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T HE story of Li Yen/ the Honanese scholar who helped Li Tzu-ch'eng 4 1jt (1605?-45) overthrow the Ming dynasty in 1644, is well known to students of Chinese history.' The kernel of the story appeared early, perhaps in the last year of the Ming, and it grew gradually over the centuries, reaching its culmination in a contemporary novel on Li Tzu-ch'eng.2 This essay reviews the outline of the story and shows how it developed over time to meet a wide variety of needs. Although its exact origins cannot be discussed here, the growth of the story alone tells us a good deal about elements of I should like to acknowledge support from the Graduate School of the State University of New York at Buffalo and the National Endowment for the Humanities and to thank, in addition to those mentioned in specific footnotes, George Potter and Eugene Wu of the Harvard-Yenching Library; Cheng P'ei-k'ai, Jerry Dennerline, Fang Chao-ying, Frederick Mote, Shimada Kenji, Ts'ao Kuei-lin, and Yang K'uan for encouragement and assistance; and Hu Ying-fen and Yang Tsui-hua for checking some of my translations. I. of course, am responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation. 1 Recent works that accept the Li Yen story as history include: James Parsons, Peasant Rebellions of the Late Ming Period (Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1970), pp. 90-93, 133-37, 162-63, 213-16; Taniguchi Kikuo ;:n i,Q "Mindai no n6min hanran" O{;co f;,al, in T5 Ajia sekai no tenkai, ii, (Iwanami koza) Sekai rekishi -tf , Vol. 12 (Kyoto: Iwanami Shoten, 1971), 120-27; Yen Shao-tang , Li Tzu-ch'eng ch'i-i (Peking: Chung-hua shu-cha, 1974), pp. 31 ff., 66-67.2 An early form of the story appears in Ming-shih PA (1739, Chang T'ing-yu fi3E ed.), lieh-chuan 197 (rpt., Peking: Chung-hua shu-chii, 1974), pp. 3506-7, 3511. For the contemporary novel, see Yao in the list of abbreviations and pp. 575-80 below. 535 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sun, 4 Jan 2015 20:28:50 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 3 An early expression of doubts about the story appeared in Cheng Lien *5W, Yii-pien chi-liueh ; gE [Record of the Uprisings in Yii], 8 chiuan (written after 1645, publ. 1743), fan-li 1; 4:18. For recent articles raising doubts about the story, see "Li Yen chih-i" and "Tsai-t'an Li Yen" in the list of abbreviations. 4 The following is my own summary based on all the sources cited in this article. A good bibliography on the Li Yen question is in Ts'ao, pp. 153-72, esp. p. 154, n. 2. For broader bibliographies on the late Ming risings which include items on Li Yen, see Yamane Yukio [UjP...