In the reign of Emperor An of Jin there was a young man of Houguan named Xie Duan. He had lost his father and mother as a child and been raised by the neighbours, and he grew up modest and honest, never stepping out of line. When he came of age he set up his own household, and the neighbours tried to find him a wife, but nothing came of it.
He rose before dawn and worked his fields until dark.
One day down by the river he found a great river snail, the size of a three-pint pot — a strange, beautiful thing — and he carried it home and kept it in a jar of water.
Soon after, he began to come in from the fields at dusk and find the house different: the floor swept, the fire lit, rice and soup steaming on the stove, as though someone had been keeping house all day. He thought the neighbours were doing him a kindness. After days of it he went round to thank them, and they only laughed. “We have done nothing,” they said. “You are keeping a wife in secret and thanking us for her cooking?”
He was baffled, and a little afraid. So the next morning he went out as usual, crowed with the roosters out the gate — and circled back at once, and crept to the window, and looked in.
Out of the water jar came a girl, young and lovely, stepping out of the great shell as out of a door. She went to the stove and began to cook.
Xie Duan burst in and stood between her and the jar. “Who are you?” he said, “that comes out of a snail shell and keeps my house?”
The girl started, and tried to return to the shell, and could not pass him. At last she said: “I am the White-Water Plain Maiden of the Milky Way. The Emperor of Heaven saw that you were orphaned and poor, and yet kept yourself honest and gentle, and he sent me down to keep your hearth and cook your meals for ten years — until you were rich enough to marry. But you have looked at me, and my form has been seen, and now I cannot stay.”
Xie Duan begged her. The wind rose outside, and the rain, and in the sound of the weather she went out of the house and was gone.
But she left the shell behind, and the shell was never empty of rice. Xie Duan never grew rich, exactly, but he never wanted again; in time he rose to be a county magistrate, and married, and built a small shrine to the Snail Girl, where they offered to her at the festivals. The shrine, says the tale, stood at Houguan still — a house of gratitude for a housekeeping spirit, whom heaven sent to a good poor man, and who stayed only as long as she was not looked at too closely.