Zhao Xiangmin, son of the great General Zhao Liangdong, was governor-general at Baoding. One night he was reading in the west wing of his residence. The doors were shut.
Something came in sideways through the gap of a window, flat as a sheet of paper. Once inside, it rubbed its head, and its hands, and its feet, and thickened out into roundness — and stood there in a scholar’s square cap and red shoes, and bowed deeply with both hands raised.
“I am a fox licentiate. My family has lived here a hundred years, and your predecessors were all kind enough to allow it. But now that you have come to study here, I cannot set myself against a great officer of the Son of Heaven, so I have come to ask your pleasure. If you must read in this building, I will move — but I beg three days’ grace. And if you are merciful enough to let me go on breeding here, then pray lock the doors as you have been doing.”
Lord Zhao was astonished, and laughed.
“You are a fox. How can you be a licentiate?”
“Every year the Queen Mother of the Eastern Peak examines all the foxes. Those who write well are made licentiates. Those who fail are wild foxes. A licentiate may cultivate immortality. A wild fox may not.”
And then the fox began to preach at him.
“You gentlemen are born noble,” he said. “It is a pity you do not study to become immortals. For the likes of us, learning is very hard.
“First we must learn a human shape, then human speech. And to learn human speech we must first learn the speech of birds — and to learn the speech of birds we must learn the speech of every bird in the four seas and nine provinces, without exception, before we can produce a human voice and complete a human body. That alone is five hundred years of work.
“A human who studies immortality begins five hundred years ahead of us. And if he is noble, or a man of letters, he begins three hundred years ahead of other men.
“Generally, it takes a thousand years to become an immortal. That is the fixed rule.”
Lord Zhao was delighted with him, and the next day he had the west wing locked up and left to the fox.
These two stories come from Zhao Zhitan, governor of Zhenyuan — the general’s grandson — who added: “My father always regretted that he never asked the fox what examination question the Queen Mother of the Eastern Peak sets.”