For historians of the book, one of the notable characteristics of late imperial vernacular fiction is the inclusion of images. Images were part of Chinese books from the inception of Chinese printing, but illustrated books were not nearly as common in Ming and Qing China as they were in other parts of the world.
Literary fiction, however, seems to have been illustrated from the very beginning. One famous example of early illustrated fiction is the 1320s edition of the Record of the Three Kingdoms. These early printed editions were not fully mature “novels,” but were instead still closely related to the oral tradition (these were called pinghua).
