The shanxiao is really more associated with mountains than with our own troll's preferred haunts (caves or subterranean places or the underneaths of bridges). De Groot (The Religious System of China, V, pp. 499ff.) devotes several excellent pages to the various descriptions of this creature, commenting: 'The remote, unfrequented mountain-forests are still to the Chinese people a kingdom full of mysterious spectral beings, strange and wonderful.'

11.

THE HAUNTED HOUSE.

Li Huaxi, President of the Board of Justice: Graduated as a Doctor (jinshi) in 1634, during the reign of the last Ming Emperor Chongzhen (161144), and rose to high office. He did not become President of the Board of Justice until the Manchu dynasty (16441911).

In the seventeenth year... Emperor Kangxi: 1678.

12.

STEALING A PEACH.

The great Moroccan traveller Ibn Batuta (130468) provided an account of some Chinese jugglers at the Mongol court in Hangzhou, an account which tallies so extraordinarily with Pu Songling's tale (minus the peach and the baskets), that it is worth giving here in full.

That same night a juggler, who was one of the Khan's slaves, made his appearance, and the Amir said to him: 'Come and show us some of your marvels.' Upon this he took a wooden ball, with several holes in it, through which long thongs were passed, and, laying hold of one of these, slung it into the air. It went so high that we lost sight of it altogether. (It was the hottest season of the year, and we were outside in the middle of the palace court.) There now remained only a little of the end of a thong in the conjuror's hand, and he desired one of the boys who assisted him to lay hold of it and mount. He did so, climbing by the thong, and we lost sight of him also! The conjuror then called to him three times, but getting no answer, he snatched up a knife as if in a great rage, laid hold of the thong, and disappeared also! By and by he threw down one of the boy's hands, then a foot, then the other hand, and then the other foot, then the trunk, and last of all the head! Then he came down himself, all puffing and panting, and with his clothes all bloody, kissed the ground before the Amir, and said something to him in Chinese. The Amir gave some order in reply, and our friend then took the lad's limbs, laid them together in their places, and gave a kick, when, presto! There was the boy, who got up and stood before us. All this astonished me beyond measure, and I had an attack of palpitation like that which overcame me once before in the presence of the Sultan of India, when he showed me something of the same kind. They gave me a cordial, however, which cured the attack. The Kazi Afkharuddin was next to me, and quoth he, 'Wallah! 'tis my opinion there has been neither going up nor coming down, neither marring nor mending; 'tis all hocus pocus!'

(Henry Yule, The Travels of Marco Polo (New York, 1993), Book I, pp. 31617) It is interesting to compare Ibn Batuta's vivid (even over-written) Arabian Nights-style account with Pu Songling's tale. See also the entertaining study by Peter Lamont, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick (London, 2004).

Spring Festival: Chunjie refers here to the celebrations that took place at the time (normally around 5 February) known as Li Chun, or Establishing the Spring, the first of the twenty-four Solar Terms in the Chinese calendar. It is not the modern chunjie, which refers to the Lunar New Year.

a peach: The fruit of immortality par excellence. Legend places the tree (a Chinese Tree of Life, or axis mundi) bearing these miraculous fruits (which ripened every few thousand years) in the garden of the Queen Mother of the West, somewhere deep in the Kunlun Mountains or some other fabled paradise. In the novel The Journey to the West (attributed to Wu Cheng'en, c. 15001582), the mischievous Monkey famously breaks into the garden and eats the lot.

the White Lotus sect: This millenarian Buddhist sect had its origins in the thirteenth century, and was later active in the overthrow of the Mongol dynasty (12791368). It emerged again in the late Ming when Xu Hongru led an uprising in Shandong (1622). It became a potent anti-Manchu movement during the Qing dynasty, and was brutally suppressed in the late eighteenth century.

13.

GROWING PEARS.

This, one of the best known and most often anthologized and translated of all the Tales, is a greatly expanded variation on a brief item in the much earlier collection In Search of Spirits, attributed to Gan Bao (fl. 320). In the earlier story, the magician is called Xu Guang: Once he was performing his magic arts in the marketplace and begged for a gourd from a vendor, who refused to give him one. So he asked for a flower and planted it in the ground, where it immediately started growing, spreading its tendrils over the ground. First it bore flowers, and then fruits. Xu Guang picked one, ate it, and then began handing the fruits out to the spectators. When the vendor turned to look at his own gourds, they had all disappeared.

(My translation of the extract quoted by Zhu Yixuan, Liaozhai zhiyi ziliao huibian, revised edition (Tianjin, 2002), p. 17. For the complete tale, see Li Qi and Liang Guofu (eds.), Soushenji Soushen houji yizhu (Jilin, 1997), p. 27.) For obvious reasons this tale has always been popular with Marxist commentators, and is placed first in the popular selection made by Yan Weiqing and Zhu Qikai in 1984. It has been published many times in cartoon-strip form.

The Chronicler of the Strange appends one of his most trenchant comments to this tale, sharply reproaching the nouveaux riches for their meanness, for the way they turn a deaf ear to needy friends or relations coming to them with simple requests for loans of food or money. In other words, his target is far broader than the country bumpkin who is made to look such a fool in the tale.

14.

THE TAOIST PRIEST OF MOUNT LAO.

This is another of the most famous and most often anthologized of the Tales. The Chronicler of the Strange, in a strongly worded comment, stresses that he is not only making fun of small-town aficionados of Taoism like Mr Wang but also has a wider target in mind: corruption, pretention and ambition in general, all of them nourished by sycophantic hangers-on with fake recipes for success, which eventually cause them to 'hit the wall'.

Everyone bursts out laughing when they hear this story. They do not realize that the world is full of Mr Wangs. When some highly placed nincompoop proceeds with the greatest pleasure to destroy his health, and rejects the idea of taking true medicine, others are only too ready to come along and suck his boils and lick his piles, feeding his vanity, offering him seductive ways to advance his ambition through violence. They thereby win his favour, claiming, 'This Art will take you forward! Abuse the world with it, and you will encounter no obstacle.' At first the Art seems to work and the nincompoop considers himself to be the greatest man in the universe. The sky is the limit. He only learns the truth when he hits the wall and tumbles.

Mount Lao: An extended range famous for its Taoist temples and hermitages, situated on the Shandong coast some twenty-five miles north-east of the port and resort-city of Qingdao.

Chang E: One of the wives of Yi the Mighty Archer, from whom she stole the Elixir of Immortality given him by the Queen Mother of the West (see note on 'a peach' to Tale 12, 'Stealing a Peach'). For this she was banished to the moon.

'Rainbow Skirts': The name of a dance probably performed in feathered costume and almost certainly of Central Asian or Indian origin. It became famous as the dance performed by the ill-fated consort of the Tang Emperor Xuanzong (reigned 71256).

16.

THE SNAKE-CHARMER.

The Chronicler of the Strange comments that the snake, although merely a dumb creature, is capable of deep feelings of friendship and devotion, listens to his old master's advice and changes his ways. Human beings, by contrast, are all too capable of betraying their oldest and best friends, and of answering well-meant advice with anger and hostility. Feng Zhenluan (1818) expected the story not to be to his taste, but found himself strangely moved by it.

green: Qing is tantalizingly defined in the dictionaries as the colour of nature, a dark neutral tint, green, bluish-green, greenish-blue, blue, grey, black, etc. The precise meaning, the lexicographers tend to say (if precision is intended), must be inferred from the context. See, for example, Herbert Giles, ChineseEnglish Dictionary, 2nd edn (London, 1912); R. H. Mathews' ChineseEnglish Dictionary, American edn (Cambridge, MA, 1943); Lin Yutang, ChineseEnglish Dictionary of Modern Usage (Hong Kong, 1972). When used of bamboo, hemp, peas, plums, moss, grass, olives, dragons, flies and tea, it is green; of the sky, the collar, orchids and porcelain, it is blue; of oxen and foxes, horses, cloth and hair, it is black.

The only snakes I can find that are described as qing all seem to be green: for example the qing-gui she or Bamboo Viper, Trimeresurus gramineus, and the qing-zhu-si, a small, green poisonous snake.

17.

THE WOUNDED PYTHON.

Feng Zhenluan (1818) takes issue with the last comment, as does Qiu Shengwei (1991). For different reasons they both find its simplistic moralizing out of character with what they had expected from Pu Songling.

18.

THE FORNICATING DOG.

This story does not appear in early printed editions of Strange Tales, but is present in the author's manuscript and in early transcriptions. Its absence from the late-nineteenth-century editions explains the lack of an illustration. It is included in both Zhang Youhe's Variorum edition and Zhu Qikai's modern annotated edition (1989).

The Chronicler of the Strange, in his Appended Judgement (on this occasion he actually provides a 'judgement', as opposed to the usual 'comment'), gives a strange extended virtuoso performance in the euphuistic parallel-prose style of which he was a master. (It is longer than, and almost eclipses, the anecdote itself.) In many ways it is similar to his comment at the end of Tale 63, 'Cut Sleeve' (see the note 'Jesting Judgement'). By piling allusion on allusion he succeeds in dwelling graphically on the subject of bestiality, without either passing judgement or being pornographic. It is an extraordinary form of literary bawdy. My version is a free one, and shortened.

Of old Assignations by the River Pu Were frowned upon, Trysts in the Mulberry Grove Were decried.

This merchant's wife had trouble Preserving her chastity, She yearned for Carnal pleasure.

She was a yaksha-demon in bed, A bitch on heat.

Her pet found his way Down the hole, Became her lover Beneath the quilt.

On the Terrace of Clouds and Rain His shaggy tail wagged with vigour; In the Land of Warmth and Tenderness Their slender limbs writhed with abandon...

No law in the Nether World Covers this case.

Should the dog not be torn Limb from limb, And his soul dragged before Yama?

Lingering Death: Lingchi, a process of gradual dismemberment sometimes translated as 'cutting into ten thousand pieces' or 'death by the slow process', was the cruellest and most ignominious of all Chinese punishments. By a series of painful but not in themselves mortal cuts, sometimes lasting over three whole days, the offender's body was sliced beyond recognition. The executioner entered ever deeper into his victim's flesh, taking care to avoid the main arteries and life-supporting organs. The head was subsequently exposed in a cage for a period. It was not abolished until 1905.

The Criminal Code of the Qing dynasty was very specific with regards to adultery when combined with murder: 'If the guilty wife shall contrive with the adulterer to procure the death of her husband, she shall suffer death by Lingering Death, and the adulterer shall be beheaded. If the adulterer kills the husband, without the knowledge or connivance of the wife, she shall suffer death by being strangled.'

19.