108 Heros from shui hu zhuan(Outlaws of the Marsh), Japanese oil

This book created great lovable characters from Song dynasty; however the end of the novel is pure crap.  Just like every other "Romance of the 3 Kingdoms" wanna bes.

The first picture, Lin Chung the Leopard Head is one of my favorite.  He is a great general with a beautiful wife in the book.  The son of a high rank kiss ass official named Gao Quo wanted Lin's wife for himself.  So he accused Lin of treason, took his wife, and was sending him to his death. 

Lin, with the help of a crazy monk who also became one of the "marshians", escaped.  To make Lin wife to give up waiting, they sent Lin, who was a great general, to some crap hole to save keep the military supply. 

They then send someone to burn down the outpost, but it was snowing so hard that collapsed Lin's room, so Li wasn't there at the outpost.  With this narrow escape, Lin finally realized that the government isn't going to do anything to keep justice, so with great conflict; he joined the Thieves in the Marsh.

The picture clearly depicts when he escaped the flame in that snow storm and decided to fight back.

There is an ... i guess you can call it comic strip in English here for people who actually wants to know this story.

http://www.chinapage.com/shuihu/watermargin.html

Hey Hansioux,

    It's unfair to say that Outlaws is merely a spinoff (wannabe) of Romance of 3K.  It was said that the author of 3K wrote the latter half of Outlaws -- so are we even be sure that 3K was written before Outlaws?  And not ALL of the 108 heroes were related to characters of 3K.  I believe, though, that at least the legends of 3K popularized before the legends of Outlaws (these legends preceded the respective novels.)  I'm a little biased, but I opine that Outlaws has greater literary merits than 3K for many reasons.

Peace,

Michael

10-20-2004

nah, i didn't say it was a spin-off at all at any point.  I simply said that it's a 3K wanna be.

If you want to know just how much of it is fiction, then start with the earliest published and found versions of this story.  At first there were only 36 heros.  Then it became 108.  So just how much of them are made up...  2/3 of it is made up. 

And that's just the characters.  What about how much of the story is made up?  Let see, the story started with Gods in heavens being punished so they fell to earth and became these heros... ok... probably made up... WEll, let's just say... if anything of this story is not made up, it's probably the few names that actually apeared in the history books.

We are on the same page here.  I didn't say there's 1/3rd of people's true.  I said at most only 1/3rd of the character names could be true.  However, Soong Jiang is a real historical figure.  His name is mentioned in Soong Shi.  Even though it's only one line, but that means his rebels made that big of an impact.

For those who reads traditional han zhi, this is the 3 parts of Song Shi regarding  this revolution.  As you can see, Soong Jiang and the 36 thieves is actual history.

�y���v�����z�G�u�ũM�T�~�ɡA�a�n�s�����Dza���x�A���N�Q���A�S �ǨʪF�B�e�_�A�J�����{�ɡA�R���{�i���]�ۭ����C�v (���v���ܤG)

�y�J�X�ǡz�G�u�����F�ʪF�A�J�X�W�Ѩ��G�y���H�T�Q���H�����Q �A�x�x�ƸU�L���ܪ̡A��~���L�H�C���M�˵s�_�A���Y�j���A�ϰQ�� �y�H��ū�C�z�Ҥ�G�y�X�~�~���ѧg�A���ڤ]�C�z�v (���v���T�ʤ��Q�@)

�y�i���]�ǡz�G�u���]�A�����{�A�����_�e�ҡA�ತ�Q�p�A�x�x�۴� �L��W�C�n���N�ܡA���]���ѩҦV�A��|�ͮ��x�A�T����Q�l�A���� ��C��O�Ҧ��h�A�o�d�H�A�]��񫰡A�ӥX���L�Z�������ԡA���Χ� ����ǡA���L�X�A�|���I���C��D���A�ҵL���ӡA��L�����A��� �Ƹ�A���D���C�v(���v���T�ʤ��Q�T)

Wow, finally i am able to log on from home.  For a while it kept telling that only specialy users can log on, yet I can log on just fine from work.  Maybe now I can go write up the sources on Taiwan and Talas after all.

Anyway, all Chinese novels started in the form of ���� (shuo Shu, story telling).  It used to be a popular form of street entertainment.  I guess not far off radio story shows, where one person tell the stories, acts it out, and add their own unique flavor to the story.  This used to draw a large crowd of people, listenning to the story and then when it ends, they paid the performer.  Then came back next day for continuetion.

This can be seen in these novels.  Such as at the end of every chapter, it same times says "������Ʀp��A�Ш��U�^����".  If you want to know what's going on, read the next chapter.  Well, why would a book need that have that?  If you are reading the freaking book, of course you are going to read the next chapter.  It is because these books were written in the spirit of story telling.  Where the performer needs to let the audiance come back to pay tomorrow.

The point is San Guo stories existed long before the Outlaw story.... for obvious reasons.  There have been novels on San Guo, not the current version, and scripts on traditional Chinese drama about San Guo before outlaw ever happened.  San Guo is embedded in the Chinese culture, even if there wasn't a novel called "San Guo Yan Yi".  That is why when the Suei Hu story started developing, they draw on San Guo stuff to make the crowd interested.  There were 108 characters, there's not need to put characters just like San Guo in the story.

These story didn't come to be just because a writer wrote it down.  They were there way before it was even put in writing.  I am talking about the story of Suei Hu as a San Guo wanna be, hence the addition of San Guo characters.  Not that the actual book copied San Guo or whether which book was written before which.