THE GOD OF HAIL.

Wang Yuncang: A jinshi graduate of 1595, who fell foul of the notorious eunuch Wei Zhongxian and was dismissed from his official post in 1627. He was from Pu Songling's home town of Zichuan.

20.

THE GOLDEN GOBLET.

Yin Shidan: (152282) Took his jinshi degree in 1547. He rose to be a member of the Grand Secretariat, but was dismissed in 1571.

the Cowherd and the Spinning Maid: Two stars separated by the Milky Way Altair in the constellation Aquila, and Vega in the constellation Lyra. According to Chinese legend, the stars are lovers who can only meet once a year, on the seventh day of the seventh month, when the magpies build a bridge for them across the Milky Way.

21.

GRACE AND PINE.

The Chronicler of the Strange envies Kong less for his beautiful wife Pine than for his close friend Grace. The very sight of such a beautiful friend drives away hunger, the very sound of her voice dispels care. Spiritual communion between a man and a close woman friend of this kind is something superior to the carnal love between man and wife. Modern commentators agree that this is the principal theme of the story. Instead of marrying his hero to Grace, or portraying him as harbouring a grudge because he never can marry her, Pu Songling portrays Kong Xueli as an enlightened friend, reunited at the end with both Grace (whom he continues to love as a friend) and her brother Huangfu. They can all carry on playing chess and drinking wine together from time to time in the garden. It is a poem in praise of platonic friendship.

Feng Zhenluan (1818) marvels at the detailed description of Grace's surgical intervention, which renders the event 'palpable to the reader's eye'. For him she is the principal character in the story. Dan Minglun (1842) envies Kong and Huangfu their excellent study routine (a drinking session every five days, to musical accompaniment), commenting that ordinary drunkards would never be capable of understanding such things.

Kong Xueli: A carefully chosen phrase in the very first sentence describes Kong Xueli yunjie, 'of generous spirit and great refinement'. The old Chinese glosses tend to paraphrase this elusive expression with others that are every bit as hard to pin down, e.g. kuanhou hanyang, 'broad or generous in spirit'. The idea refers at once to aesthetic and ethical self-cultivation, and is picked upon by Dan Minglun (1842) to characterize this whole tale. The man is so, his wife and friends are so, his words and deeds are so, the whole style of writing and subject matter of the tale are so. (One could go further and say that the whole Strange Tales collection is so.) Subtle, contained, cultivated, not showy; poised, poignant, leaving much unsaid for the reader to think about.

Kong's poetic accomplishments would have been nothing out of the ordinary. In 1788, in his General Description of China, the Abbe Grosier wrote: 'The Chinese say of a man of letters that he has the talent of making good verses, almost in the same manner as if one should praise, in Europe, a captain of dragoons, for being an excellent performer on the violin.'

Tiantai... Putuo Temple: The Tiantai range in Zhejiang Province is famous for its Buddhist temples. This one would have been dedicated to the Buddhist 'Goddess of Mercy' Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, whose legendary island home was named Mount Potalaka (abbreviated in Chinese to Putuo).

Jottings from a Distant Realm: An echo of an actual work of the Mongol dynasty, recounting expeditions into fairy realms. Here it is a condensed and elegant way of indicating that Kong has entered an otherworldly (fox-spirit) dimension.

'Bamboo Tears': The ancient sage-ruler Yao nominated as his successor a peasant named Shun, and gave him both his daughters in marriage. At Shun's death these ladies are said to have drowned themselves in the River Xiang, having wept so much that their tears literally 'speckled' the bamboos growing beside their husband's grave.

Speak not of lakes and streams... only clouds for me: I have adapted Herbert Giles's version of these famous lines from a poem by the Tang-dynasty poet Yuan Zhen (779831).

22.

A MOST EXEMPLARY MONK.

Hell: Lu Zhan'en (1825) remarks laconically: 'For the Nine Dark Places of Hell, and for the Mountain of Knives and the Forest of Swords, see Journey to the West.' In its most complete English translation, by Anthony C. Yu (4 vols. (Chicago, 197783)), this wonderful novel of the sixteenth century is about 2,000 pages long! A briefer description of the regions of Hell is to be found in 'The Quest of Mulian', an early Buddhist Transformation Text, rediscovered in the caves of Dunhuang in 1908. See John Minford and Joseph S. M. Lau (eds.), Classical Chinese Literature: An Anthology of Translations (New York and Hong Kong, 2000), I, pp. 1088110.

the Mountain of Knives... Forest of Swords: The Mountain of Knives is a cliff over which sinners are hurled, to land upon the upright points of knives below. The branches of the Forest of Swords are sharp blades which cut and hack all who pass within reach.

gambling and debauchery: Dan Minglun (1842) comments that such behaviour was all too common among monks. The Jesuit Father Le Comte wrote in his Complete History of the Empire of China (London, 1739): 'Some [Buddhist Bonzes or monks] abuse the credulous by their hypocritical pretences, others get money out of them by magical arts, secret thefts, horrible murders, and a thousand detestable abominations which modesty won't let me mention here.'

the Xingfu Monastery: Possibly the establishment of that name situated at Yetoudian, nine miles from Pu Songling's home town of Zichuan.

23.

MAGICAL ARTS.

The Chronicler of the Strange comments: 'How foolish, as I have often said, to spend money on such consultations!... And how appalling for such a man to use the death of others as a way of proving his own powers!' This story figures prominently in the modern collection Stories About Not Being Afraid of Ghosts (Peking, 1961), the purpose of the book being to illustrate Chairman Mao's injunction, 'Do not fear ghosts, bureaucrats, warlords or capitalists!'

the Chongzhen reign: 162843.

fortune-teller: In a note to his Strange Stories Giles writes: The trade of fortune-teller is one of the most flourishing in China. A large majority of the candidates who are unsuccessful at the public examinations devote their energies in this direction; and in every Chinese city there are regular establishments whither the superstitious people repair to consult the oracle on every imaginable subject not to mention hosts of itinerant soothsayers, both in town and in country, whose stock-in-trade consists of a trestle-table, pen, ink, and paper, and a few other mysterious implements of their art. The nature of the response, favourable or otherwise, is determined by an inspection of the year, month, day, and hour at which the applicant was born, taken in combination with other particulars referring to the question at issue.

hexagrams of the Book of Changes: The hexagrams of the Book of Changes, six-line figures composed of solid (Yang) and broken (Yin) lines, in sixty-four combinations, have been used for the purposes of divination or fortune-telling since ancient times. The nineteenth-century missionary Justus Doolittle has left a detailed description: The fortune-tellers first light incense and candles, placing them before the picture of an old man whom they worship as the deity who presides over this form of divination. They then take [three copper coins of the Tang dynasty] and put them in a tortoise-shell, which they shake once or twice before the picture, invoking the aid and presence of the god. They then empty the cash [coins] out, and, taking them in one hand, they strike the shell gently three times with them, still repeating their formulas. The cash are again put into the shell, and shaken as before three times, when they are turned out upon a plate, carefully observing the manner in which they appear after having fallen out upon the plate. After noting how many have the reverse [uninscribed] side upward, the same cash are put into the shell, and a similar operation is repeated once and again. At the conclusion of the third shaking and the third observation of the relative positions of cash, they proceed to compare the diagrams [hexagrams] with the five elements, according to the abstruse and intricate rules of this species of divination.

(Social Life of the Chinese (New York, 1865), pp. 3367) dog's blood: Dog's blood has been used in China for exorcism and for the treatment of demon-possession since earliest times. 'Blood of a dog cures catarrh, fever, mental insanity, visions of spectres and spectre-blows, it averts all demonry. Magicians consider dogs suitable for suppressing ground-demons, and capable of averting any evil spectres whatsoever and sorcery' (de Groot, The Religious System of China, pp. 10089, quoting the sixteenth-century pharmacologist Li Shizhen).

put to death: The Qing-dynasty penal code provided for the execution of sorcerers. 'All persons convicted of writing and editing books of sorcery and magic, or of employing spells and incantations, in order to agitate and influence the minds of the people, shall be beheaded, after remaining in prison the usual period' (Sir George Thomas Staunton (trans.), Ta Tsing Leu Lee: Being the Fundamental Laws and a Selection from the Supplementary Statutes of the Penal Code of China (London, 1810), p. 273).

24.

WILD DOG.

Yu Qi: The Yu Qi uprising in Shandong lasted for much of the first two decades after the Manchu conquest, and was finally suppressed in 1662. Chang and Chang write: Over ten thousand of Yu Qi's followers were said to have been brutally slaughtered. Hundreds of innocent people were rounded up and killed by the Manchu soldiers without any evidence of conspiracy. The bloody fighting and massacres finally ended in the early summer of 1662 as Yu Qi led his surviving force to the sea. But the terror continued... The Manchu authorities continued to search for, arrest, and imprison anyone who was said to have been slightly acquainted with Yu Qi and his followers. Over one hundred leading families of the gentry were arrested and imprisoned. Stories of horror were heard all over the region; a reign of terror darkened eastern Shandong. The ordeal finally came to an end in 1664 by an order from the Kangxi Emperor.

(Redefining History, p. 258, note 12) Pu Songling grew up in Shandong during this period and must have heard many stories of the 'killing fields'. He wrote in another tale: 'So many were killed several hundreds a day the battlefield was soaked in blood and the white bones of corpses were piled up to the sky.'

25.

PAST LIVES.

The Chronicler of the Strange comments: 'If there are princes and noblemen among our animals, it is because there are animals among our princes and noblemen.' (The modern commentator Qiu Shengwei (1991) takes this to mean that many noblemen are brutes, 'beasts in human clothing'.) The Chronicler goes on to exhort his readers to a life of virtue: The man of humble station who leads a virtuous life is like a person who plants a shrub in the hope that it will flower. The man of rank who leads a virtuous life is like a person who cherishes a shrub that has already flowered. In the first case, the shrub will grow and flower; in the second, its flowering will continue for many years. Those who do not lead virtuous lives, who neither plant nor cherish their shrubs, will become horses, they will have to haul salt-carts and wear bridles; or else they will become dogs, they will eat excrement and be cooked up in a casserole; or they will become snakes, they will grow scales and end up in the bellies of their predators, storks and cranes.

Feng Zhenluan (1818) is much impressed by Pu Songling's rare insight into the inner feelings of dogs concerning their own excrement.

Personally I have always liked the famous anecdote told by Xeno-phanes (c. 570c. 480 BC) about that other great believer in reincarnation, Pythagoras (c. 580c. 500 BC). It reads like a Strange Tales miniature.

Once, they say Pythagoras was passing by when a dog was being ill-treated.

'Stop,' he said, 'don't hit it! It is the soul of a friend! I knew it when I heard its voice!'

(Quoted by Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy (London, 1946), P. 59) Soup of Oblivion: This legendary potion for making mortals forget their past lives is administered by an old lady named Mother Meng, who sits upon the Terrace of Oblivion. Perverse spirits may altogether refuse to drink. Then sharp blades start up beneath their feet, and a copper tube is forced down their throats, by which means they are compelled to swallow some. (See Giles, Strange Stories, p. 386, note 2.) the year xinyou: 1621.

26.

FOX IN THE BOTTLE.

As the commentator He Shouqi (1823) observes, 'Smart woman, stupid fox!'