At the end of the Datong era of the Liang, the general Ouyang Ge was campaigning in the south, in the country beyond Guilin, and he had brought his wife with him — a slight, very fair woman, and beautiful.
His men warned him. “General, why have you brought a beauty through this country? There is a spirit here that steals young women, and the beautiful ones especially. Guard her.”
Ouyang Ge did not laugh at them. That night he posted soldiers around the house, hid his wife in an inner room, bolted it fast, and set ten maids to watch inside the door.
The wind got up. It was pitch dark. Nothing happened through the watches. At the fifth watch the guards were nodding — and then every one of them jerked awake at the same instant, as though something had passed through the room, and the wife was gone.
The bolts were as they had been. Nothing was broken. No one had seen anything.
Ouyang Ge searched as a man searches when he has already guessed the answer. He went out into the mountains with a company, and he found, half a day’s march south, a valley of extraordinary richness: strange fruit on the trees, a hall cut into the rock, and women — more than thirty of them, all young, all stolen, all living quietly together in a place no road led to.
They told him. He comes and goes in an instant. He is strongest in daylight, and cannot be wounded then. At night he weakens. He wears sword-bright armour and carries a blade a hundred men could not lift. He is old beyond counting, and his hair is white, and he is an ape.
They told him the rest, too: that the women who were brought there and fought him died, and the ones who accepted him lived well, and that his newest wife — the one taken three days ago — had not yet been seen.
She was in a separate chamber, sick with weeping.
Ouyang Ge asked the women what he wanted to know: how does he eat, what does he drink, when does he sleep, and what does he fear. And they answered: dogs. He cannot bear dogs. And wine — he drinks a great deal, and it makes him heavy.
So Ouyang Ge sent men down the mountain for dogs, and for strong wine, and the women of the valley cooked and poured and praised the wine, and the white ape drank, and lay down, and the dogs were loosed.
He was enormous when they saw him properly: taller than a man, white-haired, dressed in a robe, with a sword across his knees. Drunk, dying, and fast — he killed four of the dogs with his hands before they had him down, and Ouyang Ge’s men had to finish him with spears through the body, and even then he was not quite dead until they had cut off his head.
As he died, the ape turned his head to the women and said — in a human voice, and about one thing only — Take care of the child.
His wife was already pregnant.
Ouyang Ge took her home, and in due time she bore a son, and the son had the look of the animal about the eyes and the brow — and the boy, raised as Ouyang Ge’s own, grew up to be Ouyang Xun, whose calligraphy every scholar in the empire has copied for a thousand years.
Which is the point of the story, and the reason it was written. The Tang literary world was a knife-fight, and someone who wanted to ruin Ouyang Xun did not write an insult; they wrote a monster story in which his mother was carried off by an ape and he was the ape’s son. It is vicious, it is brilliant, and it is the oldest surviving piece of character assassination in Chinese fiction — and it survived anyway, because the monster in it is genuinely one of the best.