‘Daoist Master Changchun’s Journey to the West’ Review: On the Road
A classic travel narrative from China, newly translated.
Feb. 16, 2024
In 1219, the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan learned of a Daoist master in Shandong, in China’s Eastern coastal region, who allegedly knew the secret of longevity. Pausing for a moment from his bloody campaign to establish control over central Asia, the Khan sent a messenger to Shandong with a summons to bring the elderly Perfected One to his court.
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Daoist Master Changchun's Journey to the West
The Daoist’s name was Qiu Chuji, known to his followers as Master Changchun (“Eternal Spring”), and though he was in his 70s he did not refuse the summons. With a small entourage of disciples, he set off for what would be a three-year journey out and back through northern China, across the Mongolian plateau into Central Asia, and ultimately into what is now Afghanistan, to find the Khan in his military camp. Upon Changchun’s arrival,the Khan laid out some food and drink and then got right down to business. “Now that you have come all this way,” he asked, “what secret elixir for long life can you provide me?”
The 13th-century account of the master’s trip, “Daoist Master Changchun’s Journey to the West,” is one of the first volumes to be published in a new series from Oxford University Press called the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature. The series aims to do for works of premodern Chinese literature what the Loeb Classical Library did for Greek and Latin ones: render them accessible to everyday readers in facing-page translation, with the hope of placing them on the shelves of the educated public as a resource for exploring the modern world’s classical forebears.
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This is an ambitious project, especially as classical Chinese does not have the same foundational position in Anglo-American culture that the Greek and Roman classics did when James Loeb started his series in 1911. And there are particular challenges in translating classical Chinese into literary English—as the poet Amy Lowell wrote a century ago, “A Sinologue has no time to learn how to write poetry; a poet has no time to learn how to read Chinese.” To meet this challenge, the Hsu-Tang Library has recruited some of the leading scholars of premodern Chinese literature to make the translations, while pledging to edit them with an eye toward literary and poetic quality.
The Chinese name for the Hsu-Tang series is not a library but a “garden of literature” (*wenyuan*), a term that the editors selected because it implies a living quality to the works chosen for inclusion. The goal of the series is to give a sense of why these works have endured for so long and inspired so many generations of Chinese readers. They aim to introduce the unfamiliar and unexpected, a world beyond the few classics more readily available to American readers. Unlike the ubiquitous Sun Tzu with his “Art of War,” the works in the Hsu-Tang Library are unlikely to help you dominate your enemies, but they will open up a classical tradition that spans millennia, relatively little of which has ever been translated into English.
There is a humanity and irreverence to some of these works that readers expecting stuffy, prim Confucian moralizing will find refreshing. Among the volumes available at the launch of the new series are an 11th-century joke book (“The Misadventures of Master Mugwort”) and a Qing-dynasty “rustic song” in prose and verse, “The Emperor of China in a House of Ill Repute,” in which a third-rate Ming emperor disguises himself as a common soldier to go cavorting in a famous brothel district. The monarch bumbles his way through the visit, pretending to be an idiot and drawing the ridicule of all concerned. The ending isn’t what a contemporary reader might expect—yes, he meets the woman of his dreams (a courtesan wonderfully named “Buddha’s Lust,” whom he takes home as his concubine), but he also orders two people who offended him flayed alive and chopped into pieces, respectively, then burns the entire brothel district to the ground. But it is precisely the unexpected moral landscapes of these works (and the strangeness of what passed for a good joke in 11th-century China) that mark them as products of a time and place different from our own.
“Daoist Master Changchun’s Journey to the West” is a firsthand account interspersed with the master’s own poetry, compiled by a disciple in his entourage. The book can be read as a travelogue, with descriptions of geography and agriculture and social customs that depict a world beyond the borders of Chinese civilization in the 13th century. (Oxford University Press provides an online storyboard, which readers can use to trace the master’s journey through contemporary satellite imagery.) The work can also be read as a glimpse of the worldview of a Daoist faithful, as minor natural miracles follow Master Changchun wherever he goes—here an auspicious flight of cranes, there a sudden change in the weather just as he performs a ritual.
Most interesting are the book’s moral aspects. Oblique images of Mongol violence litter the path of Master Changchun’s journey—in one instance, a city whose entire population had been massacred is silent but for the barking of abandoned dogs—and such allusions underscore that this was a missionary work. Master Changchun, following in the footsteps of the Daoist sage Lao Tzu, imagines himself traveling westward to spread the Way to the barbarian peoples who lived in those remote regions (many of which are part of China today). As he writes in one poem, “I go to the Emperor’s camp beside the river, / Seeking to end the wars and restore great peace.” The more violent and benighted the non-Chinese peoples are, the more they need the pacifying virtues of the Way.
But Master Changchun was not in charge. Although he retained his dignity—insisting, for instance, that a Daoist does not kneel before an emperor—it is clear that he was completely at the mercy of Genghis Khan, who rebuffed his cherished guest’s repeated requests to go home. Instead, the ruler kept the Daoist with him until he felt satisfied that he had learned enough of the Way to prolong his life.
The elderly Daoist’s troubles do not go unrewarded. When he finally allows his visitor to go back to China, the Khan issues edicts exempting Changchun’s followers from taxation and giving him direct authority over religious practices in Mongol-occupied North China. Master Changchun’s Quanzhen (“Complete Perfection”) sect would, indeed, enjoy privileges of state patronage under the Mongols for half a century, helping to establish it as the dominant school of Daoism in China for posterity.
That boost to the fortunes of the Quanzhen sect came at the expense of Changchun’s religious rivals, above all the Buddhists. Lest we lapse into accepting the admiring account presented in “Daoist Master Changchun’s Journey to the West,” the editors of the Oxford volume include a scathing account from a later-13th-century Buddhist monk who denounced Master Changchun and his followers as charlatans who forcibly stole land from the Buddhists, violated nuns and “took plunder and pillage as their sole duty.” From such a perspective, Changchun’s journey could be seen as a self-serving endeavor, cozying up to a conqueror in order to amass power for his own religious followers.
Whatever the value of the secrets Changchun shared with the Khan, the two men’s fates were bound by this encounter, and they would die within days of each other in 1227.
Mr. Platt, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is the author of “Imperial Twilight: The Opium War and the End of China’s Last Golden Age.”
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Appeared in the February 17, 2024, print edition.