Abstract:
Some idiosyncratic stories about Guan Yu are read in the folklore of the Yuan and the Ming Dynasty. In these stories, Guan Yu, besides his classic qualities, such as loyalty, solidarity, brevity, and intelligence, was described as being simple-minded, pitiless, selfish, impolite, cruel, snobbish, and narrow-minded. The portrayal of this idiosyncratic image of Guan Yu caused a decomposition and contradiction of the wholesome image of Guan Yu in the folklore and demonstrated the discrepancy of Guan Yu’s image between folklore description and scholarly description. And this discrepancy is related to the writer, the reader and cultural function of plays about Guan Yu.
