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More Swindles from the Late Ming

Sex, Scams, and Sorcery

By: Yingyu Zhang, Bruce Rusk (Translator), Christopher G. Rea (Translator)

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Hardcover | 5 November 2024 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Hardcover
240 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.96

Hardcover

$250.25

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A woman seduces her landlord to extort the family farm. Gamblers recruit a wily prostitute to get a rich young man back in the game. Silver counterfeiters wreak havoc for traveling merchants. A wealthy widow is drugged and robbed by a lodger posing as a well-to-do student. Vengeful judges and corrupt clerks pervert the course of justice. Cunning soothsayers spur on a plot to overthrow the emperor. Yet good sometimes triumphs, as when amateur sleuths track down a crew of homicidal boatmen or a cold-case murder is exposed by a frog. These are just a few of the tales of crime and depravity appearing in More Swindles from the Late Ming, a book that offers a panorama of vice--and words of warning--from one seventeenth-century writer.

This companion volume to The Book of Swindles: Selections from a Late Ming Collection presents sensational stories of scams that range from the ingenious to the absurd to the lurid, many featuring sorcery, sex, and extreme violence. Together, the two volumes represent the first complete translation into any language of a landmark Chinese anthology, making an essential contribution to the global literature of trickery and fraud. An introduction explores the geography of grift, the role of sex and family relations, and the portrayal of Buddhist clergy and others claiming supernatural powers. Opening a window onto the colorful world of crime and deception in late imperial China, this book testifies to the enduring popularity of stories about scoundrels and their schemes.

Industry Reviews

Like every society characterized by long-distance trade, early modern China presented ample opportunities for deceit, and so had to confront endemic challenges to interpersonal trust. This book provides an extraordinary array of morality tales from the early seventeenth century, probing the variety of duplicitous schemes bedeviling Ming China and illuminating key frictions in a patriarchal, commercial society. The collection further illustrates the enduring dilemmas associated with efforts to instruct readers in how to look sharp in a world of sharpers, since its stories also serve as how-to guides for the unscrupulous. -- Edward J. Balleisen, author of Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff
In the canon of the con, More Swindles from the Late Ming is an honest-to-goodness treasure-without a trace of honesty or goodness. Rusk and Rea have succeeded brilliantly with this translation, unearthing and explaining the roots of deep moral anxieties in China. Like the greatest crime stories, these harrowing tales read like sociology in disguise, reminding us how much of our daily life rests on a thin foundation of trust-if we can keep it. -- Evan Osnos, author of Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
Think scams are something modern? More Swindles from the Late Ming proves otherwise. If, upon reading the book, you find yourself worried that there's something disturbingly timeless about human behavior like this, never fear! Each swindle is followed by stern advice for the nervous reader; e.g. "It's simply safer to marry local." -- Tori Telfer, author of Confident Women: Swindlers, Grifters, and Shapeshifters of the Feminine Persuasion
It is wonderful to now have the lively and complete translation of this curious text. -- Andrew Schonebaum, author of Novel Medicine: Healing, Literature, and Popular Knowledge in Early Modern China

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