Meng Jiangnü's wall was a city wall first

In the oldest account of Qi Liang’s widow nobody weeps and no wall falls.¹ A duke of Qi meets her in the country after her husband’s death and offers condolences. She says the house is the place for them, and he goes there.² The Great Wall, the First Emperor and the name Meng Jiangnü all arrive later.⁶⁷

Temples before any full text

Meng Jiangnü had temples in the eleventh century, and no complete telling from the next five centuries survives.¹¹¹² Idema finds temples to Meng Jiangnü and her husband mentioned from the eleventh century on, among the earliest at Ansu and Tongguan.¹¹ At Yongqiu in 1176 the temple was devoted to Qi Liang, his wife and General Meng Tian, and Qi Liang had become a man named Fan, perhaps through a misread character or through mishearing “the criminal Qi Liang” (fan Qi Liang).¹¹

No complete account of the legend as novel, play or ballad survives from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Idema writes, though it was staged early.¹² The scholar Zheng Qiao (1104 to 1162) complained that characters who had earned a few words in the Classics, Qi Liang’s wife among them, were being spun into tales “of millions of words”.¹²

The legend even shaped what the Ming called their own walls. Idema says they avoided the name Long Wall for their border fortifications because of what the legend had made of it.¹³ Seventeenth-century Jesuits were the first to identify the Qin wall with the Ming works, and the Wall became a proud national symbol in China only in the twentieth century.¹³

In the Tang Qi Liang becomes a conscript

In the Tang the story moves from Duke Zhuang’s attack to the Qin wall.⁶ One Tang version survives in a Japanese manuscript of 747, the Diaoyuji, which quotes a book called the Tongxian ji for two accounts side by side.⁵ The first is the old story of Duke Zhuang’s condolence on the road. In the second, Qi Liang is a conscript of the First Emperor who flees the Long Wall, marries Zhongzi in the garden of Meng Qi, is beaten to death and built into the wall; she weeps until it falls and tests his bones with her blood.⁵ The compiler adds that he does not know which account is correct.⁵ Idema writes that little is known of the Diaoyuji’s date and provenance, and even less of the Tongxian ji.⁵

The monk Guanxiu, who lived from 832 to 912, wrote a poem that puts the widow at the Qin wall.¹⁴

Gu Jiegang, as Wu Zhen quotes him, called this poem the opening of a new era of legends about the building of the Qin wall.¹⁵ Gu’s own 1924 study, which Wu calls the start of the modern research, had found two independent Tang versions, “the elegy of Qi Liang’s wife” and a tale of Meng Zhongzi dripping blood on bones.¹⁶ The manuscript of 747 already has the conscript and the blood, so by Idema’s dates Guanxiu was not the first to write it down.⁵¹⁴

The name comes later still. Idema says the maiden Meng Jiang first appears in an anonymous song from Dunhuang, probably of the ninth or tenth century, in which she carries winter clothes to a husband who has gone north and not come back.⁷ “Meng Jiang” itself is old: in the Book of Odes “that beautiful eldest Jiang” is a beauty of the Jiang family, and meng means eldest.¹⁷ In the Tang legend, Idema says, meng is read as the surname Meng.¹⁷

The Dunhuang prose-and-verse text, Pelliot chinois 5039, loses both its beginning and its end.⁹ In it Qi Liang’s ghost appears to Meng Jiang in a dream at the Great Wall, the wall falls at her weeping, and she sprinkles blood on the heap of bones to find her husband’s.⁹ The other dead then ask her to carry a message home.⁹

Liu Xiang’s wall

Idema credits the wall to Liu Xiang: when he put her story into the Lienü zhuan, he added that her weeping brought down a wall.¹⁸ He dates Liu Xiang to 79 to 6 BCE and the book to the final years of the first century BCE.¹⁹ His entry on Qi Liang’s wife keeps the Zuozhuan’s exchange with the duke and then adds a second half.²¹⁸

She has no son and no kin. After the burial she says she has no one to lean on, and she throws herself into the Zi River.¹⁸

No early version names the Great Wall.⁶ Beyond that the texts differ. The Lienü zhuan says only “the wall”.³ The Shuoyuan has her weep and the city wall slump, with one corner falling.²⁰ A quotation in the Taiping yulan of 977 has the people of Ju’s wall of corpses.³ Cui Bao’s Gujin zhu has the capital city of Qǐ crumble.³

Two readers who did not believe it

Wang Chong’s Lunheng takes “Qi Liang’s wife wept and the wall fell” as a claim to be refuted.²¹ He says Qi Liang died on campaign, the widow met the coffin and refused the condolence on the road, and no account has her weeping at a city wall.²¹ His verdict is that the collapse is an empty saying, and he calls the duke the lord of Lu.²¹

Gu Yanwu makes a different point in his Rizhilu: what fell was a city wall, and no text says Great Wall.⁴ Qi’s own long wall was built under King Wei, over a hundred years after Duke Zhuang, and it was not the First Emperor’s.⁴ He adds that later people tell of a wife named Meng Jiang, of the house of Fan Lang, who brought winter clothes to the wall, and says this is no longer Qi Liang’s wife’s story.²² He blames the monk Guanxiu for writing Qi Liang into the Qin builders.²²

Weeping before the wall

The weeping was there before the wall. In the Mencius, Chunyu Kun says the wives of Hua Zhou and Qi Liang were so good at weeping for their husbands that they changed the customs of the state.²³ Idema says this weeping is deliberate, loud and public, close to song, not spontaneous grief.²³

The Liji’s Tangong chapter has Zeng Zi say that Kuai Shang, who took a condolence at the roadside, knew ritual less well than Qi Liang’s wife.²⁴ She met her husband’s coffin on the road and wept for him with grief, and she answered the duke’s messenger with a refusal of her own.²⁴ Gu Yanwu observes that weeping first appears in these two books, and the collapse of a wall only in the Shuoyuan and the Lienü zhuan.^23242018

What the Zuozhuan says

The Zuozhuan, which Idema dates to the fourth or third century BCE, tells it under Duke Xiang’s 23rd year.²⁵ Duke Zhuang of Qi attacks Ju by surprise; Ju’s side takes Qi Liang, who is called Qi Zhi in the same passage.¹²⁶ When the duke comes home he meets Qi Liang’s widow in the countryside and sends condolences.¹

She adds that if he is spared there is still the humble house of his forebears, and that as a lowly wife she cannot receive condolences in the open.² The passage ends with the duke doing as she says: Qi hou diao zhu qi shi, “Lord Qi then offered condolences at her house”.¹ The words for weeping and for a wall do not occur in it.¹