Chinese · 1540–1610
The Scoffing Scholar of Lanling is a pseudonym and nothing more. It appears on the earliest manuscripts of Jin Ping Mei, which circulated in the 1590s among a small circle of Ming officials and was printed around 1617. Lanling points to Shandong, and the novel's dialogue carries Shandong speech, but every attempt to attach the name to a real person has failed. Candidates proposed over four centuries include the statesman Wang Shizhen, the playwright Tang Xianzu and the essayist Li Kaixian, and none has held up. Whoever he was, he wrote the first Chinese novel built by one author from invented material rather than assembled from storytellers' cycles, and the first to take a merchant household rather than a battlefield or a monastery as its whole subject. He knew law, medicine, commerce, popular song and the vocabulary of sex, and he ended his book by destroying everyone in it.