Background
Feng Menlong, a prolific popular author, was a native of Suzhou, a prosperous city in the Lower Yangtze region with a highly developed cultural life. Feng Menglong's family was rich and intellectual.
Не performed poorly in the civil service examinations and never passed beyond the lowest level of Cultivated Talent, despite the commercial success of several books he wrote on how to prepare for the exams. He spent a great part of his life and intellectual energy on the growing industry of popular vernacular literature and has been described as 'the personification of popular Chinese literature'.
Feng Menglong's success derived in part from his own experience with the milieu in which such popular literature was created. In his early adult life, he had fallen deeply in love with a beautiful and well-educated prostitute named Hou Huiqing. Their romance, filled with literary exchanges and discussions, ended with Huiqing's marriage to another man. This lost love was said to have ended Feng Menglong's visits to the 'red-light district' for good, but his fiction was filled with moving stories about good-hearted and faithful prostitutes, with both happy and tragic endings.
His work covered almost the entire spectrum of popular literature. Besides the civil service exam guides, he wrote and edited short stories, historical romances, folksong collections, popular anecdotal sketches, song lyrics and opera-dramas, jokes and humorous stories, and rule books for popular card games.
Feng Menglong's readers were primarly ordinary urban residents, and many of his writings were runaway bestsellers. In meeting this popular demand , his works were often shoking, with plentiful sexual content. His works were so widely read that he was often accused of corrupting young minds.
While his short stories and historical romances preached moral lessons, particularly the retribution of Buddhist cause-and-effect, Feng Menglong's collections of local folksongs, almost exclusively of the love-song genre, were utterly untouched by Confucian and neo-Confucian morality.