Nie Xiaoqian
聂小倩
A scholar spends the night in a deserted temple and is visited by a ghostly beauty — and by the swordsman who alone knows how to defeat the old demon that owns her.
GhostLoveSword
Story Library · 故事库
Tales of the Strange
Classical zhiguai and chuanqi, translated from the original texts — every story with its source, its original Chinese, and notes on the world it came from. Filter by era, book, or creature.
Showing all 328 stories
The Taoist of Mount Lao
崂山道士
A rich young man climbs Mount Lao to learn magic from a Taoist master, endures a month of woodcutting, and comes home certain he has mastered the art of walking through walls.
ImmortalTrickster
The Painted Skin
画皮
Wang takes in a beautiful runaway girl and hides her in his study — until he looks through the window one morning and sees what she wears when no one is watching.
GhostMonster
Xi Fangping Sues the Underworld
席方平
A son follows his murdered father into the Courts of the Dead and files a lawsuit — through every clerk, every magistrate, every torture the underworld can devise, up to the highest god there is.
UnderworldJusticeGhost
Yingning
婴宁
A laughing girl with a branch of plum blossom steals a scholar's heart — and only after he marries her does the family learn she is not entirely human, nor entirely of this world.
Fox SpiritLove
The Curly-Bearded Stranger
虬髯客传
A penniless strategist, an eloping palace girl with a whisk, and a red-bearded giant who wants the empire — until he sees one young man in a plain coat and quietly withdraws his claim.
SwordJusticeDeity
Liu Yi and the Dragon Princess
柳毅传
A failed examination candidate meets a ragged shepherdess on the road and discovers she is the daughter of the Dragon King of Lake Dongting, exiled by her cruel husband. He agrees to carry one letter — and sets the dragons to war.
DeityLoveJustice
Nie Yinniang
聂隐娘
A nun takes ten-year-old Nie Yinniang from her home and returns her five years later — trained to fly over rooftops, kill at a word, and carry a dagger two inches long. The greatest swordswoman in Chinese fiction comes home.
SwordTransformation
Miss Ren
任氏传
A poor scholar falls in love with a beautiful woman of mysterious means. She is a fox spirit — and she is also, by the end, the most faithful creature in the story. The oldest great fox-wife in Chinese fiction.
Fox SpiritLove
The Governor of South Bough
南柯太守传
Chunyu Fen drinks himself to sleep under the old ash tree and wakes as a royal son-in-law, governor of a province, with twenty years of triumph and ruin ahead of him. When he wakes, an afternoon has passed.
DreamsTransformation
The World Inside a Pillow
枕中记
At a roadside inn, a young scholar complaining about his failed life borrows a porcelain pillow from an old Taoist. Inside it: fifty years of power, marriage, slander and glory. Outside it: the millet is not yet cooked.
DreamsImmortal
The Cricket
促织
The emperor loves cricket-fighting, so every district must supply fighting crickets. One ruined family is saved by a champion the size of a man's little finger — which may be the soul of their dying son.
TransformationJustice
The Peony Spirit
香玉
A scholar lodging in a temple falls in love with a woman in white — who is the temple's white peony. When a visitor digs the flower up and takes it away, she dies, and he spends a year of mourning coaxing her back to life.
TransformationLove
Li Ji Slays the Serpent
李寄斩蛇
A giant serpent in the mountains has eaten nine girls, sent to it yearly as tribute. The tenth volunteer, thirteen-year-old Li Ji, goes up the mountain with a sword, a hound, and a plan.
MonsterJusticeSword
The Two Swords
干将莫邪（三王墓）
The smith Gan Jiang forges two perfect swords for the King of Chu and is murdered for it. His son Chi grows up to seek vengeance — and a stranger in black offers to do it for him, asking only the boy's head and his sword.
SwordJustice
Dong Yong and the Weaver Maid
董永
Dong Yong sells himself into servitude to pay for his father's burial. On the road to his master's house a woman offers to be his wife — and weaves ten bolts of perfect silk a day to buy back his freedom.
ImmortalLove
Song Dingbo Catches a Ghost
宋定伯捉鬼
Walking at night, Song Dingbo meets a ghost on the road. Unafraid, he claims to be a ghost too, learns its one weakness, carries it to market on his back — and sells it as a goat.
GhostTrickster
The Husband-and-Wife Tree
韩凭夫妇
The King of Song takes the beautiful wife of his retainer Han Ping. The lovers die defying him and are buried apart — and their graves grow two trees that bend across the road to intertwine.
LoveTransformationJustice
The Snail-Shell Girl
白水素女
A poor farmer finds a great river snail and keeps it in a jar. Soon he begins coming home to find his house swept and a hot meal waiting — and one day he doubles back early to catch his mysterious housekeeper.
TransformationLove
Jingwei Fills the Sea
精卫填海
The youngest daughter of the Flame Emperor drowns in the Eastern Sea. She returns as a small bird, and begins — twig by twig, pebble by pebble, forever — to fill the sea that killed her.
DeityMonsterTransformation
The Examination for City God
考城隍
A scholar is summoned in his sleep to sit an examination — but the post being filled is City God of a district in the underworld. His answer to one question gets him the job, and nine years of leave.
DeityUnderworldJustice
Wang Liulang
王六郎
Every night a fisherman pours a cup of wine on the ground for the drowned. One night the drowned one comes up and drinks with him — and their friendship ends in the strangest promotion in the collection.
GhostLoveJustice
Abao
阿宝
Sun Zichu is the most ridiculous scholar in the province — six fingers, no small talk, and a habit of running away from singing girls. Then he falls in love at first sight with a merchant's daughter, and there is nothing absurd about what he does next.
LoveTransformation
Red Thread
红线传
Red Thread is a palace maid who plays the lute and reads the histories. In one night she walks three hundred li, steals a gold box from a warlord's bedside, and stops a war — then asks to be released into the mountains.
Sword
The Soul That Left
离魂记
Qianniang is betrothed to her cousin, then promised to another man. On the night her lover sails away, a second Qianniang runs after him down the riverbank — while the first one lies in her room, sick and unmoving.
GhostLoveTransformation
The White Ape
补江总白猿传
General Ouyang Ge takes his beautiful wife on campaign. He locks her in a guarded room. In the morning she is gone — taken by something that lives in the mountains and collects women.
MonsterTrickster
The Goose-Cage Scholar
阳羡书生（鹅笼书生）
A scholar begs a lift inside a goose cage. He fits. Then, at dinner, he opens his mouth and produces a woman — who produces her own lover — who produces his. Four hundred words, and the strangest image in Chinese literature.
TransformationTrickster
The Peach-Blossom Spring of Mount Tiantai
刘晨阮肇入天台
Two men go into Mount Tiantai to gather bark, lose the path, and are fed hyssop cakes by two women who seem to know them already. They stay half a year. When they go home, seven generations have passed.
ImmortalLove
The Girl Who Sold Face Powder
卖胡粉女子
A rich man's son buys face powder every day from a girl in the market, and says nothing, until the day he says everything at once and dies of it. The girl comes to the funeral — and the body remembers her.
GhostLove
The Ghosts Who Avoided Jiang Sanmang
鬼避姜三莽
Having heard that Song Dingbo once sold a ghost for fifteen hundred cash, a brave fool decides to go into the ghost business. Every night he walks out to the graveyard with a rope. The ghosts move out.
GhostTrickster
Tan Sheng and the Ghost Wife
谈生
A poor scholar of forty is reading the Book of Songs alone at midnight when a girl comes to him and asks to be his wife. She has one condition: for three years, he must never light a lamp and look at her.
GhostLoveTransformation
Kuafu Chases the Sun
夸父逐日
A giant follows the sun across the sky, and drinks the Yellow River dry, and the Wei, and goes on north for more. He does not reach it. What he leaves behind is a forest of peaches.
DeityTransformation
The Kunlun Slave
昆仑奴
A young guardsman falls in love with a concubine who signals him in a code of fingers. His master's slave — a dark-skinned man called Mo Le — reads the code, and carries her over ten walls in one night.
SwordLoveTrickster
The Ancient Mirror
古镜记
A scholar inherits a bronze mirror eight inches across with a unicorn cast on its back. Wherever he carries it, the things that live in the dark are burned away — until one night the mirror says goodbye.
MonsterDeitySword
The Marriage Shop
定婚店（月下老人）
A young man waiting at an inn asks an old man reading by moonlight what book he has. The old man says: the register of marriages. And in his bag — red thread, for tying feet together.
DeityLoveJustice
Du Zichun and the Furnace
杜子春
A Taoist master has almost made the elixir twice, and twice it failed. He needs a man who can sit in front of the furnace and say nothing — through every hallucination hell can improvise. Du Zichun volunteers. He passes everything. Except one thing.
ImmortalTransformationDreams
Jiaona
娇娜
A stranded scholar is taken in by a family who are not human. He falls in love with the wrong sister — and when thunder comes for them, he finds out what the right one is worth.
Fox SpiritLoveJustice
Judge Lu
陆判
Dared to carry a statue out of the temple of the Ten Kings at midnight, Zhu Erdian brings home the green-faced Judge Lu — and gains a friend who will replace his stupid heart and his wife's unremarkable head.
UnderworldTransformationJustice
The Filial Wife of Donghai
东海孝妇
A widow serves her mother-in-law faithfully for ten years and is executed for murdering her. Her blood runs uphill. The province does not see rain again for three years.
JusticeGhostDeity
Chang'e Flies to the Moon
嫦娥奔月
The archer Yi obtains the elixir of immortality from the Queen Mother of the West. His wife Chang'e drinks it, and goes up — and the oldest telling says only that she was lonely there.
DeityImmortalTransformation
The Magistrate Who Went Down the Well
酆都知县
A county magistrate abolishes the annual tax that his people pay to Hell. The town tells him to explain himself to the gods. So he has himself lowered down a well — and meets Bao Zheng, and Guan Yu, and makes one fatal mistake.
UnderworldJusticeDeity
The Fox Licentiate
狐生员劝人修仙
A governor-general is reading late when a fox comes in sideways through the window crack, thickens into a scholar, bows — and delivers the most detailed cost-accounting of becoming an immortal anywhere in Chinese fiction.
Fox SpiritImmortalTransformation
The Scholar and the Rope
蔡书生
A scholar buys the haunted house nobody will live in. At midnight a woman in red silk ties a noose to the beam and beckons him. He puts one foot forward. She starts to cry.
GhostTrickster
The Friend Who Would Not Leave
南昌士人
A dead scholar comes back to his friend, says a proper goodbye, and asks three small favours. Then he stands there. His eyes go blank. His face starts to spoil. And the chase begins.
GhostMonster
The Return of Vice-Prefect Li
李通判
A Daoist offers to bring a rich young official back from the dead. The rule is that someone must die in his place — and the only volunteer is the old slave nobody counted.
JusticeGhostDeity
The Death-God in the Cangue
煞神受枷
On the seventh night the death-god comes for her husband's soul. Every relative is supposed to leave the house. She stays, hides in the bed-curtains — and twenty years later meets that god again, in a wooden collar.
GhostJusticeDeity
The Skull That Breathed
骷髅吹气
A chess player lies down in the east wing on a hot afternoon and feels a cold spot the size of a walnut on his back. It grows to the size of a plate. Then half the mat is cold, and it goes into his bones.
GhostMonster
The Debt of Seven Ounces
大乐上人
A poor yamen runner borrows seven ounces he can never repay, and tells the monk who lent it: in the next life let me be your donkey. That night, the donkey foals.
JusticeTransformation
The Palace Where the Earth Ends
地穷宫
A garrison captain dies, finds the afterlife much more comfortable than being alive, drifts southeast for hours through flying sand — and comes to a hall with a gold plaque over the door. He stands and stares. The guards tell him to move on. He argues.
UnderworldDeity
The Salt Rebel
蒲州盐枭
The salt pools stop making salt. The merchants pray. Lord Guan appears in a dream and explains: Chi You has taken the pool. His soul I can bind — but his wife is worse than he is, and for her I need my brother.
DeityMonster
The Borrowed Body
灵璧女借尸还魂
A blind, dropsical farmer's wife dies. Her husband buys a coffin. By the time he gets back she can see, her belly is flat — and she is asking where her parents are, because she is an unmarried girl from another village.
TransformationGhost
The Widow Who Sued from the Grave
田烈妻
A magistrate holding court one evening under a bright moon sees a woman kneeling at his gate with her face covered in black cloth. He has his clerk call out the writ: whoever has a grievance, let the soul come in.
JusticeGhost
The Ghost's Three Tricks
鬼有三技过此鬼道乃穷
A scholar walking home at dusk finds a rope dropped in the road by a woman who fled into a tree. He picks it up, smells it, and puts it in his coat. That is the beginning of the ghost's problem.
GhostTrickster
The Magistrate of Pingyang
平阳令
A magistrate famous for his cruelty to women spends the night in a locked loft that everyone says is haunted. An old god visits him first and tells him exactly what he wants to hear.
JusticeGhost
The Man Who Was Not Afraid
叶老脱
Four ghosts come into the room — a hanged woman with her eyes torn out, a headless thing carrying two heads, a black smear, and one vast and yellow. They search for him and cannot find him. Then one of them explains why.
GhostMonster
The God Who Gave a False Verdict
关神断狱
A stolen chicken is judged by casting the moon-blocks at the shrine of Lord Guan. The blocks come up guilty — for the wrong person. On purpose. Years later the god explains himself, and then explains something stranger.
DeityJusticeGhost
Climbing the Sunbeam
鬼攀日线才能托生
Asked how rebirth actually works, a spirit who has been dead four hundred years explains: on the winter solstice a single thread of sunlight falls across the Mountain of Shadows, the frozen dead thaw, and they climb.
GhostUnderworldImmortal
The Ghost of a Ghost
城隍杀鬼不许为聻
The City God sentences a rapist ghost to forty strokes and a public cangue. Three days later the ghost's wife comes back to avenge him. The second sentence is worse than the first.
GhostJusticeDeity
The Raksasa Bird
罗刹鸟
The bridal procession passes an old grave and a whirlwind comes out of the mound. At the groom's house the bearers lift the curtain — and two brides step out of the sedan chair.
MonsterGhost
The Rain God and the Usurper
董贤为神
A Qing official sent to pray for rain finds a shrine to a beautiful young man in Han court dress. He decides the god is bogus and plans to pull the temple down for its timber. That night the god comes and defends his reputation.
DeityJustice
The Man Who Entertained the Plague God
苏耽老饮疫神
On New Year's morning somebody paints the Plague God on paper and nails it to his door as a curse. He finds it, laughs, brings it in, gives it the seat of honour, drinks with it, and burns it.
DeityTrickster
The Shell of Heaven
天壳
In Shaanxi the ground sometimes splits open and a whole village drops in, and nobody has ever come back out. In 1646 one man did — nine days later, alone, black as charcoal.
UnderworldDeity
The Jar That Held a Soul
藏魂坛
A bully is beaten to death and thrown in the river. Three days later he walks home. Beheaded by imperial warrant, he is whole again in three days. His mother finally comes to court — carrying a jar.
JusticeTransformationMonster
The Little Magistrate
不倒翁
Something three inches tall in a black coat and a bailiff's cap crawls out from under the desk and glares at him. Then a whole procession arrives — banners, horses, a carriage, all the size of beans.
TricksterGhost
The Emperor's Flowing Nectar
帝流浆
A spirit-medium is asked why drowned ghosts smell of sheep, and what happens to people burned to death. Then he explains what falls out of the moon on one particular night each year.
ImmortalFox SpiritTransformation
The Ghost Who Guarded the Money
女鬼守财待婿
A wife is accused of stealing the silver and giving it to a lover. She hangs herself. Her ghost then haunts the house — and when her own son-in-law finally turns up, she tries to kill him.
GhostJustice
The Ghost and the Character Po
缢鬼畏魄字
A dead wife asks an old friend to come and save her husband's second wife from a hanging ghost. The defence she gives him is a chair, a patch of moonlight, and the instruction not to shout.
GhostDeity
Lady Zibuyu
子不语娘娘
A chicken-seller is promised three years of marriage to an immortal who can conjure a house. Before she leaves she gives him a wooden doll — named after the one thing a Master would not discuss.
ImmortalTrickster
Governing Demons Is Easier
治妖易治人难
Two identical brides walk a length of white cloth; one weeps and one is delighted. The magistrate cracks it in an afternoon. Then the same magistrate is destroyed by a robber using the correct form.
JusticeDeityFox Spirit
The God of Casual Unions
露水姻缘之神
A travelling husband is offered a cup of muddy wine by the roadside. A year later a god explains that he was the one who drank it — and that his wife is about to have an affair.
DeityLoveGhost
The Zombie Who Drank the Blood
僵尸食人血
A wife rises at cockcrow, rinses rice, picks vegetables, and finds her husband in bed with no head and no blood. She is arrested, tortured, and held for months. Then a neighbour goes up the hill for firewood.
MonsterGhostJustice
Resentment Became a Snake
怨气变蛇
A dying farmer asks the coffin-maker to leave a small hole in the back of his coffin. He explains that he intends to become a snake and eat his enemy's liver. The workmen laugh.
MonsterTransformationJustice
Three Kinds of Drought Demon
旱魃有三种
Two kinds of drought demon are bad enough. The third is worse: it looks like a man with a long head and a single eye on top, and it eats dragons.
MonsterDeity
Those Who Kill Themselves Become Trees
人变树
Two whole peoples refuse to take their own lives, for one reason: a tree is too easily cut down. Two sentences long, and one of the strangest arguments in Chinese folklore.
MonsterTransformation
The Ghost Who Seized Surplus
掠剩鬼
A dead merchant buys his old friend lunch and explains his new appointment: he has been assigned to seize the surplus. Then he gives him a bouquet that is very heavy.
GhostTricksterUnderworld
The Foolish Ghost Who Loved His Wife
痴鬼恋妻
A woman who can see ghosts describes one she watched for a year: a man who died at twenty-eight and could not stop following his wife, including to her second wedding.
GhostLoveDeity
The Five One-Eyes
一目五先生
Five ghosts travel together in plague years. Four of them are completely blind. The one with an eye decides who is eaten, and his method of choosing is the most cynical moral arithmetic in the collection.
GhostMonster
Two Excellent Ways to Govern a Ghost
治鬼二妙
Two sentences of doctrine from two men: breathe on it, and if you lose you are no worse than what it is. The shortest entry in the collection and one of the most useful.
GhostImmortal
The City God Was Drunk
城隍神酗酒
A clerk writes a colleague's name upside down in red ink as a joke, and burns the paper. That night the City God's bailiffs arrive. The rule is that whenever a living document names a man, the underworld arrests him.
UnderworldJusticeDeity
The Goddess Zi Gu
紫姑神
A young scholar falls in love with a statue and writes a poem on the temple wall. That night the goddess knocks at his door — and her problem is not damnation but paperwork.
ImmortalLoveTransformation
The Ghost Who Borrowed a Title
鬼借官衔嫁女
A boy makes gold-foil hairpins for a woman who says she is buying her daughter's dowry. Then she asks him to obtain a sheet of official rank from the neighbour, to borrow the surname and add lustre to her poor house.
GhostTrickster
King Ox-Head
牛头大王
A god demands a temple in a dream, clears the village epidemic, and answers prayers for sons for several years. Then one father's boy dies after an auspicious divination, and he takes a hoe to the statue.
DeityJusticeTrickster
Liu Rushi as a Vengeful Ghost
柳如是为厉
A county yamen has three sealed rooms because a hanged woman died there. A new governor opens them for his concubines. In the west wing one survives with her eye struck out. In the east wing nobody warns the new bride.
GhostJusticeMonster
The Monster Feared Reason
怪怕讲理
An eighty-year-old man sees a woman at the door, then a man with her, then the two of them astride his roof beams. He does not look up. He reads.
GhostMonsterTrickster
The Rabbit God
兔儿神
A censor has a man tortured to death for staring at him. A month later the dead man appears in a dream in his village: the officers of the dark all laughed at me, and none was angry. Now they have made me a god.
DeityLoveJustice
Poor Ghosts and Rich Ghosts
穷鬼祟人富鬼不崇人
A thousand coffins heaped like a mountain behind a convent, and the monks say the place is peaceful all year because these are all rich ghosts. Yuan Mei asks how a city can produce so many rich ghosts.
GhostUnderworldJustice
Thirteen Cats
十三猫同日殉节
An old concubine of seventy kept thirteen cats, loved them like sons, and each had a milk-name. When she died they circled the coffin and cried, refused fish and rice, and starved to death together in three days.
MonsterLove
A Robber Ghost's Confession
盗鬼供状
A revenue clerk is seized by the ankle by something rising out of the floor tiles. It is a robber he condemned in a former life, and it has been screaming on the branding irons for sixty years.
GhostJusticeUnderworld
The Woman on the Road to Loufan
樓煩道中婦人
A traveller points the way for a woman on the road. She sighs and falls down dead. He is jailed and tortured into a false confession — and the whole case turns on a name nobody caught.
JusticeGhost
The Painted Horses of Shuming Hall
淑明殿
A statue's finger breaks and blood streams down, and the temple's gold is gone. The custodians are tortured and say nothing. Then four painted horses walk off a wall — and come back carrying men.
DeityJustice
The Diver Who Killed the Flood Dragon
河朔漁叟
An embankment built by morning collapses by evening. An old fisherman offers to hold his breath for a day and a night, asks for the ancient sword out of the treasury store, and comes back with a dragon's head.
DeityMonsterJustice
The Temple Boy Who Became a Donkey
普光寺行童
A drinking, whoring temple boy falls ill, and a short donkey's tail pushes out through his skin. His family want to kill him. The monks say no — this is a public warning, and it must be kept working.
MonsterTransformationJustice
The Lady of the Ruined Tomb
張相公夫人
A traveller knocks at a great house at nightfall, is too frightened to say a word, and is taken for a rustic. At dawn he is lying among a pile of ancient graves, and the perfume on his clothes lasts a month.
GhostFox SpiritTrickster
The Temple That Moved Itself
七娘子灘龍女廟
A village asks a shrine to move out of the way of the floods, and the divining blocks say yes. That night there is a sound like a collapsing mountain, and everyone is certain they have angered the god.
DeityJustice
The Protector-General
護國大將軍
Locusts darken the sky and sweep the harvest clean. Thousands of birds with crops the size of several pecks fill them and spit them out again. Ten days later there is not one left, and the bird is given an army rank.
DeityMonsterJustice
The Widow at Jiangwan
蔣灣娘子
An army colonel buying horses loses his way and is invited in by a widow who has kept widowhood ten years with no sons or brothers. She argues that tonight was not expected, and therefore must be Heaven.
GhostFox SpiritLove
The Long-Armed Demon
王彦太家
A merchant sails to the southern seas and does not come back. His wife meets a young man in the garden with a slingshot, curses him successfully — and that is when the trouble starts.
MonsterFox SpiritLove
The Dead Man's Paper
曾尚書
A dead minister is appointed Earth God of a mountain shrine and asks his four sons to burn a few thousand sheets of dyed paper for the handover gifts. Each son fails to listen in a different way.
GhostUnderworldJustice
The Peacock Sutra
鄒智明
A plague demon is driven off by a peacock's tail, and reports that there is still a nail in the sick man's head. The cure is a pile of burned paper money — and the illness turns out to have an address.
DeityGhostJustice
The King Who Wanted a Record
順濟王
A god demands that a disgraced official write the record of his shrine. The man suggests a famous name instead. The god's voice goes harsh: who says this district lacks stone, and who is this high official I do not know?
DeityJustice
The Magistrate Who Practised the Five Thunder Method
湯顯祖
A new magistrate is told to visit the shrines on the third day. He curses the clerk: I practise the Five Thunder method, the gods are in the palm of my hand — why should I bow to a clay idol? That night the water rises.
DeityJustice
The Tablet That Read Gong
共相公
A dead man is led into the hall of the King of Hell, where a great tablet in green characters reads: Gong the Minister knows this. He thinks: in the world there is no such surname. A bailiff nearly dies of fright.
UnderworldDeity
The Woman by West Lake
西湖女子
He sees her at a commoner's house by the lake; she looks back. Five years later he meets her again on the road, married, and only when he proposes to take her home does she tell him she died within the year he left.
GhostLove
The Old Man Hou Lin
侯林
An old man presents a petition from beyond death: an archer burned his house down with his three sons inside. The archer is jailed and tortured. Then an assistant is sent to look at the place.
GhostJusticeFox Spirit
Three Hundred Cash
許元惠
His father dreams of a guest in black who says he is repaying a loan of three hundred cash. Neither the lender nor the date can be remembered. The next day a black duck turns up.
GhostJustice
The Surgeon and the Skin-Field King
張小娘子
A constable's wife is given a book of ulcer prescriptions by a god and becomes famous as a surgeon. Her greatest triumph is a diagnosis made from the sediment of drained pus.
DeityMonsterJustice
The Snake in the Prison
潭州貧民
Two sisters sold as concubines; the younger is seduced by her master's son and falls pregnant. Her mother accuses an innocent landlord. The case turns on a white snake in a prison cell.
JusticeGhostMonster
The Rich Man's Boats
處州青田水患
A rich family is safe on high ground with nothing but the clothes they stand in, and are about to turn the boats back for their goods when the water rises and a whole town rides the rooftops screaming.
JusticeDeity
The White Snake of Tongzhou
同州白蛇
A creature kills prefects. The chief minister's son-in-law takes the post anyway for the salary, and at his welcome banquet asks the singing women why they are dressed in white.
MonsterDeityJustice
Old Zhao and the Five Arrows
趙三翁
A deserter from a Yellow River fascine gang meets Sun Simiao in a jujube wood and lives to a hundred and eight. What he asks the Emperor for is his discharge papers.
ImmortalMonsterDeity
The Copyist's Four Seals
戴之邵
A penniless copyist dreams of digging up four sets of objects in his employer's garden. Twenty years later every one of them has come true — and then the tale turns on what he did to get there.
DreamsJustice
Monstrous Births
楊有成
A doctor of Jiankang says he has seen three monstrous births with his own eyes. One of the children comes back at night to drink its mother's milk.
MonsterGhostJustice
The Fox Who Debated the Classics
狐媚
A scholar says he cannot be seduced because he wants neither beauty nor gold — only the books on his shelf. The fox agrees, and quotes the classics back at him.
Fox SpiritTricksterLove
The Hell of Face Powder
香粉地狱
A man dies by clerical error, is sent back, and is shown a district of the underworld where the daughters of corrupt officials work as prostitutes to pay their fathers' debts. One of them is his betrothed.
UnderworldJusticeLove
The Enrolment of the Ghosts
森羅殿點鬼
A magistrate lodging under the colonnade of the Hall of the Ten Kings watches the registers being audited. The eighty-seven thousand death-summoning ghosts have been made doctors and prostitutes. The hungry ones are mostly county magistrates.
UnderworldJusticeDeity
The Poor Scholar and the Planchette
窮士扶乩
A starving poet is barred from a salt merchant's garden party. He claims he can call spirits with a planchette, and the greatest poet of the previous dynasty obliges him — for one night only.
SatirePoetryUnderworld
The Thief Who Judged Verse
能詩賊
A burglar breaks in, reads the householder's poems, slaps the table and calls him the heir of Li Bai and Du Fu. Then he starts editing.
PoetryOutlawSatire
The Dog Who Could Read
識字犬
Shen Qifeng's own dog learns to read, refuses to eat leftovers, refuses to sleep with the bitch he is given, and ends by barking at fine clothes and fawning on rags. It does not end well.
AnimalSatireFate
The Man With No Vapour
無氣官
A qi-reader at the capital's Liuli Market names every official's post from his breath. Then one man walks in whose vapour matches nothing in the five elements.
SatireDivinationOfficialdom
The Dead Wife Keeps House
鬼婦持家
A man's second wife beats his children. He falls through the ground into his dead parents' house, and his dead first wife is there embroidering slippers — and does not know him.
UnderworldFamilyPossession
The Temple of the Ten Aunts
十姨廟
A temple near Duqu holds ten beautiful women. Nobody remembers that it was built for Du Fu, whose office of Reminder sounded to country ears like Ten Aunts.
DeitySatirePoetry
A Heart of Ice
蘸婦冰心
A woman forced into a second marriage dies of being called unchaste. Her friend dies at the same hour, and the friend's body gets up and goes to keep thirty years of widowhood in her place.
PossessionWomenJustice
The Commandery Where a Day Is a Year
蟪蛄郡
A man rides out in a snowstorm and comes to a country where morning is spring, noon is summer, evening is autumn and night is winter. He marries the princess, sires a son, governs the realm, and is home before he sobers up.
OtherworldTimeTaoist
The City of Dung Beetles
蜣螂城
A young man whose whole body smells of orchid is shipwrecked on an island where everyone covers their noses at him. He can smell it too. It takes one bath.
SatireOtherworldMoney
Mengpo Village
孟婆莊
A man dies of love and is sent to be reborn. At the village where the draught is served, the woman in charge turns out to be someone he knows — and she will not let him drink.
UnderworldLoveMoney
The Wheel of Faces
面目輪迴
A brilliant young man is ashamed of his face. He dreams into the office where faces are drawn, and his dead friend — now a draughtsman to the Wheel-Turning King — shows him two registers: the faces of the eminent, and the faces of the poor.
UnderworldSatireDeity
The Body Outside the Body
身外身
A young man begs to become a monk. The old master throws his staff at him and tells him to go and collect his twelve years of wealth and rank first. Twelve years later he does — and finds out who lived them.
BuddhistTransformationDreams
The Hand in the Coffin
棺中鬼手
Thirty coffins of famine victims in one wing of the temple, and one fat white hand in the other. The starved ones take a single coin. The magistrate's clerk holds out for two strings — and ends with nothing.
GhostSatireOfficialdom
One Cash
一錢落職
He is dismissed for corruption before he has taken up his post, having committed no crime in office. The charge is one coin — trodden on in a bookshop gutter years earlier, by a man who was watching.
SatireOfficialdomJustice
The Old Face Ghost
老面鬼
A face pushes in through the lattice and keeps growing: first the size of a winnowing basket, then an overturned cauldron, then a carriage wheel. The teacher asks it whether it can read. It cannot.
GhostSatireMoney
The Examination Notice
考牌逐腐鬼
Four scholar-ghosts haunt a new country house, meeting every night to write examination essays. Then the annual notice of the prefectural exam is laid on the table — and they run for the darkest corner of hell.
GhostSatireUnderworld
The Mirror That Read Hearts
鏡裏人心
An itinerant doctor with a thousand-year-old mirror diagnoses the heart: seven apertures, and in a fool some of them are stopped up. He can cure what you ate. He cannot cure what your mother breathed.
SatireMoneyHealer
The Merman Who Cried Pearls
鮫奴
A scholar rescues a merman exiled for breaking the shuttle of an undersea princess. The price of the girl he loves is ten thousand pearls. The merman can cry pearls — but not to order.
LoveMarvelsMoney
The Beggar Who Was Rebuilt
換形乞丐
A mad beggar complains that the King of the Dead has been unfair to him. The Ten Kings agree, and rebuild him out of the best parts: a general's tongue, a king's shoulders, an emperor's loins. His wife identifies the one thing they forgot.
SatireUnderworldTransformation
Peach Blossom Village
桃夭村
A country that marries by examination: the girls are ranked on their faces, the young men on their essays, and first is matched to first. A merchant bribes the examiner for first place. A scholar refuses. Both get exactly what they asked for.
SatireLoveJustice
The Girl Who Parodied the Classics
筆頭減壽
A girl of genius rewrites the Book of Changes as a hexagram on Money, and the Book of Documents as a satire on her maid. Then she dreams into the hall where the classics are judged, and hears her own sentence.
WomenSatireDreams
The Tiger Fool
虎痴
A girl whose father was framed to death vows herself to whoever kills the murderer. A tiger does — and comes to claim her. What follows is not a marriage but a devotion that outlasts death.
AnimalGhostLove
The Advance Mourning
生吊
A silk merchant deep in a card game is visited by an old friend who weeps, changes into mourning white, and bows to him as to the dead — because in the underworld court his name is already booked for trial.
GhostJustice
The Painting That Cured Jealousy
妙画代良医
A beautiful, jealous wife mourns her devoted husband to death — until her painter cousin shows her a picture of that same husband surrounded by other women. Grief, it turns out, is easily cured by a worse feeling.
SatireLove
The Exorcism at Shangqing
上清官除妖
A minister's daughter is haunted. The great Heavenly Master at Longhu Mountain, who sells talismans by the ten-thousand, fobs the case off on a Daoist he finds carrying manure in a field — who dispels the demon in a basin of boiling water.
MonsterJusticeSatire
The Girl Who Avenged Herself
奇女雪怨
A gifted girl corrects a scholar's essays, gives him her body, and is betrayed for a richer match. As a ghost she tutors him all the way to a prefect's seat — so that the law, not she, can execute him.
GhostLoveJustice
The Dog-Maid
犬婢
A sallow maid with dog-bright eyes can sort gold and silver in total darkness — because she is the dog beneath Marshal Yang's altar, reborn. But ask her for a book and she is blind. A satire on everyone who is sharp on money and blind on letters.
AnimalSatire
The Dream Within a Dream
梦中梦
A man on his way to the metropolitan exam dozes at a temple and dreams he has won it all — the villa, the feast, the four concubines — and is woken mid-quarrel with his scolding wife, only to find it was a dream of a dream.
SatireOfficialdom
The Actress Who Married in Death
死嫁
A girl actor who would rather play a painted-face hero than a woman's part falls for a visiting scholar. He cannot buy her freedom; she dies. He buys her coffin instead, and buries her as his bride.
LoveSatire
The Beggar Who Learned to Flatter
贫儿学谄
A beggar, out-earned by a fellow mendicant with a better fawning bone and flattering tongue, travels far to study flattery at the gate of the most powerful flatterers in the realm — the household of the corrupt Grand Secretary Yan.
SatireOfficialdom
The Talented Man Chastened
才士惩骄
A proud young Hanlin, caught in rain, scrawls a careless inscription on a farmer's fan and fobs it off under a famous graduate's name. The 'boor' turns out to be a retired examination master who corrects every error — and his pride.
SatireOfficialdom
The Henpecked Magistrate
怕婆县令
A magistrate with no merit but twelve years of bootlicking visits his old townsman the Provincial Governor and performs his exact morning routine — down to the gold-and-pearls hairpins — for the throne. The Governor realises he is being mocked with a wife's script.
SatireOfficialdom
The Village Girl With the Sharp Tongue
村姬毒舌
A freshly minted top graduate, swaggering home on leave, tries to impress a village girl with his rank and his gold. She deflates both — and him — without raising her voice.
SatireLove
The Bride Who Was Bait
奇婚
The girl in the red tower never stays. A 六甲符 sewn under the mattress makes her vanish the instant a man reaches for her — because she is bait, and the family that owns her kills a man before every job. Her sister is the one who tells him so.
GhostJusticeMagic
The Pheasant Matchmaker
雉媒
Seventy, widowed, and refused by every matchmaker, a bird-keeper opens his cages and lets everything go. A white pheasant leads him to a house of four bird-women who make him young again — until a woodcutter's axe fells the tree they live in.
AnimalTransformationOtherworld
The Household in a Dream
梦里家园
His dead father has been given an underworld post and left him a house to look after. Night after night the young man goes back: marries, buys an office, runs a business, and becomes the richest man in the Land of Black Sweetness — while his body lies on a wet-nurse's broken bed.
DreamsOfficialdomUnderworld
The Halo of Seven Lives
顶上圆光
A traveller sheltering in a cave on Huangshan watches the old monk's halo fill with figures: a general hung with severed heads, a dog at prayer, a bribe-taking minister, a courtesan, a baby — stacked seven high. The monk wakes and names them. They are all him.
BuddhistKarmaImmortal
The Man in the Coin-Hole
财戒
A stranger at the City God temple plants a copper cash in the courtyard and makes it grow to the size of a wheel. Inside the square hole is a palace full of musicians and dancing girls. A rogue crawls in after them, and the hole closes on his waist.
SatireMagicMorality
The Geomancer's Bones
地师身后劫
A boy picking wild flowers breaks the bones in a pauper's grave, and the dead man — a famous fengshui master — comes to take his life. The City God has one question for him: you sold good burial sites for a living, so why could you not find one for yourself?
GhostJusticeUnderworld
The Dream He Invented
况太守祠赝梦
He sleeps a whole night at Prefect Kuang's shrine and dreams nothing, so he invents a magnificent one: the great judge rising to bow to him as his future superior. Years later he gets it — playing him on stage, in the opera about him.
DreamsSatireOfficialdom
The God Who Covers Eyes
遮眼神
The weavers keep a little god whose whole job is to hide things from view. One night he is hired, for a thousand gold, to go and cover the eyes of the examiners. It goes badly: somebody at that hall is holding up a mirror.
SatireSmall GodsOfficialdom
The Litigation Writers
讼师说讼
A father and son who write lawsuits for hire are dragged before Yama, who asks them how they do it. They explain, at length and with examples. He gouges out the father's eyes and cuts off the son's arms. It makes no difference at all.
SatireJusticeUnderworld
The Ghost Brothel
鬼嫖
The inn is full, so the candidate sleeps in the village and walks into a waste garden where an old bawd is calling customers. Inside the mat-shed, every traveller lies with a beauty. He is the only one who can see what they actually are.
GhostSatireHorror
The Gods Who Gambled
神赌
Two gods in the same temple compound gamble through the night for tallies. The loser stakes his wife — who points out, in front of everyone, that she is the one who bought him his post in the first place.
Small GodsSatireGambling
The Man Who Bound Tigers
壮夫缚虎
Jiao Qi kills tigers with his hands and carries them home over his shoulders. At a banquet given in his honour a cat jumps on the table. He breaks every dish on it, smashes the window, and catches nothing — and the host laughs.
MartialSatire
The Book Written by Caterpillars
虫书
A girl who was too clever to live dies at sixteen and is buried under a plane tree. Then green caterpillars come and eat characters into the leaves — and what they write is a guidebook to the land of the dead.
GhostUnderworldPoetry
The Farewell Feast
恶饯
A wandering fighting-master marries into a family that turns out to be bandits. When he asks to leave, his wife explains the house rule: the farewell feast is fought for. Four doorways, four relatives, and a grandmother with an iron crutch.
MartialSatireTransformation
The Mirror That Showed His Gall
镜戏
A scholar who can see a man's gallbladder comes to visit a fellow famous for his courage. He is very impressed — until the noise starts in the women's quarters, and the gallbladder begins to shrink.
SatireInstrumentTransformation
The Son Who Cost a Fortune
道人神相
A Daoist tells the richest man in the county that his new son will enter the Hanlin — and that this is very bad news. Talent and money, he explains, destroy each other. Every word of it comes true.
JusticeSatireFate
The Wine That Was Not Wine
酒戒
A tavern-keeper's best customer turns out to be the willow-spirit of Lü Dongbin, who has been sneaking out to buy wine behind his master's back. Then he is caught, gutted, and read a recipe for the only wine that is not poison.
ImmortalSatireTaoist
The Osmanthus With No Scent
臭桂
A stunted, stinking osmanthus tree stands outside the county offices. A passing Daoist names it: that is the seventh tree of the moon. Eight hundred years ago the Money God picked it up, and it has not smelled since.
ImmortalSatireTransformation
The Turtle Who Taught a Fortune-Teller
龟鉴
The most successful physiognomist in the province is asked for his secret. He points at a turtle crawling across the courtyard: everything I know, he says, I learned from that. Then he itemises it, technique by technique.
SatireOfficialdomTrickster
The Ant's Patent of Nobility
蚁封
A broker asks a wit to cast his son's horoscope and is told the boy will be very great and that he himself will be ennobled. He spends twenty years believing it, while the wit quietly builds him an entire ministry made of insects.
SatireOfficialdomTrickster
The Otter's Offering
獭祭
An otter and a hawk compare methods on a riverbank. The otter explains why he never takes a whole shoal — and then the hawk takes one chance too many, and the otter holds a funeral for him.
SatireAnimalTrickster
Thorn Country
荆棘里
A son walking to Guangdong to find the father he has never met strays into a country of thorns, where men in official dress blunder about bleeding and do not notice. An old man offers him directions. They are not the directions you expect.
OtherworldDreamsTaoist
The Tomb Called Gratitude
达士报恩
A village schoolmaster is accused of stealing a chicken. He swears his innocence before Lord Guan and trips on the threshold in front of everyone. Twenty years later, as a censor, he finds out who was really sitting on the god's seat.
DeityJusticeSatire
The Bride Who Cast Her Coat
命中姻眷
A fortune-teller tells a young man his fate is to marry a beast. He is outraged. Then the apes come down the cliff, and he is carried up in a sedan to a father-in-law who knew his father.
TransformationAnimalLove
The Warrant That Sank the Boat
三趙失舟
Three imperial clansmen are rowing home when something takes the tiller and capsizes them in a stream too shallow to drown in. A helpful farmer sends them to an exorcist, the exorcist summons the culprit — and the culprit turns out to be the farmer, with a warrant from the City God in his pocket.
JusticeSmall GodsOfficialdom
The Wife Who Died Every Afternoon
張次山妻
A widower meets his dead concubine in the crowd at a temple fair, and she tells him where his wife is living. He goes, and watches: every afternoon a purple-robed dignitary arrives with a full escort, the escort turns into demons, and his wife is beheaded and quartered. Then she gets up and it starts again.
GhostUnderworldJustice
The Log in the Bed
大善寺白衣人
A young man supervising building work ignores every rule about which direction you may dig in. He falls ill, and a nine-foot stranger in an old white coat comes to tell him he is under sentence of death — and then stays to tell him how to cheat it.
DeityFateMagic
The Tomb at the Drill Ground
建康太和古墓
A cavalry commander wants a mound on the drill ground levelled because it spoils the polo — and because he has ideas about what is inside it. The woman buried there comes and asks him not to. He does it anyway, and takes several thousand ounces of gold. What follows is not a curse.
GhostJusticeOfficialdom
The Bamboo That Gathered Treasure
海山異竹
A Wenzhou sea captain is blown off course to an island of bamboo that touches the clouds. He cuts ten poles for punt-poles, and an old man in white tells him to leave at once and points him home. He uses nine of them. The last one is worth five thousand strings of cash — and he only finds out when the foreign buyers start beating their chests at the sight of his mast.
MarvelsMoneyImmortal
The Red Snake in the Road
李氏紅蛇
A young wife looks too long at a red snake coiled in the garden path and comes home changed — sometimes dressed for a party with flowers in her hair, sometimes walking naked down the high street. The village exorcist does not argue with her. He walks on broken crockery, stands on red-hot brick, and puts his head in a cauldron.
PossessionMonsterMagic
The Crab With the Dipper on Its Back
龍溪巨蟹
Fifty days without rain. Three hundred villagers walk out at first cockcrow with banners, gongs and a written petition, and file it with a well. Something comes up: a crab with claws like shears, eyes like bullets, and seven stars on its shell arranged like the Dipper.
DeityMonsterAnimal
A Lifetime's Salary
郭大夫
A man is handed a few hundred cash and a few pints of rice in a dream and told: this is your allowance for one lifetime. He looks at it, puts it down, and stops living. He divorces his wife, refuses office for fifteen years, and dies the evening before payday.
FateOfficialdomMoney
The Wizard Who Could Somersault
張妖巫
A village wizard has a sideline: pay him, or he turns cartwheels outside your gate and your family comes out in sores. A county magistrate has him brought in, and asks one question: you say you know the future — what am I holding in my hand?
OfficialdomSatireMagic
The Ghost-Seer of Genshan Gate
潘見鬼理冥
A maidservant has been dead twenty-two years when her old mistress falls ill with dropsy. A medium called Pan the Ghost-Seer looks into a handkerchief laid on a lamp and sees a woman and a cat standing together. Then he files a writ with the City God to have the ghost committed — and the ghost comes back for the man who delivered it.
GhostJusticeSmall Gods
The Tiger at the Fireside
武昌客舍虎
A family of four are sitting round the brazier one winter night when a tiger walks in, sits down beside the fire, and stays. Nobody moves. Nobody even puts more wood on without thinking about it. At dawn it gets up and leaves; and the neighbour who came to borrow a light dies of it.
AnimalMonsterHorror
The Woman Who Followed Him Home
黔縣道上婦人
A hired porter walking home over the Qian county road meets a woman who says her husband beats her and her mother-in-law is worse, and offers to marry him. He says no, for excellent reasons. By evening she is already in his room at the inn.
GhostLoveHorror
The Woman With the Cat
陽臺虎精
On an empty post road a woman of about forty keeps pace with galloping horses, carrying a small tabby cat. Months later a crowd of thousands drags her before the prefect for stealing pigs and children. She picks up the brush and writes her own statement — and it is the most uncomfortable document in the collection.
MonsterWomenTransformation
Shaggy-Head
蓬頭小鬼
A guest wakes by the fire in a mountain monastery and finds a three-foot thing with a great mop of hair sitting facing him. He runs out. The abbot strolls over, takes one look and says: what harm? It's only Shaggy-Head.
MonsterTricksterHorror
The One-Legged Ghost of Kuaiji
會稽獨脚鬼
Rice keeps vanishing from the steamer, a third at a time, and the maid is beaten for it. Then someone sees the thief: it hops on one leg. And in a neighbour's back room there is a very handsome shrine containing nothing but a painting of one enormous foot.
Small GodsMonsterSatire
The Taoist Who Came to Supper
蜀中道人
A mother in Chengdu feeds one wandering Taoist a day and never asks where he comes from. One of them asks where her son is, walks into the granary to look at him, and says: within ten years the empire will be in chaos and this man will hold the armies. Thirty years later he walks in again, unchanged, with three lines of advice.
ImmortalTaoistFate
The Hundred Meat Pies
王武功妻
A monk wants his neighbour's wife. He does not write her a letter; he sends a hundred meat pies with a gold coin baked into every one, addressed politely to the household, on the day her husband leaves for his post. The husband opens the box himself.
JusticeWomenOfficialdom
One Pear a Day
茅山道士
The best doctor in Yangzhou says: your heat is at its extreme, your blood and breath are all but burnt away, and in three years you will die of a tumour on the back. Nothing can be done. So the patient puts on a servant's coat and goes to Maoshan to carry firewood.
TaoistHealerImmortal
The Three Warriors
姜處恭
A traveller shares his cooling medicine and his wine with three soldiers at a roadside lodge. They repay him with a display of sword-play, and remark that tomorrow there will not be a cash in the purse. He does not sleep. At dawn they scrape their knives along his window-sill a dozen times and go.
OutlawMonsterHorror
The Lay Brother Who Became a Pig
寶積行者
A monk's lay brother steals one row of a market gardener's plot. The gardener's wife cannot get satisfaction in court, so she looks up at the sky and names a price: one string, two hundred cash — and you can pay me back as an animal. He is a pig for a year, and the butcher pays exactly one string two hundred.
KarmaTransformationMonster
The Clerk Who Died Twice
臨安吏高生
Two petty embezzlers are beaten in the county jail. The deputy takes pity, breaks them out, and reports them dead. The magistrate is relieved — until two naked figures appear at his bedside and demand that he come down below and give evidence. The cure is a piece of information. And then Hong Mai adds what other people said.
GhostOfficialdomJustice
The Daughter of Zhang the Ten-Thousand
張十萬女
A man too rich to run slaughters oxen and brews wine and goes out to meet the bandit army on the road. It works for months. Then the bandit chief sees his daughter through the blind and says: I have spared your whole household and you still grudge me one girl.
OutlawGhostWomen
The Wet Nurse's Relics
李氏乳媪
She was a bought wet nurse, fierce and foul-mouthed, and the family left her behind when her mistress married because she never stopped scolding. When she is cremated the pyre smells of lotus and the ashes are full of little golden figures that look like seated children. Nobody can account for it, until somebody remembers what she did every morning for twenty-six years.
BuddhistWomenKarma
The Candle-Flowers
小樓燭花詞
The only story in this collection where Hong Mai is a character in it. It is 1145, he has just walked out of the hardest examination in the empire, and he and four friends end up drinking in a courtesan's upstairs room where both candles have burst into flower. She lays five sheets of paper on the table.
PoetryFateMarvels
The Woman of the Black Pine Valley
王二
A hunter loses his way and meets a naked young woman smiling at him from a stream. He knows at once she is not human, and shouts the question anyway: are you a ghost or a sprite? She never answers. She takes him home, feeds him fruit, and twenty years later she is still living in his house beside his human wife.
LoveMonsterTransformation
The Fifth Young Lord
五郎君
A man too poor and too drunk to keep his beautiful wife loses her to a young god who visits at midnight and pays in silk. He is furious — and then he does the arithmetic, casts an image of the god in gold, and worships it. When the authorities finally jail the couple, the god breaks open the prison and burns the government offices to the ground.
DeitySatireOfficialdom
The House in the Cypress Wood
呂使君宅
A soldier loses his way and finds a mansion in a cypress wood with fine horses at the gate. The widow who owns it is nearly forty, keeps a dozen maids, and presses him to stay — and it is he who refuses, on the grounds that a rough soldier is no match for such a woman. She argues him into it. Then he meets her elder sister.
GhostLoveMoney
Paper and Brush in the Coffin
方禹寃
Beaten to death by a neighbourhood bully, a government clerk makes his family promise one thing: do not sue. Do not let them examine my body. Put paper and a brush in the coffin instead — I will take it up with Heaven myself. Months later, at midday, he comes back down the road with two officers behind him.
JusticeGhostOfficialdom
The Father-in-Law With the Iron Ruler
張鮎魚
A pot broker drowns himself over a tax debt and comes back seven years later with a runner in a yellow coat and a grudge against his son-in-law. In broad daylight, in a tavern, in front of two constables who cannot see that anyone is dead. The runner refuses to make the arrest: he has no warrant from the Lord of Mount Tai.
GhostJusticeSmall Gods
The Wine Pressed From Bone Marrow
衛師囘
A clever, lazy drunkard of forty falls asleep under the window at a drinking party and dreams his own vice has invaded as a foreign army. Reduced to a starving refugee, his only thought is for a cup of wine. His friends know a place. The girl who pours it is weeping, and she can tell him why.
DreamsBuddhistUnderworld
Seventy Days of Thunder
胡煌僕
A servant who has never drawn his wages in twenty-eight years takes his master by the sleeve and says: you are going to die, badly, by lightning, in the county market, in seventy days. The master guesses back wages, then adultery. He is wrong. On the day, the sky is cloudless — and the servant stacks the furniture and borrows a monk's robe.
DeityFateJustice
The Nine Young Dragons
九龍廟
A pottery family runs ten kilns. One makes perfect ware. The other nine turn out nothing but warped, crooked rubbish — which sells faster than anything else in the market. The potter asks the dragon in his dream what kind of help that is, and gets an answer that explains a great deal about Chinese gods.
DeityMoneySatire
The Wildcat Wife
茶僕崔三
A tea-shop servant opens the barred door to a weeping young wife who says her mother-in-law has thrown her out. She sleeps in the corner, then doesn't. A year later his hunter brother comes to visit, and she stops coming — and the brother wants to know why.
MonsterLoveMoney
The Widow Who Came to File Suit
衢州少婦
Something strokes his face in the night and he dresses, thinking it is dawn. At the drum tower the watch turns out to be the third. There is a lamp burning in the Hall of Welcoming Spring, and a girl of eighteen standing against a pillar with her own lantern, who asks him: have you come to file a plaint?
Fox SpiritLoveOfficialdom
Stabbing the Spring
周狗師
A village shaman named for his habit of eating dog meat has a rain-making technique nobody else has: he thrusts paper money into a spring on the end of a bamboo pole. He also makes his clients list their names and exact acreage in a petition. Then it rains — on those fields. Not the ones across the ditch.
MagicSmall GodsMoney
Twelve Years and Little Red
小紅琴
A Daoist in a dream hands him his own zither and shows him eight characters carved inside the sound-hole: in the twelfth year, the matter rests with Little Red. He writes it down and forgets it. Twelve years later he buys a chess-playing maidservant — and asks her what she used to be called.
FateDreamsPoetry
The Collar of Wood and Iron
木箍颈
In Manchuria a hunter wears a board round his neck, braced with iron. He explains why: he and his brother met a man three feet tall in the open country who would not answer when spoken to, and only blew at their horses. His neck is now several feet long.
MonsterTransformationMarvels
The True Judge Bao and the False
真龙图变假龙图
A magistrate who models himself on Bao Zheng finds a rotting corpse in a well and tortures a confession out of an adulterous couple, to public acclaim. A year later the husband walks back into town from Sichuan and stops to watch the opera they are performing about his own murder.
JusticeSatireOfficialdom
Summoned as a Witness
梦乞儿煮狗
A tutor dreams he watches beggars cook a stolen dog, and a man in official dress is beaten to death for complaining. Three days later a runner from the City God serves him with a summons: the dead man has filed suit, and the witness list has his name on it. He dies on the date given. His friend is late because there is an opera on at the temple.
DreamsJusticeGhost
The Judge Answers Questions
判官答问
A scholar is a magistrate in the underworld by night and an ordinary man by day, so friends keep asking him to look up their life-spans. He explains why he cannot: the dead have no register unless you are in a case. Epidemics are examined separately — and men of standing are entered on a different list entirely.
UnderworldOfficialdomFate
The Man From Before Pangu
盘古以前天
When Mount Tiantai collapses it washes a coffin out of the sand, pointed at the head and broad at the foot, made of wood that sank before the world was made. Inside is a man whose skin has the grain of wood. He opens his eyes, looks up, and asks what the blue thing is. They tell him: it is the sky.
MarvelsDreamsImmortal
The Case of the Bound Feet
裹足作俑之报
A virtuous Hangzhou scholar is invited down to the underworld to take over from Yang Jisheng, who is being promoted. Before he can decline there is a case on the desk: the last emperor of the Southern Tang, who once bound a dancer's feet into the shape of a new moon. Several hundred thousand footless women have assembled at the Gate of Heaven demanding justice.
JusticeUnderworldSatire
Intercession in the Underworld
赵文华在阴司说情
A man and a serving-maid are dragged before the court of the dead and confess. The sentence is about to be pronounced when a card comes in: Minister Zhao Wenhua is here. The judge rises, goes out, and comes back with the charge reduced by three degrees. The family has no idea why a Ming minister should be shielding them.
JusticeUnderworldSatire
The God Nobody Could Name
毁陈友谅庙
Arriving at a new post, a magistrate is told there is one more temple he must burn incense at. Nobody knows what god is in it. He searches the gazetteer: not listed. So he puts an iron chain round the statue's neck and pulls. Then he writes to the Celestial Masters to ask who it was.
DeitySmall GodsOfficialdom
The Register of the Unranked
秀民册
A candidate dreams he is allowed to consult the registers of the examination system. Not in the list of top three. Not in the list of presented scholars. Not in the list of recommendees. Not in the list of classicists and fine talents either. He is about to smash the books when a clerk says: there is one more.
FateDreamsSatire
The Ghost Who Sued an Actor
冤鬼戏台告状
A company is performing The Judge Bao Breaks the Earthenware Pot when a bleeding ghost kneels in front of the actor playing Bao Zheng and holds out a plaint. The magistrate's solution is to send the actor back on stage in costume and have the ghost follow him to the yamen.
JusticeGhostOfficialdom
The Eye on Its Back
奇鬼眼生背上
Three men spend the night in a haunted government hostel in Chengdu. The thing that climbs the stairs has a head but no face. The scholar strikes it with his sword and it backs off, turns, and runs — and there is an eye set vertically into its back, a foot long, shooting gold light. It cannot hurt the general, and it never finds out why.
MonsterHorrorGhost
When the Stones Spoke
石言
Reading in an old temple on Wuyi Mountain, a scholar watches the stones of the steps stand up and become men. The window paper and the tree leaves become their clothes; the roof tiles become their hats. They say they are from the Han and the Wei, and two of the old ones are from the Qin. They talk, they fence in the moonlight, and then they tell him they are leaving to be born again overseas.
MonsterImmortalTransformation
The Corpse Who Rose for Silver
僵尸贪财受累
A tutor is lodged for one night in a newly bought house. Looking out, he sees a red-tinged flame coming out of a white coffin and remembers a story about a coffin full of gold and silver. He breaks it open. What rises up after him is a corpse with a string of ingots over its shoulder — and the ingots, not the man, are what it is really after.
MonsterGhostMoney
The Earth God Who Told
雷击土地
A dead friend has been posted as the local earth god, and he tells the magistrate that his mother is down to be struck by lightning. There is one way out, he says: make her spend out her whole allotment of food and clothing at ten times the rate, so that she dies of it first. The magistrate does it. Then the thunder comes anyway.
Small GodsDeityFate
The Temple That Ran on Poison
鸩人取香火
A Daoist raises money, builds a temple and puts up a statue. On consecration day a ruffian insults the god in front of the whole crowd — and drops dead with blood from all seven openings. The incense trade booms and the priest grows rich. A year later his accomplices fall out over the money.
DeitySmall GodsSatire
Where Ghosts Do Not Call
鬼怕冷淡
Luo Pin, the painter, said he could see ghosts — and that every evening the roads were full of them. They are a few feet shorter than a man, mostly formless, gathering where the houses are warm and busy, like herds following water and grass. In poor, cold, scattered households they hardly come at all.
GhostMoneySatire
The Spirit Who Played the Father
怪诈人父
A spirit takes a fancy to a schoolmaster's maid, moves in, and demands board. When the household tries to sell the house to be rid of him, he meets the buyer at the door in the shape of the schoolmaster's long-dead father and warns him off in the name of filial law.
TricksterMonsterSatire
The Coffin He Rode Home
借棺为车
A Shaanxi manager asks leave to go home and is refused. If I died, he says, would you let me go then? The cloth merchant laughs and promises: if you die, I will carry you home myself, three thousand li and all. Five years later the manager collects on it — in a coffin.
TricksterMoneyFate
Four Meetings With the Year God
遇太岁煞神祸福各异
Four separate encounters with the same class of being. A man beats the Year God with a stick and passes his examination. A family digs one out of the ground while sinking a well and the head of the house dies. A red-faced god with three knives goes into a mourning house. A paper slip appears in a man's cap with one character on it.
Small GodsDeityFate
The Voice in the Bamboo Tube
江秀才寄话
Jiang Yong of Wuyuan, the great scholar of evidential learning, blew up a pig's bladder to show that the earth floats like a yolk. He ploughed with wooden oxen and rode a wooden donkey. He built a bamboo tube that carried your voice a thousand li. Then one day he threw himself into the water.
MarvelsInstrumentMagic
The Falling Star in the Southern Dipper
飞星入南斗
A circuit intendant who knows astronomy sees a guest-star fall into the Southern Dipper. The omen-book says he will die within the month unless he performs the counter-charm, which shifts the calamity onto someone else. He performs it. A young protégé of his dies instead. Yuan Mei asks him the obvious question.
DeityFateDivination
The Man Who Remembered His First Wife
曹能始记前生
Riding over a mountain pass, a newly made official finds the whole landscape familiar. In the town below, a woman is keeping the thirtieth anniversary of her husband's death — on the exact day of the official's own birth. He points out the rooms, the paths, and the study where he left a manuscript unfinished.
TransformationLovePoetry
Under the Soapberry Trees
皂荚下二鬼
A soapberry orchard earns good money, so father and son guard it at night. Something with tousled hair comes up out of the ground. Then a thief arrives during the watch, is frightened off the property by a headless man, and both burials are dug up and burned.
GhostMonsterHorror
The Ghost Sealed in the Prison
鬼受禁
A magistrate slaps his wife; she hangs herself and comes back to haunt him. He has a Daoist seal her into a side room with a talisman and the official seal. When his successor moves in and opens the door, she asks for one thing: a sealed dispatch, and two dead runners to escort her down the road.
GhostOfficialdomUnderworld
The Bone of Arrogance
吕仙宝
A young scholar of some reputation lodges in a shrine of Lü Dongbin and apologises to the god for the noise of his studying. The god comes in person — as a plain Daoist — and offers him a book of examination answers. The scholar refuses it with contempt. So the immortal takes out a sword, cuts into the back of his head, and pulls out a bone.
ImmortalSatireTaoist
The Clay Puppet
泥傀儡
There is a small ugly god in a temple at Liuzhou whose arms stay inside its sleeves when the prefect is honest, and stretch out begging when he is not. A magistrate tries to push them back in by night. Next morning they are five inches further out, and the fingers will not be opened.
Small GodsDeityOfficialdom
The Tortoise Under the Stele
石赑屃
Two brothers look at the stone tortoise carrying the stele in the academy courtyard, mistake it for a common turtle, and mock it for its ugly shape. That night, at their mother's birthday party, the actor playing Fan Kuai walks off the script holding a cleaver and demands a hearing.
MonsterDeityJustice
The Man Who Caught the Flies
术士驱蝇
A guest lodges for six months at a prefect's yamen, ugly, barely literate, saying nothing to anybody. On the day he leaves he offers one demonstration: he catches a million flies out of the air with two chopsticks and puts them in his sleeve. Then he opens the sleeve and lets them go.
MarvelsMagicOfficialdom
The Slaughter She Dreamed Through
眼前杀报
A magistrate's family has abstained from taking life for generations; his wife has not. On her birthday she orders a feast of pigs, sheep, chickens, ducks and one golden carp. That afternoon, asleep behind a closed door, she is butchered in turn — in the body of every animal on the menu, and last of all in the carp, whose flesh is minced into fish balls for her own supper.
KarmaDreamsBuddhist
The Boat of the Fish Basket
大士慈航
A young widow keeps her vow, eats no meat and prays daily to Guanyin. A fisherwoman leaves a basket behind. When the flood comes and ten thousand households go under, the basket swells to thirty arm-spans and carries her to a shore of purple bamboo — where the Bodhisattva enrolls her in a register and makes her keeper of the basket.
BuddhistDeityWomen
The Girl Who Read Faces
屏角相郎
A poor girl of Jiangyin reads faces for a living, and reads her own: her fortune is to be a widow for thirty years. So when a talented painter comes to ask for her, she takes him — because his face says he will die young, and the two short fates fit together. They are happy for less than a month.
FateWomenPoetry
A Funeral Oration for the Bookworms
祭蠹文
Bookworms have ruined half the volumes in a great library, so the master has them hunted out and killed. That night the whole tower wails until dawn. The author, sleeping in a neighbouring studio, sits down and writes the worms a proper funeral oration — a mock elegy that is also a verdict on everyone who eats books for a living.
SatirePoetryTransformation
The Ox Who Bought a Leopard's Spots
兽谱
An upstart hires an official to help him forge a family tree. The official tells him instead about an ox with a load of cash who wanted to be adopted by a noble clan. The qilin refused him, the lion drove him off, and the leopard took him in — for exactly as long as the money stayed glued to his hide.
SatireMoneyAnimal
The Monk Who Lent Him a Body
和尚婆心
A handsome, destitute scholar asks a mad monk for the secret of wealth. The secret, says the monk, is to stop being so fond of your own life. The scholar falls ill, wakes up in the body of a rich man who has just died, spends a fortune by day and a harem by night — and then looks in a mirror.
TransformationBuddhistMoney
Top of the List by Accident
泄气生员
A dull-witted candidate named Xia Qitong is told by a diviner that he will come first. He does — because a minister happened to break wind while the new examiner was asking him for instructions, and the examiner, hearing 下气通, wrote the name down as 夏器通.
OfficialdomSatireFate
The Soldier Who Kept His Word
营卒守义
A poor garrison soldier is betrothed to a maid who is pockmarked, bald from ringworm and already middle-aged. He rises to be a commander, comes home, and marries her anyway — and the black pill he was given years ago by a physiognomist has one effect he was never told about.
LoveFateWomen
The Swordsman Who Came for the Judge
姚端恪公遇剑仙
A condemned murderer's family pays a hundred thousand in gold to the Minister of Justice's brother. That night a man with a dagger drops out of the rafters of the minister's study and offers him a choice. The minister points at his own throat and says: take it. The assassin does not.
JusticeSwordOfficialdom
The Pagoda of Ghosts
鬼宝塔
A cloth merchant takes the haunted rooms because the inn is full. At moonrise twelve beautiful women flicker through the yard, climb onto one another's shoulders into an acrobat's tower, and then all put nooses round their necks and hang their tongues out a foot long. The merchant watches the whole performance and tells them what he thinks of it.
GhostTricksterHorror
The Coffin Lid That Flew
棺盖飞
A brave man wagers a night alone in a house nobody will buy, on account of the thing that lives in the back garden. At midnight a small grey-faced ghost leads him into the shrubbery, a coffin lid comes spinning out of the air like a windmill, and it presses him to the ground until the cockerel crows.
HorrorGhostTalisman
Boiling the Ghost in Oil
油瓶烹鬼
A party of friends out on the lake at midnight goes looking for the ghosts under the hill, armed with a borrowed fishing net. What the net brings up is a foot of rotten wood, which bleeds when it is sawn. They buy a bottle of lamp oil, boil it, and drop the pieces in.
GhostMagicHorror
The Country Without Doors
无门国
A sea-trader blown off course comes to an island where the houses are towers and every family lives stacked by generation — great-grandfather at the top, grandson at the bottom. There are doorways everywhere and not a single door. Nobody steals. The day is counted as two days, a man of ten is a boy of five, and the penal code is a mirror.
OtherworldMarvelsJustice
The Ghost Who Followed Him Through Three Lives
吴髯
A salt merchant's son on his way to be married into a magistrate's family is met on the river by a woman who has been looking for him for three lifetimes. She takes a seat at his wedding and a place at his table. Ten years later she means to have his life — so he hires himself out to the City God.
GhostJusticeLove
Master Crane Stillness
鹤静先生
A planchette spirit joins a Hangzhou poetry circle and is wonderfully useful — he dates the rain, he stops fevers, he matches the rhyme for wild goose sixty times over. Ask him about great matters and the brush simply lies still. Asked to show himself, he hangs himself from an archway on Solitary Hill.
GhostPoetryDivination
Two Tales of Corpse Fragrance
尸香二则
Two wrongful deaths, two graves, one strange fact. A smell comes off the dead that cannot be hidden and cannot be drowned out with filth and dead animals, and it walks out into the street until an official has to follow it back. In the second case, once the wrong is redressed, the bodies that had kept fourteen months finally rot.
GhostJusticeWomen
Lord Qiu Becomes a Water God
裘文达公为水神
A dying minister tells his family he is the river god at Swallow Rock and is going back to his post — and leaves them a way to check. Draw the third lot of the highest grade at the temple of Lord Guan and he keeps the appointment; draw anything else and he has been demoted. They draw it. Yuan Mei, wind-bound at the rock years later, writes a poem on the wall and gets a fair wind.
DeitySmall GodsPoetry
The Major Who Carried His Head
捧头司马
A traveller puts up in a ruined Shaanxi temple and chooses the room with a door into the sealed hall. At the full of the moon an official in court dress comes out and sits down in the moonlight without a head — then fetches it, sets it on his knee, and carefully wipes its eyes. The temple-keeper knows who he is.
GhostOfficialdomHorror
The Folding Immortal
折叠仙
A man of the Hu Pass shuts himself in a locked house, gives up rice and then vegetables and then water, and lives on one jug of lake water a month — taken in through the door, answered by a note pasted on the lid. He survives on a spoonful a day for a hundred and twenty years, and his own teacher was carried about folded up like a paper figure in an embroidered box.
ImmortalTaoistTransformation
The Iron Pill of the King of Hell
阎王升殿先吞铁丸
An honest official of the Board of Punishments serves as King of Hell every night, and before he can hear a single case he must swallow an iron pellet forged by God — because God does not trust a human magistrate not to bend the law. The pellet is also what stops him helping his own cousin.
UnderworldJusticeOfficialdom
The Ghost-Masters of Guangxi
广西鬼师
In Guangxi the exorcist can cure a dying man — by handing his lamp-flame to the sleeping soul of a neighbour, who takes the death instead. The Chen and Lai families have grown rich on it. The countermeasure is to stand with both feet flat on the earth.
GhostTricksterHorror
The Scale of Merit
神秤
A revenue clerk is hauled before a green-faced judge of the dead, and his life's record is literally weighed — red slips for good deeds, black for bad, thrown into a scale with golden stars. His whole life comes up wanting. Then one red dossier goes in and outweighs everything.
JusticeUnderworldMoney
Yan Hui Judges for His Master
颜渊为先师判狱
A Hangzhou scholar dies of dysentery and wakes in heaven's courtroom, where his case is referred down to the Confucian temple — and the two disciples of Confucius who judge him are Yan Hui and Zifu Jingbo. He is sent home to mend his ways in five years. His cousin's testimony tells us what he did to deserve the trial, and why the five years were never going to be enough.
UnderworldJusticeGhost
The Gods Know No Textual Criticism
神仙不解考据
A planchette spirit impresses all of Henan by summoning Han Yu and Su Shi on demand — until a scholar asks it to explain a discrepancy between its own epitaph and the Tang geography treatise. The spirit promises to check with Ouyang Xiu in person. It never comes back.
ImmortalSatireScholar
The Pavilion of the Great Turtle
鼋壳亭
A giant softshell turtle snatches an official's favorite concubine from the boat window at Zhenjiang. The official spends a hundred gold pieces, four water buffalo and a stone roller to haul the monster ashore — and builds a pavilion out of its shell, which stands by the road outside the Chaoyang Gate to this day.
MonsterWaterRevenge
The Tiger Who Carried Off Wenchang's Head
虎衔文昌头
A bride dies of heat on the road, revives in her coffin, and is murdered a second time — by the novice whose master revived her, so he can keep her. A year later a tiger jumps into the Wenchang shrine and carries off the god's clay head, leaving three tiger cubs behind. That is how the whole village, including the girl's parents, finally finds her.
TigerJusticeMurder
The Chicken-Footed People
鸡脚人
A Fujian merchant's junk is sucked down a whirlpool into a harbor that lies below the sea, where castaway sailors farm rich fields and wait years for the one leap-year day when the water rises level with the ocean. In the hills across the creek live naked giants, ten feet tall, with the legs of cattle and the feet of chickens.
StrangeOceanMonster
The Rite of the Whole Bones
道家有全骨法
A tea merchant digs up the graves under Dragon Well and scatters the bones — male skulls on female shoulders, old legs on young bodies. The ghosts come wailing in four dialects, led by a general dead a thousand years, and Buddhism is no use: only the Taoists have the rite that makes broken bones whole again.
GhostTaoistDeity
The Wronged Ghosts Mistook Their Man
冤鬼错认
Walking home at night, a rice-shop clerk meets an acquaintance hurrying to Suzhou between two strangers — and the acquaintance, who is at that moment dying, gasps out a warning: at the little bridge by the Chaowang Temple, do not say your name is Yang. The ghosts waiting under the bridge get the surname right and the man wrong.
GhostRevengeStrange
The Planchette Showed the Questions
乩仙示题
Examination candidates beg the planchette spirit to leak the paper. It writes two characters — 'Don't know' — and when they laugh at its ignorance, writes again: 'Don't know, don't know, and again don't know.' That year's question was on the Analects verse about not knowing the Mandate. Twice.
PlanchetteExaminationTrickster
The Fox's Elixir
狐丹
A fox possesses a farmer's wife in Changzhou and runs a fortune-telling practice through her — reading petitions burned to ash by spitting up its own red elixir-pearl like a mirror, and pinching the woman's finger-joints to make her memorize verses she cannot even read. Then a scholar comes asking to exchange poems, and the fox sets a couplet he cannot match.
Fox SpiritMagicPoetry
Thunder Strikes the Pickpockets
雷打扒手
A silk-seller's bundle is stolen, the magistrate dismisses his complaint, and in one rage-filled evening he kicks his small son dead, drowns himself, and his sick wife throws herself from the tower. Three days later a thunderstorm kills three men at the dead family's door — the pickpocket, the blackmailer, and the barber who fenced the silk, who wakes to tell the whole story.
ThunderJusticeTragedy
The Thunder God Answers a Memo
雷州雷神
Guilin has had no rain for months, so the prefect does what a prefect does: he writes an official memo to the Thunder God and sends a courier five hundred li to file it. The god replies on the memo, in writing, with a date and a gratuity — and the courier spends the tip on the road home.
ThunderDeityOfficialdom
The Debt the Temple God Collected
資聖土地
A clerk borrows ten strings of cash from a monastery to marry off his son and never pays it back. Twenty years later, dying, he can see the abbot standing in his bedroom — sent by the temple's god to collect — and the only settlement left is paper money burned at the bedside. Then the procession moves on to the next man's house.
Small GodsMoneyJustice
The Seven Ladies
七姑子
The Seven Ladies are mountain spirits with shrines all over Jiangxi and Fujian, and their images are seven women. One morning in Lin'an, the household women walk out of the gate, buy bean-milk from the seller, and promise to bring the money. The gatekeeper finds the bowl of bean-milk sitting on the incense table in their shrine.
Small GodsTricksterStrange
The Land God of Jianju Abbey
簡寂觀土地
A generous man dies and is appointed earth god of a Taoist abbey. A year later he comes to his father in a dream with a complaint: the roof leaks, the rain runs down his face, his whole body is soaked, and nobody repairs the shrine. His father and his son dream it separately, compare notes, go and look — and rebuild it.
Small GodsDeityJustice
Lu Dongbin Tests a Hermit
陳待制
A disgraced statesman retreats to a hut on Mount Mao and gives his one coin to a beggar in a leaf coat, who doubles it, vanishes, and reveals himself as Lu Dongbin: you have the temperament, but you have done nothing for anyone. Thirty years later, after the man has been talked back into office, he cannot work a single miracle — and dies by falling into his own brazier.
ImmortalTaoistCultivation
The Goddess Who Bought the Woods
林夫人廟
A timber merchant offers a tenth of the asking price for a stand of trees and is laughed out of the yard. That night a storm fells the whole grove, the money is found stacked in the courtyard, and every remaining trunk has three characters cut into the bark. A rich man who gives too little cannot get his cash out of his own gate.
Small GodsDeityMoney
Listening for the Omen
婆惜響卜
On the night the results go up, a candidate goes to the bridge to listen for an omen and hears a woman on the riverbank shrieking an angry curse: 'Posi, you'll get it!' His friends groan. He is delighted — Posi is his own childhood name. The servant arrives with the news before the wine is poured.
ExaminationScholarFate
The Boys Who Chased Butterflies
李氏二童
Two serving boys chasing butterflies on Mount Magu wander into a valley and meet a Taoist carrying his own headscarf, who sets them to make tea, panics at their names being called, and throws a lump of silver after them as they run. They spend it in the market for a year before anyone asks where it came from.
ImmortalTaoistMountain
Axu in the Underworld
阿徐入冥
A farmer's wife dies and is summoned to the underworld court to answer a charge of seizing her nephew's inheritance. Nobody in the room expects much from an illiterate old woman who has kept vegetarian and chanted Buddha for thirty years — least of all the bailiffs, who had to drag her there. She wins the case on the facts, and is still flogged on the way out.
UnderworldJusticeWomen
Cai Zhengniang
蔡箏娘
A scholar is conducted into a palace inside a cliff and given wine by the daughter of an immortal, who tells him he has the stuff of an immortal but that the Controller of Fate will not let him hold high office, in case he falls. He writes ten poems on the spot. The next night a messenger returns the poems — corrected.
ImmortalPoetryScholar
The Bronze Bell of Fuzhou
復州銅磬
Fishermen drag an ancient bronze chime-stone out of a lake. Washed clean, it lights up through flesh and bone and will not stop turning. They beat it with an oar and it rings to the clouds; they pack it with rotten fish and it turns still. So they throw it back. Next spring the monks find it — and where the fish touched it, it is dark.
StrangeObjectLake
Qiuding in the Underworld
丘鼎入冥
A scholar is hauled to the underworld court to answer a charge from a woman he knew in his youth, and he never gets to speak: something at his shoulder argues the case for him and wins. Then he reads over a clerk's shoulder a summons list with his brother's name on it, and the officer asks him for a tip.
UnderworldJusticeKarma
The Ghost Who Bought a Son
鬼買兒
A dead first wife, jealous of her own embroidered jacket, possesses the second wife to get it burned. Then she stays on — running the household each morning, choosing her own grave, and finally bargaining for three thousand paper coins to buy the family a son to keep her sacrifices fed.
GhostFamilyMarriage
The Lake God Who Guarded a Corpse
湖神守屍
When the scholar-chancellor He Fengsheng chose the lake rather than capture by the rebel Zhang Xianzhong, a god kept his body from the water for a hundred and seventy days, and told a fisherman in a dream exactly which corpse to pull up.
DeityLoyaltyLake
The Thunder God and His Fire Sword
雷神火劍
Two servants and a boatman see a golden-armoured god on a stage that no one else can see; then the thunder takes all three. The one who revives describes a palace of silver bricks, a throne, and a sword of red light run clean through the others' throats and chests.
ThunderDeityDeath
The Ghost Who Brought Dumplings
鬼送湯圓
A dead pupil returns on the eve of the Qixi festival with a bowl of hot dumplings for his old tutor, who eats three before realising the boy has been in the grave a year. The ghost gone, the house fills with a hundred hungry ghosts — until the right old monk is invited.
GhostDevotionFeast
The Chaste Girl Who Cried Injustice
貞女訴冤
A prefect is about to rubber-stamp a county verdict — a girl dead by her own hand, ruled consensual adultery. A wind rises in his secretary's room and a silent woman stands. His son hears her: she died resisting rape, and her parents took bribes to call it willing.
GhostJusticeWronged
Not Every God Was Virtuous
成神不必賢人
A beheaded grave-robber rides to the capital as a ghost to collect a bribe a ministry clerk never honoured. The clerk is cured only by paying real silver. Then the ghost, at a village opera, fights and unseats the incumbent Guan Yu — and takes the god's place.
DeitySatireImpostor
The Girl Ghost Who Filed Suits
女鬼告狀
A handsome young merchant is possessed by a chaste girl who declares she has filed nineteen suits against him with the City God and now, approved by the Eastern Peak, will take him. He is bound, dies, and returns describing a midnight trial where the girl is slapped and cangued for a false accusation born of unrequited love.
GhostJusticeCourt
The Headless Stone Men of Waxie
瓦屑廟石人無頭
By Tai Lake stands a small temple where more than twenty stone men sit with their heads chopped off and lying on the ground, some still clutched in their hands. One story says they fought for the warlord Zhang Shicheng; another says villagers knocked their heads off with hoes.
DeityStatueWar
The Wooden Dog That Barked
木犬能吠
A guest in the capital is nearly bitten by a lion-furred dog that roars from the gate — until the host laughs and explains it is wood inside, with a hidden mechanism. Then he produces a wooden cock that crows the dawn.
ObjectCurioCraft
The Bronze Actors of Romance of the West Chamber
銅人演西廂
In 1764 the West sent eighteen bronze actors a foot tall who perform the whole of Romance of the West Chamber — clockwork innards, a key and lock per scene, who dress themselves and bow like the living, and lie down in their chest when done. They cannot sing.
ObjectCurioTheatre
Two Tales of Jealous Ghosts
鬼妒二則
Two dead girls who died of consumption come back to claim their bridegrooms. One is scolded off her own portrait by the prefect's strict lady; the other stabs a fishwife's heart and is only silenced when the younger sister marries in, knife in hand.
GhostJealousyLove
The Goddess of the Favourable Winds
天妃神
Commissioned to install the king of the Ryukyu, the academician Zhou Huang is blown into the Black Ocean that none survive. Ten thousand red lanterns appear on the water, a beautiful lady with a high coiffure directs the air, and the boat is hauled out. He returns and builds her a temple.
DeitySeaStorm
The Earth God Who Bargained for the Children
孝義坊土地
A malaria-stricken old man hides under the City God's seat and overhears a heavenly roll-call: the gods are to loose a plague ward by ward. One Earth God pleads that his ward is full of good people. The City God relents — but only on one condition.
Small GodsPlagueOfficialdom
The Thunder That Chose Its Victims
贑州雷
A farewell feast is broken up when fireballs fill the courtyard — and the guests, quoting Confucius, decide it is no night to carouse. By dusk the thunder has taken three men, all of them petty clerks, and left three vermilion seal-characters burned into one corpse.
ThunderJusticeOfficialdom
The Ghostly Battle on the Sandbar
景德鎮鬼鬬
A fisherman takes shelter from a sudden cold wind and watches a hundred tattooed warriors divide into two armies on the sandbar and fight. The losers turn into cattle and swim away. That year the plague spares only the village on the winning side.
GhostPlagueSmall Gods
The Judge of the West Lake
西湖判官
A three-foot crab caught at a city gate turns out, in a dream, to be the Judge of the West Lake — an underworld official begging not to be boiled. The general wakes too late: his sons have already eaten it, and the curse falls on the household.
UnderworldJusticeAnimal
The Timber the Storm Delivered
峽州泰山廟
A ruined Mount Tai temple needs rebuilding, but the timber grows too far from the river to haul. One stormy night, a thousand logs float down from fifty miles away and stop, of their own accord, just outside the city wall — already barked, already sorted, already cut to fit.
Small GodsDeityMarvels
The Perfected Man of Fuling
富陵朱真人
A scholar dreams he is told he was once the Perfected Man of Fuling and is destined to be prime minister. He believes it, and writes a poem to mark it. Hong Mai, unimpressed, appends the man's actual career: a persecutor of hundreds, whose line ended in execution and exile.
ImmortalDreamsSatire
The Monk Ghost of Yunmen
雲門僧鬼
A monk hanged himself at a temple in the Mayuan valley. Left alone one night, the caretaker hears a knock, looks up, and sees the dead monk enter with his tongue hanging to the floor. A lacquer-worker, it turns out, has seen him too — night after night, calling for his disciple.
GhostBuddhistHorror
The Green-Furred Turtle
呂氏綠毛龜
A tame turtle comes when its keeper taps the water at noon and eats pork from the rod. When a child breaks the routine and keeps it overnight, it will not come out again — and starves rather than eat. Hong Mai adds three more turtles that are not as they seem.
AnimalMarvelsTransformation
The Qin Stand and the Chess Table
琴臺棋桌
When a corrupt eunuch's estate is confiscated, an official buys two marvels: a qin stand cut from stone that bears a living landscape, and a chess table of aloeswood and gold. A scholar warns him that the poor exam-candidates next door resent such wealth. Hong Mai notes the eunuch's crimes went unpunished.
ObjectOfficialdomSatire
The Torturer and the Life-Taking Ghost
蔡乙兇報
An orphan hired into a prison becomes a torturer so cruel the town calls him the life-taking ghost. Past forty, a voice calls his name at midnight; he is found hung upside down, bleeding from every orifice, and spends a year begging for death — lowing like an ox before he dies.
GhostJusticeKarma
The God Who Borrowed Two Horses
石城廟神
A flood wrecks the City God's shrine, and in the rebuild the two guardian horses are forgotten. A month later the magistrate dreams of a purple-robed clerk: the Great King needs to borrow two fine steeds. The magistrate pays for them himself — and the next drought breaks the moment he prays.
Small GodsDeityMarvels
The Ghost Who Came Home
籌洋村鬼
A woodcutter meets a dead neighbor on the path; the ghost asks him to tell his mother to leave food at the door, because he lives on just as before. After his death his widow remarried and her sons were beaten — so the ghost waits on the ridge and beats the stepfather bloody.
GhostFamilyJustice
The Ox That Bore His Name
常珤牛
A dissolute stepson robs his dead benefactor and dies mid-bellow, lowing like a beast. That night the household ox drops a calf with a hoof on its back and two vermilion characters — his name — branded on its flank.
RebirthKarmaFilial Piety
The Physician Who Burned With Aconite
張文寶
A military healer who did not know his craft pours a massive dose of aconite into a feverish young soldier. The soldier dies cursing him — and three days later, from the reopened grave, names his killer.
Wrongful DeathSoul's ReturnMedicine
The General Who Punched a Ghost
孫儔擊鬼
A bold retired general is told a thing crouches by his kitchen stove each night, hair wild, face unreadable. He goes to look — and recognizes a dead man's discarded soul. One punch, and it is gone.
GhostCourageHun and Po
The Girl Claimed by the Neighbor Shrine
張承事女
A pious girl falls into a trance; a traveling exorcist is routed by whatever speaks through her. A nap by a bridge shows him the truth: the god of the neighbor's shrine wants her for a wife, and her parents once promised her.
PossessionSmall GodsMarriage
The Scholar Who Returned From the Court of Death
蔣良輔
A failed exam candidate dies in 1183 and comes back halfway through the funeral to report: he was hauled to the court of the dead, left standing in the courtyard because the King of Hell had not yet come to session — and given a brief furlough he will not survive.
Near-DeathUnderworldFengdu
The Brother Who Traded a Sickness
李夢旦兄弟
In 1195 a family is swept by pestilence; only the younger brother is spared, because in a dream the gods had already assigned the elder's five days of sickness to him. He bargains his way out — and learns the underworld keeps a transfer desk.
PlagueUnderworldFengdu
The Four Generals and the River Dragon
陽武四將軍
A Yellow River dike fails again and again. A diver is sent down with a sword to kill the dragon sleeping in the deep — and returns with the monster's head, a settled river, and a godhead of his own.
DragonRiver GodSacrifice
The Water People of Dingtao
定陶水族
A Jin magistrate dreams of a green-robed envoy pleading for his kind, the water creatures his subjects net and eat. He forbids the fishing. That spring the river answers with a monster six or seven zhang long.
DragonRiver GodMercy
The Wife Taken by the Lake Dragon
諸暨陸生妻
A pregnant woman vanishes from a locked room; her husband finds her in the lake, holding a newborn he says a young man fathered. The village suspects a dragon dreamt her into bearing its child.
DragonChildbirthMarriage
The Flood That Rose From the Well
清塘發洪
In 1195, after seven days of rain, a village courtyard sprouts pinpoint fountains. The family thinks it is pooled water — until two great holes erupt and the flood takes everything. The wise say the dragons rode the water.
DragonFloodOmens
The Sorcerer and the Seaside Shrine
金山廟巫
A coastal shrine to a Han general lends invisible troops to a founding warlord. A skeptic mocks the priest mid-rite — and drops, foaming, seized and consigned to Fengdu, until the god decides the joke was joke enough.
Small GodsSorcererFengdu
The Wife Summoned From the Other Side
項明妻
A widower hires a traveling medium to call back his dead wife. She comes — invisible to him, visible to their grown daughter — moves back in, takes offerings, builds a paper house, and slowly shrinks to nothing.
Ghost WifeMediumMarriage
The Temple of the Traitor's Lackey
黑衣太仆
At a county festival a god is carried past on a sedan chair, and the golden placards name him 'Grand Steward of the Chancellor's House'. A young scholar asks who he is — and discovers the whole town is worshipping a tyrant's doorkeeper, and asking him for heavier bribes.
Small GodsSatireOfficialdom
The God of Books Who Took Revenge
书神作祟
A family of scholars gives up books for trade. That night something sighs by the bed — and a scholar in a square cap appears to say he is the God of Books, homeless in this house, and that the money now binding him will bring disaster. The merchant's answer is to burn him.
Small GodsSatireScholars
The Vet Who Treated the Dead
病鬼延医
A cow-doctor who found fame by treating a rich man's asthma with veterinary methods is invited out at noon by a servant. He arrives in a hall full of yellow-faced, bone-thin patients — and recognises every one of them as someone he once failed to cure.
UnderworldComedyFengdu
The Ghost Who Shrank Before a Soldier
正士驱邪
A martial scholar takes shelter in a ruined temple, and a ghost walks in and begins to grow. But as it grows, so does he — to three zhang above it. The ghost drops to its knees and explains the arithmetic: every man's spirit is ten zhang tall, and each bad deed shortens it by a foot.
GhostCultivationMorality
The Ghost Tutor of Broom Village
扫帚村钝秀才
A rich man cannot choose a teacher for his son, until a voice in a dream tells him to go to Broom Village in Wu commandery and ask for a certain licentiate. The old man who comes is strict, brilliant, and — as he explains at the farewell banquet — has been dead for three years.
GhostExaminationsKarma
The Lotus Immortal Who Tested a Son
芙蓉城香姑子
A young man who dreams of an immortal's love fishes a petal from the lake with a poem on it, and is led to a city of lotus. The immortal who receives him will share his bed but never his body — and when his mother's letter arrives, the test he has been failing all along finally comes due.
ImmortalsFilial PietyTemptation
The Poets Through the Wall
隔牖谈诗
A young poet quarrels with Shen Qifeng over the lineage of verse and storms out. Alone by the lamp, Shen hears a laugh in the dark — and is harangued at length on four-character and seven-character poetry by the dead of a ruined garden.
GhostPoetryScholars
The Oracle Slips of General Bu's Temple
卜将军庙灵签
At nine years old Shen Qifeng prays at General Bu's temple and draws a slip that promises his 'old universe' back at mid-autumn. Thirty years later he works out that the prophecy was a word-game on the examiners' names — and that it was right.
Reading the FateOmensSmall Gods
Why the Star-God of Literature Is Blue
奎垣真像
Why is the Star of Literature painted with a blue face and a demon's grin? Because the God of Wealth once lost a lawsuit to the God of Prose, and the Star was sent in wearing a borrowed face and carrying a golden measure.
Reading the FateImmortalsSatire
The Girl With the Lotus Root
有根女
A girl of eleven loses her mother and goes to study in her uncle's library. One night a maid leads in a spirit in purple, who holds out half a sheet of stationery with half a couplet on it — and the girl finishes it without stopping to think.
Monsters and YaoguaiChildrenReincarnation
The Crow That Knew a Man Before His Rise
祥鸦
Everyone says magpies report good news and crows bad, so the author feeds the crows in his courtyard instead. Through three decades of examination failure and one family success, the crows prove to be the only honest omen-bearers in the story — and the magpies arrive last.
Reading the FateOmensAnimals
The Maid Who Caught the Bullets
青衣捕盗
A dismissed official is ambushed in a jujube grove by two bandits, one who fires five pellets at a time and one who shatters stone with an iron staff. The maid his household has spent years beating for failing at needlework steps off the horse and takes them apart with her teeth.
HeroesMarvelsVengeance
No stories match these filters.