A scholar named Jiang was travelling to Henan and put up for the night at Gong county. The inn had a west wing that had been swept very clean. Jiang liked it and took his luggage up.
The innkeeper smiled. “Are you a brave man, sir? That room is not very settled.”
“Jiaoshan had his own gall,” said Jiang, which is a way of saying he did not lack for any. He sat with a candle until late in the night.
Then he heard under the desk a sound like water slopping in a bamboo bucket, and something jumped out: black coat, black cap, three inches tall, shaped like a yamen runner. It stared at Jiang for a long while, clucked, and withdrew.
Presently several short men carried in an official — banners, horses, carriages, all as distinct as beans. The official sat upright in a gauze cap and abused Jiang violently, in a voice as thin as a wasp’s.
Jiang showed no fear. The official grew angrier, slapped the floor with a tiny hand, and ordered the short men to arrest him.
They pulled at his shoes and tugged his socks, and could not move him at all.
The official thought them cowardly. He rolled up his own sleeves and got up himself.
Jiang picked him up with one hand and set him on the desk, and looked at him closely.
It was a tumbler doll — the kind they sell in the street. It fell over stiffly. A lump of clay.
Its retinue prostrated themselves in rows and begged for their master back.
Jiang joked: “You will have to ransom him.”
They said yes at once. There was a buzzing in a hole in the wall. Sometimes four of them bore a hairpin between them, sometimes two carried a clasp. In a moment, hair ornaments, gold and silk, were spread all over the floor.
Jiang threw the tumbler back to them, and it could move as before. But the procession would not reform; they scattered in a rout.
When it grew light, the innkeeper shouted that he had been robbed.
And when Jiang asked, the things the little people had ransomed their official with were all the innkeeper’s own property, which the three-inch thieves had stolen.
