Caizi jiaren

Caizi jiaren (Chinese: 才子佳人; pinyin: Cáizǐjiārén; Wade–Giles: Ts'ai-tzu chia-jen; "Scholar and Beauty" or "Scholar-Beauty") is a genre of Chinese fiction typically involving a romance between a young scholar and a beautiful girl. They were highly popular during the late Ming Dynasty and early Qing Dynasty.

Three Tang Dynasty works particularly influential in the development of the caizi-jiaren model" were Yingying's Biography, The Tale of Li Wa, and Huo Xiaoyu zhuan (T: , S: , "The story of Huo Xiaoyu"). Song Geng writes that Iu-kiao-li: or, the Two Fair Cousins was "one of the best-known caizi-jiaren novels." Chloë F. Starr adds that among the best known were Yu jiao li, Ping Shan Leng Yan, and Haoqiu zhuan.

Early examples are also common in Ming and Qing dynasty opera, such as The Story of the Western Wing, which uses the term caizi jiaren in its text, and The Peony Pavilion. In both of these operas lovers elope, have secret trysts, or were perfect matches in spite of parental disapproval. But the genre finally achieved an independent cultural and historical identity in the early Qing, when a writers began to use the term caizi jiaren for a group of vernacular novels with twenty or so chapters which had formulaic or standard characters and plots. The mid-18th century novel Dream of the Red Chamber criticized them, and literati dismissed them as inferior and obscene. By the 18th century, the genre had developed variety as the scholar and the beauty shared the action with fantasy and various other elements (such as judges and courtroom, monks and nuns, brothels, and illicit assignations, etc.).

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