長安形勝 The Splendor of Chang'an
話表陝西大國長安城，乃歷代帝王建都之地。自周、秦、漢以來，三州花似錦，八水繞城流，真個是名勝之邦。彼時是大唐太宗皇帝登基，改元貞觀，已登極十三年，歲在己巳，天下太平，八方進貢，四海稱臣。话表陕西大国长安城，乃历代帝王建都之地。自周、秦、汉以来，三州花似锦，八水绕城流，真个是名胜之邦。彼时是大唐太宗皇帝登基，改元贞观，已登极十三年，岁在己巳，天下太平，八方进贡，四海称臣。
逐句解 Line by line
Our tale tells of the great realm of Shaanxi and the city of Cháng'ān, the seat where emperors of successive ages had founded their capitals.
The tale opens by planting a flag on the map. 長安, Chang'an, was the Tang capital, set on the Wei River plain, and dynasty after dynasty had put its throne there before the Tang arrived. Two readings worth catching now, because both recur all chapter: the place-name takes 長 as cháng, and 建都, to found a capital, takes 都 as dū rather than the more familiar dōu.
Ever since the Zhou, the Qin, and the Han, its three districts had bloomed like brocade and its eight rivers wound about the walls — truly a land of storied splendor.
This is tourist-brochure prose, and meant to be. The 八水, eight rivers, are the streams that ringed Tang Chang'an, and 花似錦, blossoms like brocade, is stock praise you could paste onto any celebrated city — 似 here reads sì. One textual wrinkle: some editions print 三川, three rivers, where this one has 三州, three districts.
At that time the Emperor Taizong of the great Tang had ascended the throne and changed the reign-style to Zhenguan. He had reigned thirteen years — the year being jǐsì — and all under Heaven was at peace, the eight quarters bringing tribute and the four seas owning themselves his subjects.
Here the novel sets its clock, and sets it wrong. 貞觀, Zhenguan, was Taizong's reign-era, 627 to 649, and the text puts the action in its thirteenth year, which it calls 己巳. Count it out on the sixty-year cycle of stems and branches, though, and the thirteenth year of Zhenguan is 639, which falls in 己亥. The novel is full of these loose date-markers. They are atmosphere, not chronology.
Start with a warning label: this chapter is a latecomer, and no part of the novel as it was first printed. The 1592 Shidetang edition 世德堂本, the base text here, has nothing like it in this slot — its ninth chapter is 袁守誠妙算無私曲，老龍王拙計犯天條, the fortune-teller and the doomed Dragon King. The Chen Guangrui story was attached later, as an appendix, 附錄, by the Qing editors 汪象旭 and 黃周星 in their Kangxi-era 《西遊證道書》, and from there it slid into the popular 通行本 as Chapter 9 and stayed. Anthony C. Yu prints it as Chapter 9 of his translation. Glen Dudbridge's The Hsi-yu chi: A Study of Antecedents to the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Novel remains the standard account of where the episode came from and how it grows out of the older 江流和尚 legend. This edition gives the 通行本 chapter whole, and says plainly that it is second-hand.
The scene itself is a wide establishing shot. Taizong (太宗, r. 626–649) is on the throne, the Zhenguan era has begun, and that is exactly the historical moment the pilgrimage will later set out from — so the chapter is doing frame-work as well as backstory. The praise of Chang'an is pure formula: eight rivers looping the walls, three districts flowering like brocade, an empire so settled that tribute arrives from every direction. None of it is meant to be checked. It is the hush before somebody gets thrown in a river.