There was a scholar of Fenyin named Hou Sheng, one of the remarkable men of the Sui, and Wang Du served him as a master. On his deathbed Hou Sheng gave Wang Du an ancient mirror.
“Carry this,” he said, “and a hundred evils will keep their distance.”
Wang Du treasured it. The mirror was eight inches across. On its back, at the boss, was a crouching qilin; around the boss were set the four quarters — the tortoise, the dragon, the phoenix, the tiger, each in its place; outside those were the eight trigrams; outside those the twelve branches, each with its animal; and outside those, running round the rim, twenty-four characters in a script like the clerical hand, complete in every stroke, and to be found in no dictionary that exists.
He carried it, and things began to happen.
At his uncle’s house in the country there was a girl who had been wasting away for a year, and the mirror showed her for what she was: a great fox, which knelt on the ground in the lamplight and begged for its life, and was allowed to finish its last meal before it died, because Wang Du’s uncle asked it.
At a village where everyone was dying of a fever, the mirror hung over the well for one night, and the sickness stopped, and a thing like a serpent with a fish-tail was found dead in the water in the morning.
On a river journey, in a storm, Wang Du held the mirror up out of the boat, and the water divided around them for a hundred paces, and they passed.
He carried it through provinces. A serpent-spirit in an old tomb; a white ape in a ruined temple; a thing in a scholar’s library that had been reading his books for forty years, and wept when the mirror showed it to itself and asked only to be allowed to finish the chapter.
Wang Du’s brother, who borrowed it once, crossed a mountain pass at night with a band of robbers on the road; the mirror, hung on his belt, made a sound like a struck bell, and the robbers fell to the ground where they stood, and he walked past them.
In the seventh year of Daye, on the night of the summer solstice, Wang Du was woken by the mirror ringing in its case.
It was a long, thin sound, rising, and it went on for some time and then stopped. He opened the case in the morning.
The mirror was gone.
And the story ends not with a monster but with a sentence of explanation, which is rare for this genre and very moving: that the mirror was made by a man of the Yellow Emperor’s age for a purpose, and that its purpose was finished, and that a thing made to hold the darkness back must leave when the darkness it was made for is over.
Wang Du writes it in the first person, from beginning to end — one of the first Chinese tales ever told as I — and that is what makes the ending land. He is not reporting a marvel. He is telling you what he lost.