a happy ending — Wang Shifu's Romance of the Western Chamber, in which Hongniang finally gets the last word.