Wine-loving warrior's wild tiger ride

Wu Song Kills a Tiger (Wu Song Da Hu) is a classical tale of Shandong kuaishu and one of Eric Shepherd's favorites. It is a lively rendition of an excerpt from Outlaws of the Marsh, one of the four classical novels of Chinese literature, which is a popular 120-chapter Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) novel based on peasant uprisings in late Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127). Since the story is told in Chinese, flavored with Shandong dialect, Shepherd often offers an English summary first.

"Long ago in medieval China there lived a warrior named Wu Song..." he begins. Shepherd then places the audience in the middle of Wu Song's journey home to see his older brother.

On the way Wu Song stops at an inn with a flag reading: "Three bowls of our wine and you can't cross the ridge," meaning that the wine is terribly potent and that more than three bowls would knock an ordinary man to the floor.

However, Wu Song drinks 18 bowls of the wine. The innkeeper, feeling responsible for Wu's safety, tries to get him to stay at his inn. But Wu refuses to stay, believing the innkeeper is trying to rip him off.

At sunset, Wu Song arrives at the top of Mount Jingyang. Just as he is about to fall asleep on a stone, he feels a gust of stinky wind - it is a huge tiger charging at him. Wu Song manages to evade the animal several times and the annoyed tiger launches another assault. Wu Song jumps onto the back of the tiger, grabs its skin and uses his other fist to beat the tiger to death. The incident makes Wu Song famous far and wide.

China Daily

(China Daily 08/07/2007 page20)