Notes On Xiaoshuo: Bao Guang Lu

Abstract

The article from the “Notes on Xiaoshuo” series is a part of a large ongoing research project titled “A Brief History of Chinese Xiaoshuo Prose of the 1st—13th Centuries and is fulfilled within the framework of a unified pattern, which has been adopted by the author to describe written monuments and has been applied in the already published monographs “The Garden of The Marvellous: A Concise History of Chinese Xiaoshuo Prose of the 1st—6th Centuries” (2014) and “The Notes of Innermost Miracles: A Concise History of Chinese Xiaoshuo Prose of the 7th—10th Centuries” (2017). This work is devoted to one of the little known collections of the 10th century titled Bao guang lu (“葆光錄”, “Notes on Concealed Light”) by Chen Zuan (陳纂, 10th c.) The article considers the history of the creation of the text of this collection, analyses its composition, studies the history of publications of Bao guang lu from the first to the modern ones, analyses the themes and subjects of the collection.