The subject of The Book of Swindles is the con, the scam, the swindle, set in the exuberant world of the late Ming commercial explosion. The Book of Swindles (Dupian xinshu 杜騙新書) consists of eighty-four brief tales, distributed over twenty-four “types” with such names as “The Bag Drop,” “Brokers,” “Showing Off Wealth,” and, to cover the educated elite as well as merchants and brokers, “Poetry” and “Corruption in Education.” Drawing from each of these types, in The Book of Swindles Christopher Rea and Bruce Rusk have translated forty-four of the original tales and their accompanying commentary. The highly enjoyable translations successfully reproduce the witty tone of the original.
Following each tale is a page-long commentary by the author/compiler Zhang Yingyu 張應俞 (fl. 1612–17), of whom little is known. As the translators point out on page 93 (n. 1), he cannot have been an examination-schooled literatus, given his “ignorance of...
