The Plum in the Golden Vase by Lanling Xiaoxiao Sheng
Published 1617 · 550,000 words · about 48 hours at an average pace · Classic Literature, Literary Fiction, Satire
How hard is The Plum in the Golden Vase to read?
The Plum in the Golden Vase scores 67 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 78 out of 100
- Sixteenth-century Shandong vernacular thick with commercial terms, medical and pharmaceutical vocabulary, popular song lyrics, drinking games and euphemism, all of it annotated by Roy.
- Sentence structure: 54 out of 100
- Storyteller's prose in clear sequential sentences, interrupted constantly by verse, song suites and set pieces in other registers.
- Abstraction: 48 out of 100
- Relentlessly material — silver, silk, food, bodies — with a Buddhist argument about retribution left implicit until the last chapters.
- Information density: 80 out of 100
- Hundreds of named characters, a full accounting of an urban household's economy, and constant quotation from plays, songs and earlier fiction that the reader is expected to catch.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- The narrator's moralising interjections do not match what the story shows, and scholars still argue about whether the book condemns Ximen Qing or enjoys him.
- Symbolic density: 64 out of 100
- The title assembles three women's names into an image of flowers dying in a vase, and the household stands in for a Ming state rotting from the middle.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- Pious verse tags introduce chapters of bribery and adultery, and the novel's borrowed passages are placed to mock the works they come from.
- Resolution withholding: 60 out of 100
- The retribution arrives, but the final chapter's Buddhist consolation is so abrupt that four centuries of readers have argued about whether it is meant.
- Structural complexity: 74 out of 100
- A hundred chapters with no plot arc, organised by household calendar and financial cycle, and grown out of an episode belonging to another novel.
How The Plum in the Golden Vase is regarded
The Plum in the Golden Vase holds a literary regard score of 79 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.