Talk:Journey to the South

Did you know nomination

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• ... that Journey to the South has many similarities with Journey to the West?
  • Reviewed: Template:Did you know nominations/Coastal Farm & Ranch

Created by Kingoflettuce (talk). Number of QPQs required: 1. Nominator has 180 past nominations.

KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 10:29, 31 January 2025 (UTC).

General: Article is new enough and long enough
New enough: Long enough:

Policy: Article is sourced, neutral, and free of copyright problems
Adequate sourcing: Neutral: Free of copyright violations, plagiarism, and close paraphrasing:

Hook eligibility:

• Cited: - Offline/paywalled citation accepted in good faith
• Interesting: - n

QPQ: Done.

Overall: No issues with the length, eligibility, or neutrality. Copyright checks on Cedzich and Ganany didn't turn up anything.

Assuming good faith on the offline source for the hook, but it's not terribly interesting. There's lots of interesting plot elements with real world connections or facts about the work's authorship that would be more engaging that simply saying one book is like another, so I recommend the nominator draft some altblurbs.

The Cedzich source at 141-145 (available via the Internet Archive [1])doesn't really support the certainty about authorship in the article, only concluding that the credited author put together the modern version of the novel since it has his poems. One scholar cited there (Liu Ts'un-yan) claims it's entirely a republishing and Cedzich notes the credited author has a reputation of ripping off works. This should probably be expanded upon in the article to make these authorship issues clear to the reader.

Ganany (available via the Wikipedia Library) gives the full title of the work as "The Tale of the Heavenly King Huaguang, the Emperor of Five Manifestations (Wuxian lingguan dadi Huaguang tianwang zhuan", which is not mentioned in the article, which mentions a shorter title as the full title. Similarly Cedzich at 141 lists multiple alternative titles, of which only one is mentioned in footnote 26 in the article. This discrepancy should be fixed/explained in the article, perhaps by creating a note with all the titles.

Another issue is the date in the infobox gives the date as "c. 1632" whereas Cedzich at 141-142 only names this as the most likely date of the first extant edition, since they were based on original edition prints likely from the 1570s or 1580s. I don't have access to Shahar which is cited for the date. Does that work explain the discrepancy?

I think the Cedzich source goes much deeper into real-world details about the work, even just in the pages already cited, that the article would benefit from including, though that level of detail is not necessary for a DYK to pass.

The images in the article are also free and at least the first three seem likely to be reasonably clear at DYK image size so perhaps they could be used.

Article is also missing a short description. I would suggest "[Publication year/century/dynasty] fantasy novel by Yu Xiangdou" once the date issue is resolved. -- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 08:27, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

@Patar knight: Thank you for the review and I'll work on some of the hook/article pointers ASAP but you seem to be mistaken about the titles. The (alternative) title mentioned in Gamany _is_ the same as the one in the footnote, albeit with an extra "Illustrated" at the start. All other titles are not relevant to this article (as Cedzich points out they're temple publications and suchlike... It would similarly not be feasible/reasonable to mention all the ways in which "The Tortoise and the Hare" has been "retitled" by other publishers). The English-language scholarship on this novel isn't the most extensive so I've tried to give a broad overview without going into the nitty gritty which can be contentious anyway (much of Cedzich's analysis, while very interesting, probably belongs more in the relevant cult articles than here for example). As for the hook I simply wanted to point the reader's attention to the fact that there's actually a "Journey to the South:. (I trust most would be familiar enough with there being a JtoTheWest) But I agree that it would be great to include something specific to the plot in there to further pique their interest. Cheers, KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 19:05, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

The sources were pretty clear that multiple versions were published under different names given the obfuscated authorship. If it would be too unwieldly to name them all, we could just add something noting that multiple other names were used (e.g. adding ", though slightly different names are used in other publications, especially by temples" which would be backed by Cedzich 141).

As for the details that I thought were relevant, I agree that the stuff on the cult ties would not be appropriate in this article, but Cedzich also goes into stuff like target audience (general public, but with literary references) and reception (Cedzich 213-14; 216), which would be (though not essential for a DYK pass) One possible suggestion for an altblurb might be Cedzich's suggestion at pg. 215 that the author might have been trying to legitimize the Wutong cult by changing its practices in the novel to a sanitized version accepted by the upper class.-- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 22:06, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

The situation here isn't dissimilar from that of Journey to the West etc., I just want to stick to the titles that the (putative) author Yu Xiangdou gave, all of which have been listed in the article. I have already briefly mentioned the possible influence of earlier sources but insofar as there's no scholarly consensus that Yu did not write the novel, I don't think it's really necessary at this point to wholesale import whatever Cedzich (a source that I find both somewhat dated and speculative) says. See for instance Shahar at p.177: ...the mythological novel was authored by Yu Xiangdou 余象斗 (ca. 1560–ca. 1640), a prolific author and successful publisher from Jianyang County, northern Fujian Province. Similar sentences abound in other scholarly sources. So, if they are content with that then I don't see why we shouldn't be either. Anyhow, I will try to work on the rest of the article and drum up an alt or two. von Glahn makes a similar point about sanitising the Huaguang cult. Thanks so much! (This has been an unusually lengthy thread 😅) KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 05:09, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

We should still very briefly mention the existence of other versions/titles as I suggested above. As for the authorship, we can still credit Yu, but we should mention the historiographical dispute in a sentence or two. Shahar repeatedly cites Cedzich without much if any critique on other matters, so I would hesitate to dismiss the authorship issue entirely. -- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 07:36, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Actually, after taking another close look at everything, I can't find a fully unique "title" that doesn't already appear in the article so my point still stands. e.g. Why take the trouble to mention that "for instance" a certain temple in Taiwan publishes it as "Wu-hsien ta-ti Hua-kuang tien-wang chuan" which is just one word short of the "legit" alt-title "Wuxian Lingguan Dadi Huaguang Tianwang zhuan"? And the rest go by the exact same titles as they appear in the article. If there were an edition out there with a wholly different title that'd be a different story. KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 07:58, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

Anyhow, thank you for your very perceptive feedback and I've modified the publication history section to better reflect the disputed authorship. KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 07:58, 6 February 2025 (UTC)

• ALT1: ... that the protagonist of the Ming dynasty fantasy novel Journey to the South—who eventually loses his right leg and converts to Buddhism—may have been modelled on popular one-legged spirits? KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 05:17, 3 February 2025 (UTC)
• ALT2: ... that the protagonist of the Ming dynasty fantasy novel Journey to the South—who impersonates the Monkey King of Journey to the West—may have been based on the Horse King? KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 05:17, 3 February 2025 (UTC)

  Not sure if these are fully accurate. Shahar (also available on the Wikipedia Library) at 178-79 cites Cedzich with approval in saying that this merger of traditions in Huagang had already happened by the time the novel was published by Yu, so it's that the protagonist of the novel was modelled on a combination of these two traditions, but that protagonist of the novel was a religious figure whose lore had already combined the earlier traditions. A distinction, but a meaningful one for accuracy. Not sure if there's a way to mention that fusion within blurb length if specific details are mentioned, but maybe something like:

  ALT3... that the protagonist's multiple reincarnations in the Ming dynasty fantasy novel Journey to the South reflect the composite traditions of Huaguang Dadi, the religious figure that he was based on?

  Could work? Other options might be the cult legitimization or the work's ironic take on Mulian Rescues His Mother are other options. -- Patar knight - ^chat/_{contributions} 07:31, 5 February 2025 (UTC)

Well, to preserve the "hookiness" of the hook while improving on its accuracy, why not something like: ALT4 ... that the Ming dynasty fantasy novel Journey to the South—whose protagonist eventually amputates his right leg and converts to Buddhism—alludes to popular one-legged spirits? KINGofLETTUCE 👑 🥬 07:58, 6 February 2025 (UTC)