The Scholars

The Scholars, also translated as The Unofficial History of the Scholars, is a Chinese novel written by Wu Jingzi and published in 1750 during the Qing dynasty. It is considered one of the great Classic Chinese Novels, distinguished for its unusual narrative structure and acerbic wit, describing and often satirizing academic scholars of the Ming period in which it is set. The novel's loose, sprawling narration follows a lead character for several chapters before seamlessly transitioning to another introduced at a social gathering, with earlier lead characters recurring as minor characters in later vignettes, holding up exemplary Confucian behavior on one hand while ridiculing over-ambitious scholars and the imperial examination system on the other. Promoting naturalistic attitudes over belief in the supernatural, the author rejects the popular belief in retribution, and the novel was one of the first major works to seriously utilize the vernacular style now called baihua, which language reformers of the early 20th-century New Culture Movement later cited in their case against classical Chinese.