The Teochew vernacular opera “Tale of the Lychee and Mirror”, also known as “Dang San and Ngou Nio” 陳三五娘, is one of the most well known folk stories and operas in Southern Min culture. This version was originally published in 1581 with the full title 《新刻增補全像鄉談荔枝記》. It is one of six printed versions known from the Ming and Qing eras. Although the oldest extant edition, published in 1566, usually receives the most attention, this version is also a useful source for the history of Teochew vernacular language and culture.
This transcription is based on a digital scan of the original book held in the Austrian National Library. The scan was released under a No Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Only license, while this transcription is released under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Variant and simplified characters used in the original were transcribed as
closely to the original as possible, if the variant character is available in
Unicode. Otherwise, “ideographic description sequences” were used to describe
them. Lines starting with > are notes or explanations. Characters that I
could not find or was unsure of are represented as X, whereas characters that
were illegible or missing due to damage in the original are marked with ■.
As the transcription is being proofread and edited, additional notes (e.g.
TODO and STOP) to mark points of progress may be left in the file.
Digitized version from the OeNB can either be viewed in the browser online, or exported to PDF for download. Cropping or formatting issues with the PDF compared to the browser version are documented here.
- page 171 in PDF is badly cropped, part of text missing
- One line missing in the PDF version (pg. 91) but visible in the online browser
- Whole pg 51 is visible in PDF version but higher-resolution image in online browser has right-most line partly cropped.
- Heading for chapter 46 missing from scan (pg. 15 in PDF) but visible in online version