Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio: Why Foxes and Ghosts Understand Humanity

Geoffrey Chen

100 Works of World Literature · Article 96

# Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio: Why Foxes and Ghosts Understand Humanity

A scholar lodging in an abandoned temple meets a female ghost ordered to seduce him; she instead asks him to move her bones beyond a demon’s control. A poor family is destroyed because the emperor likes cricket fighting, and a child’s spirit seems to enter an insect that rescues the household. A filial son appeals through the underworld and finds bribery, torture, and delay identical to the living bureaucracy. A man shelters a beautiful woman and discovers that her face is a painted skin worn by a monster.

These narratives share no protagonist and form no novelistic plot. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a world of roughly five hundred classical-language pieces. Some are miniature anomaly records, others elaborate romances, horrors, jokes, or courtroom satires. Foxes, ghosts, flower spirits, dreams, transformations, and rebirth do not merely escape reality. Pu Songling changes the angle of judgement. When a ghost keeps faith, a fox chooses freely, and a cricket bears taxation, the human institution becomes the strangest creature.

The collection is not a simple modern progressive allegory. It gives women intelligence and initiative while often making beauty a male reward; attacks the examination system while allowing degrees to complete stories; sympathises with outsiders and restores order through traditional retribution. Rather than recruiting Pu as a modern born early, read the contradictions through which a repeatedly unsuccessful candidate used classical prose, oral tale, and fantasy to express Qing desire and injustice.

Not a modern book with one fixed count

  • Author: Pu Songling (1640–1715), courtesy names Liuxian and Jianchen, sobriquet Liuquan, from Zichuan in Shandong; a lifelong examination candidate and private teacher.
  • Formation: an initial compilation and preface existed around 1679; collecting, addition, and revision continued for decades.
  • Printing: chiefly circulated in manuscript and copies during Pu’s life; the 1766 Qingketing edition was an important early printing after his death.
  • Count: base texts, appendices, divisions, and attribution produce totals around 490, commonly 491 or 494. No single number should be asserted without an edition.
  • Manuscript: the surviving half of Pu’s fair manuscript contains 237 pieces and supplies essential evidence for wording and order.
  • English: Herbert A. Giles published a major selection in 1880. John Minford’s 2006 Penguin Classics contains 104 tales and is a selection, not the full collection.

Before reading, identify complete text, annotated original, vernacular rendering, or selection. Editorial choice changes the apparent proportions of romance, horror, satire, and morality.

What the title means

Liaozhai is the name of Pu’s studio; zhiyi continues the old genre of recording anomalies, spirits, and strange reports. The title means roughly “records of strange matters from the Liaozhai studio”.

The verb “record” brings documentary posture. Narrators give name, place, witness, and source as if filing evidence, then report a fox wedding or a soul leaving its body.

Factual tone beside impossibility creates the pleasure. We temporarily believe and then decide whether monster or ordinary rule is more absurd.

Why Pu kept sitting examinations

Pu performed brilliantly in early local examinations and remained blocked at higher levels for most of his life. Teaching for income, he knew rural gentry, tutors, candidates, and patrons.

Failure, examiner, composition, and rank are lived experience. The examination controls marriage, income, status, and masculine selfhood through an unknown reader’s judgement.

Pu attacks its blindness while repeatedly imagining fulfilment through success. The contradiction belongs to someone injured within the system, not outside it.

Where the stories came from

The collection absorbs anomaly records, Tang tales, historical biography, oral accounts, local rumour, friends’ reports, and invention. Pu restructures, compresses, adds verse, and comments.

Oral material in classical prose receives literati allusion and judgement. Written tales return through opera, storytelling, film, and television in further transformation.

They are neither transparent ethnography nor fantasy without social voice. They are many voices recreated through one studio.

Classical Chinese: rapid and difficult

Many tales are extraordinarily brief. A sentence can cover years, travel, and marriage. Dense verbs, omitted subjects, allusion, office titles, and wordplay require annotation.

Brevity makes impossibility factual. The narrator does not explain cosmology; a fox arrives and the report continues.

Vernacular translation is an entry, but an annotated parallel original preserves humour, ambiguity, and the voice of “the Historian of the Strange”.

Why foxes matter

In Chinese traditions, foxes transform, cultivate powers, seduce, repay kindness, study, and form households. Pu’s foxes have no single morality: benevolent, harmful, mischievous, devoted.

Transformation destabilises identity. A decorous woman may be vulpine; a proper gentleman may be the greater fraud. Ethics cannot be read from species and appearance.

Fox women let Pu imagine desire, intelligence, and choice unavailable to ordinary secluded women, while that freedom often fulfils the male scholar’s fantasy.

Why ghosts can be more dependable than humans

Ghosts have left property and normal status while retaining burial, revenge, affection, and marriage needs. They rely upon the living and may reward trust.

Officials take bribes, parents trade marriage, scholars betray; a faithful ghost creates contrast. Death does not confer virtue but allows an excluded voice to return.

The ghost story often becomes a suppressed case’s second hearing.

“Nie Xiaoqian”: more than a rescued beauty

Ning Caichen lodges in a temple. Nie Xiaoqian is compelled by a demon to kill through sex or gold. Ning refuses, so she trusts him and asks that her bones be reburied away from the controller.

Yan Chixia resists the supernatural threat. Ning takes the remains home; Xiaoqian enters his household, cares for his mother, and gains a new family identity.

Film adaptations expand martial romance. The tale stresses integrity, burial, admission to family, and a ghost’s active plan for release.

The double edge of Xiaoqian’s ending

She moves from coerced predator to daughter-in-law, wife, and mother. Family provides safety and imposes familiar roles.

This can be self-reconstruction: she identifies trust, escapes control, and practises care. It also asks why a female outsider proves harmless through marriage and childbirth.

The tale enlarges agency and closes it within household order. Both are true.

“Painted Skin”: skin or desire?

Wang Sheng meets a beauty claiming abuse and hides her. A Daoist warns that she is demonic; Wang refuses belief. He later sees a monster spread a painted human skin and put it on.

The demon removes his heart. His wife Chen endures a beggar’s humiliation and swallows his foul expectoration, from which the heart is restored.

“Do not trust beauty” is surface morality. Wang converts a stranger’s account of suffering into possession; his wife pays the entire cost of repairing his desire.

Is “Painted Skin” misogynistic?

The revelation of a monster beneath feminine beauty certainly carries fear of female bodies and sexuality. Reading only “beautiful women are dangerous” erases male action.

Wang is married, hides the stranger, and rejects warning. Visual magic does not remove responsibility.

Chen has extraordinary capacity and fidelity, while her sacrifice normalises a household in which women repair male error. Horror and gender critique should remain together.

“The Cricket”: emperor, bureaucracy, insect

During the Xuande reign, court enthusiasm for cricket fighting becomes a local quota. Each administrative level transfers it until poor Cheng Ming is beaten and ruined for failing to supply an insect.

After divination, his wife helps him find a valuable cricket. Their son accidentally releases it and attempts suicide in terror. A tiny invincible cricket appears, moves upward as tribute, and enriches the family. The child later remembers being the insect.

The emperor does not strike Cheng. An administrative chain converts preference into death at the bottom.

Why the happy ending remains terrible

The family prospers and the son wakes. Yet a child’s life had to become an entertainment commodity before the state compensated them.

No institution changes; the next household remains exposed. Miracle allows one victim into the reward system.

If justice requires transformation into a cricket and imperial pleasure, the order itself is a strange tale.

“Xi Fangping”: bureaucracy after death

Xi Fangping’s father is tortured in the underworld after an enemy bribes officials. The son appeals from office to office and finds collusion, torture, and delay.

He is sawn and burned but refuses to withdraw, eventually reaching a superior authority that corrects the case.

The underworld should provide final justice and duplicates earthly administration. Fantasy extends reality beyond death to show no escape.

Why final vindication is insufficient

The judgement satisfies faith in an incorruptible higher magistrate. Justice depends upon finding one exceptional authority, not reliable procedure.

Officials can injure a complainant at every stage; only impossible endurance reaches the top. Individual vindication proves ordinary process unsafe.

We may enjoy the reversal and ask what happens to petitioners without Xi’s endurance.

“The Literary Examiner”: who can read?

A blind monk judges prose by burning and smelling it, recognising real quality and reacting physically to bad writing.

The absurd gift reflects institutional blindness. The blind man perceives value; the men controlling rank cannot smell it.

Pu turns criticism into bodily comedy and expresses a failed candidate’s rage.

“Scholar Ye”: examination desire beyond death

Scholar Ye writes well and repeatedly fails. Appreciated by an official, he later tutors the patron’s son to success and only upon returning home learns that he had died.

A ghost continues examination education as if the desire for rank outlasts the body. His talent receives only indirect recognition through the student.

The tale condemns neglected talent and still uses examination victory as proof of talent.

“Yingning”: the disappearance of laughter

Wang Zifu meets the laughing Yingning at a festival and follows her to a mountain home. Associated with flowers, laughter, and intelligence, she later enters his family.

Her laughter ignores or resists ritual boundaries. Male voyeurism and harassment lead to death and litigation; discipline follows, and her public laughter recedes.

The natural-girl romance can also show society training an unusual woman to silence an improper bodily voice.

Is Yingning truly naive?

Naivety can look like performance. In dealing with harassment, she may use plants and supernatural power rather than merely suffer.

Narrator and Wang prefer to see a girl who does not understand. Readers should ask what she knows and when she chooses not to explain.

Fox nature is not innocence alone but a refusal to accept all human rules.

“Xiaocui”: apparent madness as protection

Fox woman Xiaocui repays an old debt by marrying into the Wang household; her husband has an intellectual disability. Play and apparent impropriety embarrass the parents while protecting them from political danger.

Observers see etiquette and lack her information. Madness may be strategy an outsider declines to explain.

She repays kindness without surrendering dignity. When trust fails, obligation is not endless obedience.

“The Daoist of Mount Lao”: the wall and the shortcut

A man who desires magic enters Daoist training. The master assigns prolonged woodcutting; he resents the labour and wants wall-passing powers.

After learning a little, he returns to boast, violates the conditions, and strikes the wall.

The joke separates the desired result from the process that makes a person capable of using it—a parable for every instant mastery scheme.

“Planting a Pear”: justice or magical theft?

A Daoist asks a pear vendor for fruit and is refused. A bystander buys one; the Daoist plants its seed, produces a tree instantly, and distributes pears.

The vendor discovers his stock gone and a cart shaft cut for the trunk. The crowd receives wonder and the miser pays.

Retribution is satisfying, while the Daoist’s right to seize property remains questionable. Pu keeps justice and prank unstable.

“The Raksha Country and the Sea Market”

The handsome and talented Ma Ji reaches a country where ugliness is beauty and the most grotesque rise in office. To enter power, he paints himself into locally approved deformity.

At the Dragon King’s sea market, a different evaluative order recognises him and brings marriage to a princess.

Spatial inversion exposes official taste. Standards are not natural truth but mutual confirmation among the powerful.

Why romance so often brings rank

Fox and ghost women finance study, predict examinations, manage houses, and confer wealth. Love restores social recognition to a rejected scholar.

This grants women competence and places supernatural intelligence in service of male status. Reality’s examiner rejects him; fantasy supplies a perfect reader and patron.

Readers can feel the romance and identify the wish to be unconditionally recognised by an extraordinary woman.

Are Pu’s women “liberated”?

Many choose partners, reject betrayal, manage money, avenge, or wield magic beyond contemporary ordinary roles. Outsider status avoids some seclusion.

Beauty, chastity, childbirth, and service to a husband’s household still often determine worth. Some tales accept polygyny or punish female sexuality and jealousy.

The text opens cracks and often stitches them back into household order. Neither “progressive” nor “traditional” is enough.

Scholars as victims and suspects

Failed scholars lack income and official power and receive sympathy. Often only a ghost or fox recognises their writing.

They retain gender and cultural capital, may be lustful, faithless, vain, and entitled to female aid. Wang Sheng is not an innocent target.

Pu speaks through scholars and satirises their appetite and pedantry.

“The Historian of the Strange says”

Some endings introduce the Historian of the Strange, who comments like an annalist, mocks institutions, or offers judgement.

The comment is not always the last interpretive word. It may clarify; it may impose conventional morality upon a more unruly plot.

Separate what the events make us feel from what the explicit comment asks us to decide.

The power and limit of retribution

Villains become animals, corrupt officials suffer, and goodness receives reward. Fantasy swiftly supplies justice absent from reality.

It can individualise structural problems. Punishing one official after death avoids reforming administration; saving one chaste wife by miracle avoids asking why protection requires miracle.

Supernatural justice compensates reality and can preserve it. Pu’s strongest tales leave a barb inside compensation.

Monster or ordinary institution?

The demon in “Painted Skin” is terrifying and can be identified and expelled. Tax quotas in “The Cricket” and purchased justice in “Xi Fangping” are harder because everyone performs one small official step.

A monster has shape; institutional violence disperses among order, target, beating, and appeal.

The lasting horror is not meeting a ghost at night but the daylight moment when everybody calls a rule proper while someone is made an insect or tribute.

Nonhuman ethical subjects

Foxes, snakes, dogs, birds, insects, flowers, paintings, and tools may remember, love, and transform. Moral community expands beyond humans.

This is not identical to modern ecological ethics, but it disturbs human monopoly on subjecthood. A small animal repays care while a greedy human loses human form.

Species boundary becomes ethical question rather than fixed hierarchy.

Violence and gender prejudice

The collection includes forced marriage, sexual deception, torture, suicide, bodily humiliation, and female valuation through beauty. Classical status does not require assent.

Distinguish narrative depiction, character norm, and authorial comment. Do not call every old prejudice irony; do not cancel all complexity with a single modern label.

Criticising a classic keeps its injured figures from remaining mere devices.

Why selections create different books

Fox romances alone make romantic fantasy; “Painted Skin” and companions make horror; “The Cricket” and “Xi Fangping” make political satire.

English and children’s editions select for length, sexuality, and translatability. Penguin’s 104 tales cannot reproduce the proportions of nearly five hundred.

Read contents and translator’s note. Know which Strange Tales you have read.

A thematic reading route

Begin with “Nie Xiaoqian”, “Yingning”, and “Xiaocui”: three female outsiders entering families. Then “The Cricket”, “Xi Fangping”, and “The Literary Examiner”: power, justice, examination.

Read “Painted Skin”, “The Daoist of Mount Lao”, and “Planting a Pear” for desire, discipline, and retribution; then “Raksha Country” and “Scholar Ye” for social valuation.

For each ask: who reports the anomaly, who has information, what does the miracle repair, and what remains unchanged?

Choosing a Chinese edition

A first edition should be complete, clearly punctuated, and annotated for vocabulary, allusion, and office. Vernacular translation is best placed beside, not instead of, the original.

Check story count, base text, and retention of authorial comments. “Accessible”, “selected”, or “young reader” may mean substantial rewriting.

Manuscript facsimiles and the major copied and printed textual lineages can come later; entry need not begin in textual scholarship.

Choosing an English edition

Identify selection or full translation, count, and base text. Giles matters historically but reflects nineteenth-century omission and style. Minford is readable and richly supported but contains 104.

English titles vary greatly. Search with pinyin, character names, and synopsis.

No single English selection replaces the Chinese whole. Selection is a translator’s argument about what most represents Pu.

Why it remains necessary

We still live amid image management, examinations, layered targets, and algorithmic evaluation. “Painted Skin” asks how image hides motive; “Literary Examiner” whether judges understand work; “The Cricket” how an elite preference becomes a bottom-level metric.

Outsider status remains urgent. Who is abnormal, required to prove harmless, and admitted to humanity only by entering a mainstream family or profession?

Pu’s modern force lies less in predicting technology than in allowing the designated monster to judge normal society.

Conclusion: strangeness wears office and ritual

Pu does not build a consistently free fantasy republic. Fox women become proper wives, the underworld awaits a supreme clean judge, and failed scholars often dream of the next examination. His period and position remain visible.

He nevertheless opens nearly five hundred side doors. A cricket exposes how imperial taste ruins a household; a ghost reveals control hidden in burial and marriage; a blind monk exposes the examiner’s blindness. Fantasy reverses scale until the centre looks absurd and the marginal fox or ghost possesses judgement and loyalty.

We need not believe that painted skins exist to read slowly. Real power is skilled at naming its painted skin common sense. Pu lets it fall away for a moment: strangeness sometimes has fangs, sometimes a seal of office, and sometimes the form of a rule nobody dares describe as strange.

Further reading and sources

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