In the last years of the Ming, the grand secretary He Fengsheng, hard pressed by Zhang Xianzhong at Wuchang, threw himself into Dunzi Lake and died.
From summer to autumn a god entrusted a dream to a certain lakeside resident, saying: “I have been charged by the Lord on High to guard Chancellor He’s corpse, and it is bitterly hard; you may haul it up and look — the one with the mole on his left hand, that is he.”
The man woke and found it strange. He waited by the lake, and there — out of the water it came, the corpse, plain to see. So he laid it out and buried it.
The body had been in the water a hundred and seventy days, and its face was like that of a living man.
