This is Hakodate...This is Historifandom!

Dear hypothetical readers,

Your hapless author has been occupied with cramming Japanese into a pitiably sieve-like noggin for the last few weeks here where the sun don't shine, i.e. Hokkaido. Updating because my so-called "independent study" project draws to a close (or at least is being forced to come to some kind of closure, as the presentation looms like the Sword of Damocles over next Tuesday) and it attempts to express, very poorly, some observations made in these parts about historifandom as well as Modern East Asia*, which I will relate with greater detail and eloquence below.**

These observations concern mostly the life and demise of one Hijikata Toshizo, "The Demon Vice-Leader of the Shinsengumi." If that line made little sense to you, Mr. W. Pedia could probably explain things much better. But, briefly, Hijikata was the close friend and right-hand-man of the leader of a semi-official police force fighting for the dying Shogunate in the 1860s. As Imperial supporters increasingly gained in power and finally erected the new Meiji government, the remnant Shogunate loyalists broke away and tried to form their own country in Hokkaido, the Ezo Republic, with its capital located in the little town where I am currently making my abode. In perhaps one of the more pathetic civil wars in East Asian history, Hijikata and fellows staged a desperate last stand in Hakodate, centering their energies on holding a new-style pentagonal fort, Goryoukaku, only to be totally wiped out by summer 1869. Hijikata, who had become Vice-Minister of the Army for the Republic, was supposedly killed in a spot about 10 minutes by foot from where I type this post.

Anyway, what's more exciting than modified copy-paste from Mr. Pedia is that Hijikata fandom is extremely active. Photos from the big souvenir shop near the Goryoukaku Park:

Exhibit A, Hello Kitty cosplaying as Hijikata. (Expresses one of the central tenets of fandom, namely "sacrilege is an measure of total worship"...) 315 Yen.

Exhibit B, Hijikata piggy bank. 682 Yen.

Exhibit C, Hijikata T-Shirt. About 3000 Yen.

I could go on with the random Hijikata memorabilia, but that could be a very long post indeed. Instead let me cut to the chase: I find these tokens curious because of their mingling of the life of a historical figure (and from not even that long ago) with fan-mythos, tourism, and consumption. More than simply creating a legend and maintaining/expanding it through free-for-all fan channels like scanlation groups or fanfiction writers, these items create an (capitalist) economy of historifandom. It is nothing as simple as "well, I like him because he was a cool dude" or "he was the last real samurai." If such were the case, how could one bear to buy a (probably made in China) cell phone strap of the last samurai

Thus Hijikata has been remodeled into a mascot of sorts, a stand-in for Hakodate or for whatever bushido is supposed to mean, more than for himself.*** It would be interesting to interview tourists and find out how much they know of Hijikata's background and of the period in general, and how much of that knowledge might be derived from what might be considered "illegitimate" sources, like NHK Taiga Drama, manga, or novelizations. If I were really good at this accursedly difficult language **** or about 50 times more diligent a student I would have probably done so. But for the purposes of the manga, I felt it sufficient to document atrocities/awesomeness like the "Hijikata Hotate [Scallop] Burger" buyable at the local burger joint, Lucky Pierrot.***** Witness the mayonnaisey horror:

And the "Shinsengumi" coin laundry (a pun on the word "sen", 撰/洗, the first of which means "organized," as in "Newly Organized Group," the latter of which means "washing,", as in laundry...):

Abominations or amazing testaments to a view of history that celebrates losers sometimes more than it celebrates winners? As to that, I wonder how much of the so-called "mono no aware" sentiment suposedly so native to Japan has been retroactively emphasized after 1945.

This monument located in a quiet corner in the moutain, for instance, is dedicated to the fallen Shogunate warriors, but its delayed installation (and rather out-of-the-way placement) could imply that there was considerable resistance to recognizing the losers of the Bakumatsu in the early Meiji. I would not be surprised if militarization also led to a certain interpretation of Hijikata and his colleagues. Sure, they were romantic and dashing and doomed, etc., but surely not much room for that by the 1930s? Ditto for the Chunshingura. I am sure that someone could answer this question, especially as I recall hearing from somewhere this spring that there's a collection or monograph on the transmutation of the text and its various adaptations (aka fanfic spinoffs!11!!!). Where does heroism end and plain old failure begin?

Before signing off, the Mona Lisa-like photo of unknown date (probably in 1868) that is plastered over every imaginable household item and surface in the souvenir stores:

A statue version of him from Shinsengumi days:

Some recent anime versions:

From Gintama, I believe.

From Peace Maker Kurogane.

And, I always thought that Anachronism looked like a great game, but this trading card takes the cake:

And with that, to all a good night.

*Phrase used with a mild twitch of the eyebrow.

**Not saying much.
***Other Hakodate mascots include squids, squids, and also squids. These folk really appreciate their 名物, so much that there's a whole dance routine reciting some popular squid dishes, like squid somen and squid shiokara...
****Gratifyingly or maybe terrifyingly, our most recent reading selection, by Dr. Donald Keene, has him writing that Japanese is "uncountably many more times more difficult than Chinese." If even Dr. Keene thinks so, then...well...
*****Apparently, founded by a Chinese man...

Comic Books, Old School Chinese Style

The term's finally coming to an end, and so I guiltily update a horrifying two months since my last entry. To make up a little for this transgression, I've got some juicy stuff to share.

While doing some poking around in old books earlier this year, I ran across illustrations in some late Ming (early 17th century) gongan xiaoshuo, or "court-case tales." (NB: xiaoshuo is the Modern Chinese word for "fiction," but the fictiveness of the genre in late imperial times was not nearly as clear-cut as that label might imply. Thus I use a zillion synonyms, but never "fiction.")

Anyway, these pictures take up about a third of the page;

(This and all following images from the Mingjng gongan, or Bright Mirror Cases. )

block-printed like the text, they are not exactly the pinnacles of late imperial Chinese artistic genius--in fact, they are frequently quite stereotypical in their graphic vocabulary, with all the women looking like one another, all the magistrates much apparently cloned from one man, etc. Not unlike Lego characters in the recent series of popular films adapted into Lego-based action games, even when these figures' heads are lopped off they retain more or less the same expression--one of slight bemusement:

(Oh dear, it looks like this evil monk, being unable to seduce me, has lopped my head off in his fury. Teehee?)

Nonetheless, the presence of these illustrations suggests something of how the vast majority of Chinese people might have accessed stories that literate folk could read at length in the body of these xiaoshuo. The stereotyped images also have the flavor of the courtroom drama, put on and accessible to even the most "rootless" of illiterate rural people. As one would expect from the Cops of 17th-18th century China, most of the stories are pretty sensational, with lots of blood, sex, and plot twists. Notably, I've found two stories in this collection alone with women who have sex and impregnate each other.

But just about all gonagan xiaoshuo end with the successful, clever resolution of the case by a righteous judge, and, often, most unpleasant punishments for the guilty parties. More than occasionally, these sentences far exceeded the statutory regulations.

(If "a wicked monk buries the woman [he murdered, see above] and plants a tree atop her grave" isn't pretty sensational, then you, dear Reader, have probably watched a little too much true crime TV, especially since the monk is apparently a late Ming version of the Hulk or something, able to uproot entire full-grown trees.)

Here I want to post a complete graphic account of a case so you can pretend to be an illiterate person--little kid, young wife, old codger, bandit--of your choice and follow along, just like an episode of CSI as a comic, except Old and Chinese, which can only make the experience better...right? Thus I present "Lord Governor Chen Solves the Case of a Rape and Murder."


A local gentleman, Deng Kui, treats the scholar son of an acquaintance, Zhang Wenli, to a meal.

(Thebpody text notifies us that Deng Kui's young wife, Yu shi,* is "flowerlike in complexion and moonlike in radiance, more beautiful than Xishi and Imperial oncubine Pan of old, with hands delicate as new-sprung lily-buds and brows as fine as willow-leaves just appearing on the branch." During the Pure Brightness festival, Deng and his old mother go out to pay the customary tributes to his father's grave, leaving Yu shi home alone. BAD IDEA.)


Zhang Ba [Zhang the Eighth] tries to rape Yu shi and, failing to overcome her, murders her.

(The body text describes the young idler Zhang the Eighth, who had long lusted after Yu shi, and, when he saw the young woman's husband and mother-in-law both heading toward the graves on Pure Brightness, decided to make his move. Unfortunately for him, Yu shi shouted invectives at him and tried to flee. Suddenly realizing his difficult situation, and espying some fancy jewelry and cltohs, Zhang the Eighth grabs a kitchen knife, kills the poor Yu shi, and seizes some of the cloths and jewels before running and hiding in the hills behind the house.

Coincidentally, the young scholar Zhang Wenli passes by the Deng household and heads inside to say hello--with the ulterior motive of maybe catching another glimpse of the beautiful Yu shi. He ends up discovering her "corpse, saturated with fresh blood and lying on the floor," which scares the soul from his body. In terror, he leaps on his horse and dashes away. Zhang the Eighth, still crouched in the hill, sees all of this clearly. You may see where this is going.)

Kui returns home, sees his wife's murdered corpse, and begins to weep uncontrollably.

(The mother-in-law and Deng Kui report matters to the local headmen immediately. Zhang the Eighth makes a timely appearance, saying that he had been chopping wood in the hills and had seen Wenli ride in, then leave a short while later in a panic. "His family is rich and just has the one son," Zhang suggests to Deng. "You should take this body and carry it to their door, otherwise they'll probably try to bribe the officials with all they've got."** But Deng is reluctant--the Zhangs might send people out to grab Yu shi's corpse and thus eliminate the evidence, so he takes matters to court.)

Deng Kui turns in a petition to the county magistrate accusing Wenli.

(The text reproduces Deng's accusation as a standard "petition" form--perhaps as a way to satisfy armchair detectives who should have been studying up on the Book of Odes or the Spring and Autumn Annals instead, so they could become a magistrate and read real, but probably much more boring, petitions.)


The magistrate sends out constables to arrest Wenli.

(The magistrate, Shen, is "an impatient and harsh man" equipped with "a steely sense of justice." He's furious after reading the plaint, and straightaway sends off constables. I do like this dude's pose with those manacles--can you hear the Cops theme music in the background here?)

Zhang Shimao, Wenli's dad, sets out some wine and goodies for the two constables.

(The next morning, having deflected the police for the evening, Shimao has Wenli file his own petition, accusing Deng Kui of making false accusations: "last year Deng lent my father some silver as startup capital, which we have not yet repaid. Thus he is plotting to cheat us of money.")

Magistrate Shen conducts the inquest of Yu shi's corpse.

(The corpse has a wound on the side and another on the neck[--this does seem obvious, considering the picture shows her decapitated...]. Magistrate Shen calls in the local headmen and Zhang #8 for interrogations. I wonder what that weasel's going to say?)


Zhang the Eighth stubbornly testifies against Wenli, who is injustly condemned.

(At first resistant to confessing, even after forty strokes of the bamboo rod and collapsing in a faint, Wenli eventually confesses after being trussed up in the leg-press and having his head knocked with sticks. Even though he still denies any knowledge of the clothes and jewels, Magistrate Shen ignores him and writes up a case summary.)
Shimao appeals the case to the Provincial Judicial Commissioner's office.

(There's another "plaint" here recording what Shimao filed on the provincial level, going over the prefect's head.)

Luckily for the hapless Wenli, the Nanjing-based Governor Chen is on a tour of inspection and arrives in Huizhou prefecture at just the right moment.

("A youthful holder of the jinshi degree [the third and most advanced in the bureaucratic tests]," Chen is "bright as a mirror, able to see as clearly as a vase of ice, and careful in the details, down to matters as fine as the new-grown autumn down of birds and beasts.")

The Governor interrogates the murder in detail.

("Lift high the bright mirror, Sir," pleads Wenli, "and shine through my injust condemnation." Zhang #8, though, maintains that he had seen the entire rape-attempt-cum-murder from the hill where he was chopping wood. The Governor asks if he, being at such close range, had heard the woman screaming, which she must've done as her murderer attacked. "This humble person did hear," says Zhang #8. "Well, if you heard her cries, why did you not report the matter, instead waiting for Deng Kui to do so? Your words seem unreliable." Zhang #8 has nothing to say.)

A crow flies in and pecks the head of Zhang the Eighth.

(Just as the Governor is hesitating over Zhang #8's inconsistent testimony, a crow flies right in, pecks Zhang #8 on the head once, then flies off again. Everyone's shocked, until Governor Chen sternly shouts that it was Zhang #8 who had done the deed. The fellow refuses to confess until he's gotten two rounds of the leg-press and a hundred knocks from the sticks. When he finally does admit to his crime, he adds that "Heaven couldn't allow my stubborn accusation and injustice toward Wenli, and now you, Sir, are as just as the blue sky. I am resigned to paying with my life.")

The great Governor sentences Zhang the Eighth to the death penalty.

(The Governator also declares that, because Yu shi had resisted rape to the death, she would be commemorated as a chastity martyr, which probably means some silver distributed to her husband's family to erect a paifang, or arch, and a likely biography in the local gazetteer--though such institutions are much better documented as well as a lot more extensively maintained in the Qing than the late Ming.)



Wenli is cleared of the crime and sent home a free man.

(I dig his jolly look here. The blob in the sky could be anything--a comet? A dying bird? A melting sun? A cloud? But those little dark marks near the horizon are definitely supposed to be bamboo. Bamboo shoots, probably. Yum. What a lush landscape they have in Huizhou.)

The gentry and the common people alike praise the righteous, moral governance of Lord Chen.

(More blobbity things in sky, and either a really "mad cursive" inscription*** or a surprisingly postmodern representation of Lord Chen's justice. This last page of the story is taken up by an eighteen-line poem. I quote, "Emperor and lords rule with righteousness and the four seas are clear/the star of virtue hangs high and the eye of Heaven is open." Aha! Those blobs must be THE EYES OF HEAVEN. Do these lines sound a bit apocalyptic to you too, dear Reader?)

Golly, that was an epic post. No commentary--just the observation that these could be awesome if some competent people decided to make 'em into a TV series.

Next time, on THE STAR OF VIRTUE, join us for mutually impregnating lesbians and patron deities of literature--all in the name of JUSTICE, of course!



*shi has sometimes been translated as "woman," [for instance Spence's Death of Woman Wang] but it literally means "of the clan of". If only one surname is mentioned before shi, it is the woman's father's name; if there are two given, for instance Zhang Wei shi, the first is her husband's and the second her father's. Oh, the delights of Cofnucian patriarchy.
** Lest Zhang #8 seems maniacal here, this tactic was actually practiced often enough that it entered a substatue in the Great Qing Code.
***Behold:

Of dyed bears and WAHAHA

I have to confess, I've always perversely enjoyed reading about the newest line of fake shit being sold somewhere in the Motherland. I'm just a schadenfreude type. The melamine-tainted milk, however, was flat out evil enough that I haven't been so har har about fake stuff since (especially because I and people I was responsible for consumed plenty of dairy products in summer '08--fortunately all of us were big and strong enough to not get sick from it).

But this post from the Taipei Times made me gasp. What? The "diplomatic gift" pandas from the Mainland to Taiwan in late 2008 turned out to be random forest bears painted with the right colors?! Surely not? Not the bears whose names, when joined together, actually means "reunion"?

Then I followed the post to Paul Midler's site, and whew, it was all an April Fool's hoax. As he rightly points out, though, the fact that the TP Times put up this story signifies a vast gulf between the Mainland (who is probably pulling an Unhappy China about this, if anyone even got wind of it over the Great Firewall) and Taiwan. It's called being able to laugh at oneself. Sure, in this case it's more like Taiwanese reporters laughing at the people across the strait, but what it really takes is the capacity to look at oneself and burst out laughing. I mean, if the bears had actually turned out to be fake, it's not like anyone reading on Taiwan would likely forget that the Mainland really could get away with such jabs--because they can, because the island is not unlike Seoul, balanced not so many miles away from a host of frightening possibilities. So even while the article's making fun of Chinese fakes, it's also a kind of cheerfully cynical snicker at Taiwan's own position in the world.

But now for a real fakes story: the WAHAHA. This was a fate luckily dodged in '08, but according to my bosses, in summer '07, during the scheduled excursion to a "wild" (unrestored) section of the Great Wall four hours north of Beijing, everyone bought extra bottles of Wahaha [literally, "Kids' Ha-ha"] drinking water. They drank the suckers, because the hike is long and very hot, and then everyone puked for the next week. From then on, the brand became an evil totem, its name read as an evil laugh. Wa. Ha. Ha.

In summer '06, I actually partook (fortunately without incident) of some sketchy Wahaha. The little store in the "downtown" bit of the village we were living in carried 24-packs of water, and, too spoiled to drink the excessively mineral-rich hand-pump water boiled in an ancient, disgustingly crusted kettle, we opted to buy these. Anyway, the one time we sprang for a good deal on some Wahaha it turned out to be a suspicious imitator--same red and white label, but all the graphics seemed a little...pixellated. And the name was very similar-looking, but not quite there. We tried it anyway. It tasted like old flour. We trashed them. I still kind of wonder what the hell was in that stuff--surely not real flour? How is that a better profit margin than just selling boiled tap water, anyway?...

Yuan Mei my homeboy strikes again...

...with a short story encapsulating so neatly the class- and language-barrier crossing legal culture of eighteenth-century China that I can barely move.

"The Real Longtu Turns Out To Be A False Longtu"*

A man of Jiaxing county [in modern Zhejiang province] named Song became county magistrate in Xuanyou [in modern Fujian province, which is frigging far away from Zhejiang**]. He was a stern, fastidious official, and thought of himself as a second Lord Bao. In one of the villages under his jurisdiction, there was a State Student named Wang. Wang started an affair with his tenant's wife, and the two got along well. It put Wang off that the husband was at home, so Wang bribed a fortune-teller to confide to the husband that it was not an auspicious year to remain at home, and that he should instead travel far away to avoid disaster. The husband believed all this and told Student Wang, who lent him capital and ordered him to go do trade in Sichuan. The man did not return for three years; all the villagers gossiped that this tenant had been done in by Wang.

Magistrate Song had also heard of this matter and wanted to right the injustice done to the tenant. One day, as he passed the village where Wang lived, a whirlwind began to blow in front of his sedan chair. He followed it and saw that the wind was coming from a well; he ordered his staff to dredge the well, and found a decayed male corpse inside. Believing it truly to be the disappeared tenant, he arrested Student Wang and the tenant's wife, interrogating them using harsh torture, under which both confessed to murdering the husband. They were sentenced according to the full extent of the law.*** Local people began to call the magistrate "Song Longtu," and there was even an opera scripted from the story that was sung in all the neighboring villages.

The next year, the husband returned from Sichuan. When he entered the city, he saw that onstage they were putting on a performance of Student Wang's story. As he watched, he realized that his wife had been executed unjustly and immediately began to wail in sorrow. He petitioned the provincial seat for redress. The judicial commissioner took the case for him, and Magistrate Song was sentenced according to "deliberately punishing an uninvolved person to death." The people of Xuanyou made a ditty about this:

Blindly sentencing the adulterers as murderers,
a real "Longtu" turned out to be a fake.
A warning to the people who rule us commoners,
even if not corrupt, you pay for a mistake.

***

This story wouldn't have much sting if legal cases didn't have a popular circulation, through venues ranging from the terse classical tales penned by literati authors to media much more accessible to the illiterate or semi-literate. The fact that Yuan Mei had served as a magistrate for several years in three different places himself only adds to the ironic impact of the "false Longtu": sure, it's a funny story of a snobby overreacher, but the pressures on local officials to solve cases, particularly those with a corpse involved, was pretty damn heavy. Even if Yuan could look back in his leisurely retired life to criticize Magistrate Song, he must have once faced much of those pressures himself.

In fact, we know Yuan Mei used supernatural associations with the law in resolving cases: he told one story about his days as a borough magistrate within the city of Nanjing in which a young wife had disappeared, only to show up in a village far outside the city. The father-in-law wanted a divorce, saying that she had obviously been going to meet a paramour, but the woman stubbornly said that she had been carried to the village involuntarily by a giant whirlwind. Yuan sided with her and used a story from the collected works of a thirteenth-century Confucian as proof. In that story, a girl was blown away by a giant whirlwind and ended up wedded to a Prime Minister; "I only wish I could promise you that your son will get as far as that," Yuan told the father-in-law, which was apparently effective in shutting the old man up.

Given his profound skepticism toward most religious practices around him, I doubt that Yuan Mei believed that the young woman had been blown by a wind to where she was found. It's possible that he even created this story because it, like the tale of the false Longtu, is funny. But from both the story he included in his collection of "weird tales" and the one he claimed to be autobiographically true, we can see that popular expectations about the magistrate's justice, which blurred the boundaries between what we'd call fiction and fact, could not be simply put aside by even the most cynical official.

*Longtu is the courtesy name of the famous Song judge, Lord Bao, who was basically a medieval Chinese supernaturally assisted version of Sherlock Holmes.
**Not unusual, since by the "rule of avoidance" magistrates weren't supposed to serve in their home districts.
***Both would have been up for death penalties--the adulterer by beheading after the assizes, and his partner in crime by the harshest sentence on the books, lingchi, a.k.a. "death by slow slicing." [Won't go into gory details here.]

Some more pictures

By all rights I have no excuse whatsoever to not post something more substantial, but... well, these images kind of speak for themselves. I'm scanning a batch for a More Serious Project, and though these don't apply to that, I figure no one could possibly think

SNAKE DEMON ATTACKS (oh shi--!)

or

EPIC BATTLES BETWEEN DAOISTS AND DEMONS (calling it for the Daoists.)

unawesome. Both are from Jingshi Tongyan, a 1624 collection of tales edited by Feng Menglong. The first is an illustration of the famous Miss White Snake, who marries a mortal man for TWOO WUV but is forced apart from him at the end of the tale and imprisoned under a pagoda.* The second picture depicts a Daoist master named Xu and his students fighting the armies of an evil dragon (dragons in Chinese lore are associated with water). It's a bit hard to tell, but they consist of turtles, crabs, and a shrimp or two, all armed with swords and spears.

*Intense folks who want to read the original from 1624 in Chinese, see here. Those who rather prefer Wikipedia, sidle on over here.

** Original here. It's pretty rousing stuff.

Lazy Post

Hell of busy-ness this month, but I'd feel sad leaving my oh-so-devoted readers with nothing for so long. No Bear Wives--that may have to wait until after end of term, at least--but have some pictures from Athanasius Kircher's truly epic China Monumentatis from 1667.*

Fig. 1: The Kangxi Emperor-Monarchæ Sinico-Tartarici

One word: PIMP. Note the weird little dog (not sure if he was a doggy type in life). The really cool thing about this picture (and the others in the book) is that we can "read" them to be depictions of China in the 17th century, but they actually have a lot of improbable distortions based on how European observers saw, for instance, Kangxi's throne troom as a copy of the French king's. We can't make judgment calls about European travelers simply being unable to see the "real" things around them--only that they saw, but what they saw was processed between observation and representation. Here's a contemporary photo of the Taihedian throne room for comparison.**


Fig. 2: Father Adam Schall-P. Adami Schall Germanus I. Ordinis Mandarinus

I will pwn you with geometry. (Kangxi was actually quite into geometry. Unfortunately, the mass conversion Schall was supposed to be working toward didn't exactly occur by dint of his success in sharing the delights of triangles with the Emperor. Instead, they studied math, which is probably the opposite of mass conversion.)

Fig. 3: Green-haired turtles-No Latin caption. [Let them speak for themselves.]

Included because they can fly. [Hums "Flight of the Valkyries," followed by the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song.]
Oh yeah, I know. I haven't ever seen them because they're from the palm-tree areas of South China. Gosh, they have some strange shit down there.***

Fig. 4: Mandarin with sidekick-Modus scribendi
This reminds me so strongly of Carl Pyrdum's medieval marginalia monkeys. Indeed, I wonder if it isn't from the same visual tradition? (Especially as this is the modus scribendi?)

I could post a lot more, but these are probably my top 4 . Maybe later I'll try to find the page of "regional costumes" from various Chinese cities, or the pictures of Chinese beauties posed in "native" styles and costumes.


*Randomly: judging from how dark these images are, I'd guess it's the English edition we're looking at. Oh well, the Latin captions are still sweet.
**NB, the Taihedian, or "Hall of Great Harmony," was the pimpest of the throne halls, and was reserved for fairly special occasions--celebrating the New Year, for instance, or the accession of a new ruler.
***Other strange shit those Southerners have: people who use tree bark to make fake injuries so to better accuse others of assault or even murder; sodomites (often rendered "rabbits" in slang); pirates; weird islands where people have holes in the middle of their chests; informal wars between gangs hired by different powerful lineages.

I think someone might be turning in their grave

What with lousy weather and a case of pests in our apartment, this past week has been pretty terrible and totally un-conducive to work either serious or bloggish. Today, though, things seem to be looking up, so I thought I'd just talk about this ridiculous bit of historifandom (sort of?) that I have just witnessed.

Context: I am looking over the "Humans" section in the Ben cao gang mu, or Materia Medica, Arranged according to Drug Descriptions and Technical Aspects, by Li Shizhen, famed physician of the 16th century. It's the most famous of a considerable corpus of Chinese medical texts, and features all sorts of herbs, minerals, and fauna.

Boring background over, let's get to why I'm bothering to post though a week and more's worth of reading is dangling like the Sword of Damocles above me. When I typed the title into Teh Internetz, this is what I found:

A MUSIC VIDEO OF JAY CHOU RAPPING ABOUT HERBAL MEDICINE.

Okay, in case you're not convinced that naming a song after a frigging early modern medical encyclopedia is totally sweet/bizarre, here're some on-the-spot teaser translations of the lyrics:

You can't cut the deer horn too thin,
you can't screw around when you're learning from the old master.
Turtleshell jelly, Yunnan ginseng powder
and dried caterpillars,
your own music, your own medicine,
the amounts are just right.

Yeah, listen up, Chinese medicine's bitter,
copying out formulas is even bitterer,
you better open up that Ben cao gang mu and read you some fair-copy editions.
Toads and lizards, they've traveled all over the jianghu*,
these venerable ancestors' efforts, we can't lose them.

I detest rap as a rule (and its associated culture of "hos" and "pimps" and violence, which you can witness in the first minute or so of that video**), but Chou's songs have generally been a lot more closely tied to tradition--either in musical influence or in themes, and this one is just awesomely ridiculous. I mean, FAIR-COPY EDITIONS? Can we imagine an American rapping about those?

(In case you weren't convinced yet to watch, there really are some scandalously clad ladies.)

*Jianghu-a term in martial knight-errant (wuxia) novels that refers to the sort of "parallel world" in which aforementioned knights-errant move. Literally, "rivers and lakes."
**Strangely enough, the sexy ladies seem to more or less go away after an initial "hook"...