水Shuǐ浒Hǔ传Zhuàn · Water Margin

Shuihu Zhuan (Water Margin, also translated as Outlaws of the Marsh and All Men Are Brothers) is one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese literature, attributed to Shi Nai'an (施耐庵, c. 1296–1372) and first printed in its 100-chapter form around 1589. It tells the story of 108 outlaws — 105 men and 3 women — who gather at Mount Liang (梁山) in the marshes of Shandong and form a brotherhood of righteousness (义) against corrupt officials, before eventually accepting imperial amnesty and being sent on campaigns. The novel is the great Chinese meditation on brotherhood, loyalty, and the gap between orthodox law (法) and moral justice (义) — a working-out of the same tension that drove the chivalric wuxia tradition that followed it. Its language is the vernacular (白话) of the late Yuan / early Ming, more accessible than Sanguo's classical-literate register, and it seeded an outsized share of modern Mandarin idioms (逼上梁山, 八十万禁军教头). Where Sanguo Yanyi is history-driven and Xiyou Ji is mythological, Shuihu Zhuan is sociological: it is the novel most cited in modern Chinese political rhetoric about 'the people' and 'the masses.' Placeholder: the Chinese exists on zh.wikisource but is not yet ingested; an aligned English seeding has not been chosen.