Fiction as Supplement to History: The Case of Yuan Jiao’s Ganze Yao

Abstract

In this essay I examine the relationship between fictive and historical (here meaning otherwise attested, rather than necessarily veracious) elements in two tales from the Tang dynasty writer Yuan Jiao’s 袁郊 ninth-century Ganze yao 甘澤謠, a collection of anecdotes about events in the Tang past. Yuan Jiao’s tales concern historical figures and build on incidents that are confirmed in other sources and appear to have been well known at the time, into which Yuan Jiao weaves fabricated characters and scenes. Though these fabrications can be easily recognized as such, the tales speak to the same goals as more conventional histories. The tales demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of historical narrative as necessarily built of both fictions and facts, whose value lies in their power to explain the past for the present.