Water Margin

Water Margin (Shuihu zhuan) is a Chinese novel about 108 outlaws, also called heroes, who gather in the marshes of Liangshan in Shandong and defy a corrupt court. It was composed in the fourteenth century and printed in the Ming dynasty, and it is traditionally attributed to Shi Nai'an, with Luo Guanzhong sometimes named as an editor or co-author. Among its memorable characters are the leader Song Jiang, the tiger-slayer Wu Song, the warrior-monk Lu Zhishen and the exiled officer Lin Chong.¹²³

The story is set in the early twelfth century at the end of the Northern Song dynasty and is based on a real bandit leader named Song Jiang. Storytellers and playwrights of the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties had long told these tales, and the Ming novel brought them together, along with the sense of resentment at government corruption. Its early editions circulated in several versions of different lengths, and the Qing government sometimes banned it for encouraging banditry. It is one of the Four Great Classical Novels. Pearl Buck translated it as All Men Are Brothers in 1933, and Sidney Shapiro produced Outlaws of the Marsh in 1980.²