The Evolution and Circulation of Cui Nings’ Story

Abstract

The story of Cui Ning has been told for a long time in the early days of ancient times, and can be found in the scripts for story-telling in Song and Yuan dynasties, such as " Mistakenly Beheading Cui Ning" and "Grinding Yu Guanyin", in which the man named "Cui Ning" is a pivotal role in the script. This paper takes the story framework of " Mistakenly beheading Cui Ning" as an example and studies the evolution and circulation of Cui Ning's story in detail. “Mistakenly Beheading Cui Ning” is a Song Dynasty novel by an unknown author, which was first included in the “Capital Popular Novel”, but was later selected by Feng Menglong in the late Ming Dynasty for inclusion in the 33rd volume of “Stories to Awaken Men”, and slightly modified and renamed as “Fifteen Strings of Cash and Playful Words Become Coincidental Disaster” (hereinafter referred to as “scripts for story-telling in Song”), and then adapted by the Qing Dynasty dramatist Zhu Suchen as the Shuang Xiong Meng(hereinafter referred to as the “scripts for story-telling in Zhu”), and in the 1950s it was adapted by the then National Customs Su Opera Company into the Kunju “Fifteen Strings of Cash” (hereinafter referred to as “scripts for story-telling in Kunju”), which was very popular among the Chinese.