水滸傳

At the marshy stronghold of Liangshan, 108 outlaws — driven there one by one by corrupt officials, false accusations, and plain bad luck — gather into a sworn brotherhood under the reluctant leadership of the former clerk Song Jiang. The company includes the disgraced drill-instructor Lin Chong, the tattooed monk Lu Zhishen, and the tiger-killing Wu Song, each arriving with an origin story of their own before the marsh unites them. They raid, feud, and grow in reputation — until a stone tablet reveals their full number and rank under Heaven, and, in the novel's final chapter, a warning dream turns their triumph dark.

水滸傳 (Water Margin) grew out of centuries of oral storytelling and street theater about a real Song-dynasty bandit chief before taking its now-classic shape; it is traditionally credited to Shi Nai'an (c. 1290 – c. 1365) and ranks among the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature. The earliest surviving complete printed edition dates to 1589, but the text transcribed here has the shape of the influential seventeenth-century recension the critic Jin Shengtan edited and published in 1641 — seventy chapters opening with the same prologue and closing on the same scene, Lu Junyi's nightmare of the band's mass execution, rather than continuing, as longer editions do, into an imperial amnesty and later campaigns.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text: the prologue and all seventy chapters, unabridged.