The Confucius Chronicles - by Wai-Yee Li

About the Book

This book explores enduring narratives about Confucius, shedding light on his role as a symbol of cultural ideals and a fulcrum of ideological debates across eras.

Book Synopsis

Our ideas about Confucius come from the stories told about him. He often appears as the great sage of ancient China, handing down timeless moral precepts to his disciples and to posterity. Yet over the course of twenty-five centuries, Confucius has meant many different things to different people, representing varied views on political order, ethical behavior, and personal well-being.

This book explores enduring narratives about Confucius, shedding light on his role as a symbol of cultural ideals and a fulcrum of ideological debates across eras. Wai-yee Li translates and provides commentary on a wide range of key texts, examining how Confucius's legacy was interpreted in different historical moments. Beginning with the canonical account by the historian Sima Qian, she canvasses Daoist and Legalist writings from the Warring States, a ballad about a homicidal Confucius from the Tang dynasty, an eighteenth-century anthology of jokes, modern writers such as Lu Xun, and contemporary rap music, among others. Focusing on how these stories are told, Li identifies continuities, ruptures, and unexpected connections in the representations of Confucius and considers the questions they raise. Suitable for a range of courses, this book offers new ways to understand Chinese cultural and intellectual history through Confucius and his transformations.

Review Quotes

Masterfully weaving 2300 years of Confucius imaginaire from the Zhuangzi to the rap on Sunny and Cheerful Kong Yiji, Wai-yee Li brings to life the history of Confucianism in an engrossing anthology of texts on Confucius. Unparalleled, Wai-yee Li combines the power of storytelling with a magisterial historical analysis of the sources. The Confucius Chronicles is a superb, thoughtful quest into the diversity of the Confucian tradition.--Joachim Gentz, author of Gongyang tradition (Das Gongyang zhuan)

Confucius is among the most admired--and most debated--figures in Chinese history. For some he epitomizes wisdom; for others, unfulfilled aspirations. Wai-yee Li introduces this polyphony through annotated translations of a variety of stories, from Confucius's biography to a recent internet song. Students and scholars alike will enjoy this book immensely.--Yuri Pines, author of Zhou History Unearthed: The Bamboo Manuscript Xinian and Early Chinese Historiography

For the first time, some of the many stories about Confucius that circulated in China for thousands of years are now available to modern English readers through Wai-yee Li's translations. With Li's groundbreaking approach to reading these sources, even the Analects appears here as a more revealing and complex text than ever before.--Thomas Wilson, author of On Sacred Grounds: Culture, Society, Politics, and the Formation of the Cult of Confucius

In this lucid and judicious collection, the eminent China scholar Wai-yee Li offers a rich sample of the surprisingly diverse lore surrounding Confucius's life and thought. The Confucius Chronicles will serve scholarly and general readers alike as an indispensable complement to the Analects.--David Schaberg, author of A Patterned Past: Form and Thought in Early Chinese Historiography

In an era when pseudo-efficiency and a hyper-focus on fleeting impressions reign supreme, Wai-yee Li's The Confucius Chronicles reminds us of the delicious pleasures to be experienced not only from "slow reading," but also from "super-slow reading," by which one moves from a single passage both vertically in time and horizontally across roughly contemporaneous texts, savoring associations by turns obvious and subtle. Pieties are out. Instead, we find her romp through the centuries. Meanwhile, the Kongzi of the collective imagination comes alive, as we see him by turns excoriated, admired, and co-opted by all manner of would-be claimants to the role of sage, including Han Fei and Li Zhi. This book is a triumph: a teaching text that shows how much we all have to learn!--Michael Nylan, author of The Chinese Pleasure Book

About the Author

Wai-yee Li is the 1879 Professor of Chinese Literature at Harvard University. Her recent books include The Peach Blossom Fan (2024), Gender and Friendship in Chinese Literature (2024), A Topsy-Turvy World: Short Plays and Farces from the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Columbia, 2023), and The Promise and Peril of Things: Literature and Material Culture in Late Imperial China (Columbia, 2022).