Abstract

This poster offers a dialogue-based network analysis of two landmark Ming–Qing chuanqi dramas, Huan Sha Ji (The Story of Washing Silk, c. 1543) by Liang Chenyu and Tao Hua Shan (The Peach Blossom Fan, 1699) by Kong Shangren. Both works have long been read within the structural pattern of "borrowing romantic separation and reunion to express the rise and fall of a state" (借离合之情，写兴亡之感), with Huan Sha Ji described as inaugurating the pattern and Tao Hua Shan as developing it in more complex directions (Wang 1992; Yang 2007; Xu 1994; Guo 2001). These claims have largely rested on close reading. This poster asks whether computational methods can render them more explicit, comparable, and open to further testing in the spirit of distant reading (Moretti 2000), adapting elements of the pipeline developed by Zhang and Zhong (2023) for Tang Xianzu’s Linchuan Si Meng. We treat "romance" and "politics" as descriptive structural clusters within the dramatic texts themselves, not as claims about Ming–Qing political consciousness; the analytic framing draws on Li Yu’s classical principle of li zhunao (立主脑"establishing the central pivot") in Xianqing Ouji (Li [1671] 2005), recast in network-analytic terms.

Full-text editions from the Zhonghua Book Company Digital Humanities Platform were segmented with jieba using a custom dictionary tuned to classical drama (Shi 2020). Frequency analysis shows that across the 45 chu of Huan Sha Ji, the heroine Xishi appears 40 times while political-relational terms ("ruler," "great king," "altars of soil and grain") dominate the top of the distribution; in Tao Hua Shan, the heroine Li Xiangjun appears 93 times (rank 3 overall), and the high-frequency vocabulary mixes official titles with Nanjing, Qinhuai, Yangzhou, and Fu She (Restoration Society).

Following Liao (2010) and Zhao (2018), each scene was then manually segmented into dialogue turns, annotated with one primary speaker, primary addressee(s), and secondary listener(s). The edge weight between two characters x and y follows the formula given in Liao (2010), shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Edge-weight formula for the dialogue network, adapted from Liao (2010).

Here C_xy is the number of co-participated turns D_xy, S_i the line count of turn i, and T_i a role coefficient set to 5 for speaker–primary-addressee, 3 for speaker–secondary-listener, and 1 for two secondary listeners. Networks were analysed in NetworkX with weighted degree and weighted betweenness as the primary measures.

The networks differ sharply. Huan Sha Ji yields a small, dense network (12 nodes, 39 edges; density 0.59, average clustering 0.84) whose three highest-weighted dyads are all ruler–minister pairs (Bo Pi–Fuchai, Goujian–Fan Li, Wen Zhong–Fan Li). Tao Hua Shan yields a substantially larger and more modular network (29 nodes, 179 edges; density 0.44, average clustering 0.68) whose highest-weighted dyads are not court-political pairs but mediating-figure pairs in the Qinhuai social world (Li Zhenli–Yang Wencong, Ruan Dacheng–Ma Shiying, Li Zhenli–Su Kunsheng) — a structure in which the romantic-political plot is routed through madams, mentors, and brokers rather than concentrated on a ruler-minister core.

The two heroines occupy strikingly different positions. In Huan Sha Ji, the heroine Xishi and the male lead Fan Li both register a weighted betweenness of zero: neither lies on any shortest weighted path connecting otherwise disconnected parts of the network, and the play’s emotional and political subgraphs touch but do not interpenetrate. In Tao Hua Shan, Li Xiangjun shows a non-zero weighted betweenness, sitting at the intersection of Fu She, court-official, and Qinhuai-courtesan clusters. Her structural role is best characterised not as solitary "agency" but as a bridging position embedded in a small female cluster — with foster mother Li Zhenli and mentor Su Kunsheng both showing higher betweenness still — whose collective mediation drives plot decisions, most directly her acts of querian (却奁) and manyan (骂筵), which catalyse Hou Fangyu’s political choices.

The two endings echo these network positions: Huan Sha Ji closes on Fan Li and Xishi’s withdrawal into reclusion; Tao Hua Shan closes on the lovers’ separate entries into religious life. By focusing on classical Chinese drama, the project also contributes a non-Anglophone case to digital humanities and points toward future work with transformer-based models for ancient Chinese such as SikuBERT (Wang et al. 2022) for guided topic modelling and stance analysis.

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