ABSTRACT
The colloquial language of Beijing and its neighbourhood prevailed and dominated over other dialects. It was not only the language of the local people, but also of the officials who sat for their highest-ranked Mandarin exams in Beijing, from where they were sent across the country to take up their offices. The official language was the language of the administration and the officially recognized literature. It was Classical Chinese as the continuation of the archaic language in its standardized version dated back to the Han dynasty. Colloquial Chinese was the tongue of everyday communication and gradually also became the language of literature. As Classical Chinese and colloquial languages drifted more and more markedly apart, the distance between classical and popular literature grew ever wider. Any detailed presentation of the main groups of written monuments of the colloquial language of those times would entangle in fairly complicated problems of a philological and editorial nature.
