You’re listening to Short and Interesting – the podcast that reads to you short excerpts from old, weird, interesting books. This week is our first look at “The Book of Swindles” by Zhang Yingyu (夔衷). This is from sometime around 1617 in Fujian province, China, and catalogs all the various scams, schemes, swindles, and switcheroos one might encounter in Ming dynasty China (or, indeed, anywhere in the world at any time in history.) This time we’re reading: “Pilfering Green Cloth by Pretending to Steal a Goose”; “Robbing a Pawn Shop by Pretending to Leave Goods There”; “An Officer Reprimands a Captured Criminal in Order to Halve His Flogging”; “Marrying a Street Cleaner and Provoking His Death.”

This (Chinese) work is itself public domain, but we’re reading from the English transaction, which is from Christopher Wray and Bruse Rusk in 2017, and is copyright of the Columbia University Press. We are reciting the text in the spirit of fair use. Check out the Columbia University Press’s website: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/the-book-of-swindles/9780231178631/.

Music by Dan Mason. Check out and buy his music at https://danmason.bandcamp.com. For this podcast we’re using clips of three tracks from his 2019 album Hypnagogia. Available under the Creative Commons License, Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. Creative Commons License details at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

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