Mr Meijie’s Study Of The Colden Lotus

The Golden Lotus is a great naturalistic novel and known to be skillful in description of normal lives and criticism of human nature. There are many studies of The Golden Lotus from different scholars, such as Mr Meijie, whose ideas are adopted in this paper. Mr Meijie, an oversea scholar, is famous for studying The Dream of Red Mansions and The Golden Lotus, correspondingly this paper aims at expressing the significance of Mr Meijie’s research of The Golden Lotus at the aspect of revision and study. The most contribution of Mr Meijie’s studies on The Golden Lotus, lies in a supply of a best checking and punctuating version of the cihua edition of The Golden Lotus, which can benefit the reservation, continuity and research of The Golden Lotus. Besides, the process of checking and punctuating work applied traditional methods extraordinarily and also proved the importance of Chinese traditional knowledge in such study. This process enlightens us significantly. Generally, Mr Meijie’s studies concentrated on three aspects:there are "author","finish time" and "version" respectively. As for "author", Mr Meijie believed that the authors should be folk writers who finished this masterpiece together. As for "finish time", Mr Meijie argued that the finish time should be during the reign of Emperor Wanli. As for "version", Mr Meijie supposed two points:the first one was about fake parts between chapter53to chapter57; the second one was about the relationship between the cihua edition of The Golden Lotus and the chongzhen edition of The Golden Lotus. Uncharacteristically, in Mr Meijie’s opinion, he cihua edition of The Golden Lotus and the chongzhen edition of The Golden Lotus shares a same source-Chin Pin Mei Zhuan. In addition, the publication date of the chongzhen edition of The Golden Lotus was ahead of that of the cihua edition of The Golden Lotus. To sum up, the interaction of checking, punctuating and examination is the unique point of Mr Meijie’s study. Last but not least, we also need more materials to confirm Mr Meijie’s hypothesis.