Ma Rufei’s Legends and the Generating of Modern Storytellers’ Ideal Personality

The material value of historical legend mainly lies in the times and social messages provided through the dissemination of legend, instead of the credibility of the historical events involved. In the late Qing Dynasty, the legend of Ma Rufei, who was the great master of Suzhou Pingtan (" 苏州评弹”), has spread far and wide in the end Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, generating a modern storytellers’ ideal personality, from which reflect the mobilization of cultural resources by the legend disseminator. Starting from the very limited original documents about Ma’s deeds, the storytellers and social elite in South-eastern China who undertook world salvation in the end Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China managed to mold Ma into a scholar of great learning and skillful in making education. However, the populace who anxiously expected to be favoured would rather propagate Ma as a man who was close to folk world and a chivalrous and tender itinerant entertainer. The two contrasted personalities—scholar and folk world person—have reached an accommodation in Ma’s legend, generating an ideal personality of modern storytellers. Through an overview of the generating mode of Ma’s personality, whether on the basis of disabuses of original documents and selective recall or emic proof deviated from the original documents and argument about different legend versions, the original documents in all aspects indicate get the command of the meaning of the symbol mark and are the knowledge resource of using the historical legend to express the social ideal by modern Jiangnan people, among them deriving a history of social ideas from Ma Rufei’s legends, from which we could not only discover the different appeal from several social class, could but also understand cultural power competition for the appeal respectively.