Zhanghuiti-Style is the main form of Chinese
classic novels. Each chapter of this form has a different title, and the
paragraphs are generally the same in length with complete beginnings and
endings. It was a long process for this art form to get mature.
The Chinese character Hui in
Zhanghuiti-Style literally means time. Storytelling artists in the Song
(960-1279) and Yuan (1271-1368) dynasties could not finish a long historical
story at one time, so they divided the whole story into many parts and broke off
at every crucial point to attract the audience. The length of every chapter was
generally the same. Therefore, the storytellers' scripts could be regarded as
the primal form of Zhanghuiti-Style Novels. For the convenience of telling the
story, the scripts were generally divided into volumes and chapters such as the
Five kinds of Quanxiang Pinghua, which was the earliest form of novels
with chapters.
At the end of Yuan (1271-1368) and the
beginning of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), a lot of re-created saga novels
emerged on the basis of storytellers' scripts, such as The Romance of the
Three Kingdoms, Outlaws of the Marsh and etc. These novels were
divided into volumes, which in turn were divided into sections and each of them
had a respective title, which was a strict seven-character line, such as the
Jiajing Edition of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. The form of
Zhanghuiti-Style Novels had been elementarily built up at that time.
To the mid Ming Dynasty, the use of Hui had
been formally established. Works created at this time like Pilgrim to the
West, Romance of Heroes and Gods and The Golden Lotus, had a title
for each chapter, but the titles were not necessarily written in the form of
couplets. At the end of the Ming (1368-1644) and the beginning of the Qing
Dynasty (1644-1911), titles for all chapters were in the strict form of
couplets, and this gradually became a fixed rule. From then on, Chinese saga
novels and novelettes generally took the form of Zhanghuiti-Style. The form was
often used for literati to create short story-telling
scripts.