Chapter 22 Chapter Five

In the mid-Qing Dynasty, there was a class of novels showing off knowledge, Li Ruzhen completed in the 20th year of Jiaqing (AD 1815) is a representative of this type of novels.Li Ruzhen, courtesy name Songshi, was born in Daxing (now Beijing), Zhili.He used to be the magistrate of Henan County.He once received a job from Ling Tingkan, "in the spare time of the thesis, the side and the rhyme".In addition, there is still a monograph on phonology "Li's Yinjian".The background of the novel is set in the period of Wu Zetian in the Tang Dynasty.The two most attractive contents in the novel are the overseas roaming and the exam-taking list of 100 talented women.Tang Ao, a talented scholar, had a bad official career. He and his wife and brother Lin Zhiyang went overseas for business and roaming. They passed through dozens of countries and saw many strange customs and strange mountains and rivers.After the talented girl won the list, a celebration banquet was held in the Grand Master's Mansion.They performed various items such as poetry, painting, piano, chess, poems, phonology, medical divination, arithmetic, guessing lantern riddles, and drinking orders.The illusory roaming abroad satirizes sour scholarly habits, criticizes the system of stereotyped scholars, lashes out at the hypocritical and cunning double-facers, and ridicules the mean and mean rich men."Talented Women Take the Examination" capitalizes women's talents, which denies the traditional concept that a woman's lack of talent is virtue.

Absorb nutrients from books such as "Natural History" and "Natural History", develop, supplement, and embellish them, showing rich imagination.The portrayal of the characters in this novel is relatively poor, and the second half of the novel emphasizes knowledge and ostentation, which weakens the artistic appeal of the work.