Features · 专题
Deep essays that follow one thread — a creature, a place, an idea — through two thousand years of stories.
From dynastic omen to ruin of kings to the most faithful wife in fiction — two thousand years of the nine-tailed fox
The fox-spirit has been, by turns, a blessing from heaven, a national catastrophe, a predatory seducer and the moral centre of Chinese fiction. Tracing its transformations is tracing the whole history of the genre.
From the Yellow Springs to a civil service of the dead
The Chinese land of the dead began as a vague wet darkness and ended as the most elaborate bureaucracy ever imagined for the afterlife. Its history is the history of how China thinks about justice.
A field guide to the Shan Hai Jing, the oldest and strangest bestiary in the world
Nine-headed birds, flying fish, an oracle-beast that knows every spirit's weakness, and a glutton with no body. Ten entries from the catalogue that invented the Chinese monster.
Where the wuxia tradition was born — in the assassin-nuns, flying daggers and sword-swallowing magicians of the Tang chuanqi
A thousand years before the wuxia film, the Tang tale-tellers invented the Chinese superhuman: part assassin, part magician, part monk, and bound by a code stranger than any law.