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Text 12 Zhàngúo cè 戰國策, Qí cè 齊策 (節選)

馮諼為孟嘗君市義 Féng Xuan wèi Mèngcháng Jun shì yì

The text for this lesson is a very famous tale composed during the pre-Qín era, probably in
the late third century B.C. It tells the story of an actual patrician Prime Minister of the state
of Qí 齊, Tían Wén 田文, also known as Lord Mèngcháng 孟嘗君, and one of his retainers, a
poor commoner named Féng Xuan 馮諼. Tían Wén flourished about 300 B.C. He belonged
to the ruling clan of Qí, and was known throughout eastern China as the greatest patron of
swordsmen, scholars, and jacks-of-all-trades who had ever lived. He valued his great
assembly of hundreds of retainers above all else, and was famous for treating them with
generosity and respect. There are a number of surviving tales about his willingness to accept
even apparently worthless men into his entourage, only to have them perform some unique
and indispensable function at some later time. The Féng Xuan tale is the best of these.

This text itself is longer than others we have read and includes many difficult points where
one must be guided more by context than by the normal limits of word-meaning or
grammatical form. It helps to understand that men of Féng Xuan’s humble position often
desired to become retainers of a patrician lord for economic reasons – lords provided
retainers with food, shelter, status, and often enough income to allow them to support family
members away from the lord’s compound. Retainers differed in benefits and in the status
accorded to them. Most retainers were expected to provide military skills for the lord’s
private army or administrative skills to help run the lord’s extended household. Those who
were most adept at these pursuits were generally housed together in higher class quarters and
afforded signs of favor, such as special clothes, weapons, chariots, or food. The society of
retainers understood the correspondence between merit and treatment, although they also
understood that there were cases of exceptions (sometimes “jester” type retainers seem to
have received special treatment, which may explain some of the background to this tale).

Warlords like Tían Wén sustained their wealth on the basis of hereditary estates that had
been granted to their families in generations past. In the case of Tían Wén, although the story
opens with him living near the capital of Qí in northern Shandong, where he served as Prime
Minister, his lavish lifestyle is actually sustained by the income produced by farmers in the
region of Xue 薛, far away in central Shandong, where the lord’s hereditary fief was located
and where his family’s permanent residence lay. Clearly, Tían Wén had long had little to do
with this faraway source of his income, living permanently in his palatial quarters in the
north. However, he would have needed periodically to have his staff travel to Xue to extract
from its residents the income that sustained him. His tenants in Xue, like many farmers of the
time, would have been permanently bound to their lord not by loyalty, but by the fact that
virtually all peasant families would have, over time, fallen deeply in debt to the lord of their
land, most likely due to the fact that in years of poor harvest, their inability to pay the full
fixed rent on their land would have been charged as an interest-paying loan from the lord,
due the following year. This type of situation was the norm in early and traditional China.
Féng Xuan’s response to this situation, which forms the pivot of this tale, was clearly
formulated as a rebuke by the writer to the patrician caste of early China.