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.
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.
