Journey to the West

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great novels of China’s Ming era, and perhaps the most loved. Written in 1592, it draws on the celebrated travels of a real monk from China to India a thousand years before, and on a thousand years of retellings of that story, especially the addition of a monkey as companion who, in the novel, becomes supersimian. For most readers the monk, Tripitaka, is upstaged by this irrepressible Monkey with his extraordinary powers, accompanied by the fallen but recovering deities, Pigsy and Sandy.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Julia Lovell 6 episodes
  Professor of Modern Chinese History and Literature at Birkbeck, University of London
• Chiung-yun Evelyn Liu No other episodes
  Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica, Taiwan
• Craig Clunas 5 episodes
  Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at Trinity College, University of Oxford

Reading list

• Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China
  Cynthia J Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (University of California Press, 2005) Google Books →
• Demons, Gods, and Pilgrims: The Demonology of Hsi-yu Chi
  Rob Campany (Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews, 7.1/2 July, 1985)
• Cosmogony and Self-Cultivation: The Demonic and the Ethical in Two Chinese Novels
  Rob Campany (The Journal of Religious Ethics, 14.1 Spring, 1986)
• The Journey to the West
  Wu Cheng'en (trans. Anthony Yu) (University of Chicago Press, 2012, 4 vols.) Google Books →
• Monkey King: Journey to the West
  Wu Cheng'en (trans. Julia Lovell) (Penguin Classics, 2021) Google Books →
• The Hsi-yu Chi: A Study of Antecedents to the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel
  Glen Dudbridge (Cambridge University Press, 1970) Google Books →
• Out of the Margins: The Rise of Chinese Vernacular Fiction
  Liangyan Ge (University of Hawaii Press, 1997) Google Books →
• The Silk Road Journey With Xuanzang
  Sally Hovey Wriggins (Basic Books, 2003) Google Books →
• Wordless Test, Empty Hands: The Metaphysics and Materiality of Scripture in Journey to the West
  Andrew Hui (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 75.1 June 2015)
• Fictions of Enlightenment: "Journey to the West", "Tower of Myriad Mirrors" and "Dream of the Red Chamber"
  Qiancheng Li (University of Hawaii Press, 2004) Google Books →
• Imperial China 900-1800
  F. W. Mote (Harvard University Press, 2003) Google Books →
• The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel: Ssu ta ch'i-shu
  Andrew H. Plaks (Princeton University Press, 1987) Google Books →
• How to Read the Chinese Novel
  David L. Rolston (Princeton University Press, 2014) Google Books →
• Encyclopedia of the Novel
  Paul Schellinger (ed.) (Routledge, 1999) Google Books →
• Transforming Monkey: Adaptation and Representation of a Chinese Epic
  Hongmei Sun (University of Washington Press, 2018) Google Books →
• Tradition and Creativity: Essays on East Asian Civilizations
  Ching-I Tu (ed.) (Transaction Books, 1987) Google Books →
• A Masterpiece of Dissemblance
  Vincent Yang (Monumenta Serica, 60.1)

Related episodes

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• The Silk Road
  
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• Matteo Ricci and the Ming Dynasty
  
  16 Apr, 2015 950 History of Asia
• Sources of Early Chinese History
  
  23 Jan, 2014 950 History of Asia
• The Ramayana
  
  9 Mar, 2023 290 Other religions

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Programme ID: m000w5hd

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w5hd

Auto-category: 895 (Chinese Literature)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. Journey to the West is one of the great novels of China's Ming era and perhaps the most loved.