Shi Nai'an

Shi Nai'an is the name that the first editions of the novel give to its compiler, alongside Luo Guanzhong, but almost nothing is known about him; tradition makes him the latter's master. Documents revealed in the early 1930s and a genealogy found in Jiangsu have credited him with a career as a scholar who passed the examinations under the Yuan, without their authenticity being accepted. Lu Xun held the name to be an invention of late editors, and the critic Jin Shengtan, in the seventeenth century, placed under this name a preface that he had written himself.

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