35.

THE MERCHANT'S SON.

The commentators are all loud in the boy's praise. He Shouqi (1823) remarks: 'A treasure indeed, this ten-year-old boy of such courage and intelligence!' When the boy goes to spy on the foxes in the garden, Dan Minglun (1842) quotes Sunzi's Art of War (sixth century BC): 'Without entering the tiger's lair, how can one hope to capture the tiger? He is scouting out the disposition of his enemy. "Know the enemy, know yourself, and victory is never in doubt, not in a hundred battles." '

Ho family: Strictly speaking (according to the Hanyu Pinyin system of romanization, the alphabetic system of Chinese words) this family name should be written He, but this syllable is open to misinterpretation in English, especially in a narrative.

white liquor: The fiery Chinese schnapps (baijiu) distilled from one of several cereals, often misleadingly translated as 'white wine'.

Chen Ping: The famous Han-dynasty statesman (d. 178 BC) who helped restore the imperial family of Liu after the Empress Lus usurpation of power. As the Grand Historian Sima Qian comments, Chen 'again and again devised ingenious plans, and found a way out of the most perplexing crises' (Records of the Grand Historian, trans. Burton Watson, 3 vols., revised edn (Hong Kong and New York, 1993), I, p. 128).

37.

A LATTER-DAY BUDDHA.

Qiu Shengwei (1991) describes this vivid little sketch as one of Pu Songling's sharpest satirical pieces, a miniature documentary essay (jishi xiaopin), exposing the attitudes of a corrupt and perverse feudal society, where eccentricity is elevated to the level of sanctity and excrement to the level of enlightenment. Zhang Renrang and Yang Guangmin (in Ma Zhenfang, 1996) are a little more subtle. They connect the mad monk to the 'crazy Zen' trend of the late-Ming period, as exemplified in such extraordinary individuals and champions of free self-expression as Li Zhi (15271602). Despite its absurdity this trend had a 'progressive' dimension, in that it was opposed to Confucian hypocrisy. Pu Songling, as the Chronicler of the Strange, echoes this himself, castigating the behaviour of hypocrites such as Magistrate Nan, who allow their own Confucian temples to fall into disrepair while persecuting 'weirdos' like the mad monk.

Jin Shicheng: The name contains a play on words. The 'mad monk' was, or claimed to be, 'a Living Buddha' (jinshi chengfu).

a dhuta: A Buddhist ascetic or mendicant.

Judge Nan: Nan Zhijie was indeed, according to the local gazetteer, Magistrate of Changshan in 1671.

38.

FOX ENCHANTMENT.

Zhang Renrang and Yang Guangmin (in Ma Zhenfang, 1996) point out the thematic and plot resemblance between this story and 'The Painted Skin'. But whereas in the description of the ghost-seductress and man-killer with the painted skin it is the monster's terrifying, fiendish ugliness that dominates the story, here it is the fatal fox-girl's beauty and sweetly seductive smile.

Tai Su... reading the pulse: This method of fortune-telling, practised by traditional physicians, was based on a sensitive pulse-diagnosis (always of primary importance in Chinese medicine). There are at least three pulse points on each wrist and at least twenty-eight recognizable pulse patterns, from which physicians are trained to diagnose the condition of a patient's internal organs and the patient's overall state of health. It is a relatively short step from pulse palpation to the prediction of a patient's lifespan and prosperity. This particular branch of fortune-telling probably dates back to at least the ninth century.

It wasn't your face... It was your tail: This is a typical Strange Tales use of allusion, the force and humour of which are utterly lost in translation. See p. xvii of the Introduction.

he had ejaculated in his bed: This is one of many tales where the progressive weakening of the male partner is associated with his frequency of ejaculation. One of the prime goals of traditional Chinese sexual practice has always been the conservation of energy, and through the centuries Chinese males have striven to minimize seminal emission, to 'treasure their fluids'. As Douglas Wile puts it, 'Post-coital enervation impressed the ancient Chinese more than any heights achieved through orgasm... Ejaculation brings enervation not relaxation, homeostatic holocaust not emotional catharsis. Detumescence of the penis is consistently analogized in these texts with death... Thus sexual prowess came to be defined not as the ability to expend semen but as the ability to save it' (Art of the Bedchamber: The Chinese Sexual Yoga Classics (Albany, 1992), pp. 57).

Golden Elixir: The Golden Elixir (jindan), which the fox-spirit had been perfecting over the years, is the ultimate goal of the prolonged process of 'nourishment' (caibu) by which these succubi accumulate psychosexual power, feeding on the energies of their partners. Another tale, 'Fox as Vampire', by the eighteenth-century writer Ji Yun, describes the process in a very unadorned manner. Ji Yun's beautiful fox-girl finally confesses to her two worn-out lovers: 'I invented that excuse of mine about the man on the mountain, just to give you five days to rest. I wanted to provide you with a chance to recuperate your strength and produce more sperm for my purposes, so that I could nourish my inner force. Now my secret is out. But since your sperm is all used up anyway and neither of you are of any further use to me, I shall be on my way.' In both stories, Ji Yun's 'Fox as Vampire' and Pu Songling's 'Fox Enchantment', the encounter between fox and human can be read as a figurative representation of the sexual transaction between human lovers, in which the one greedily takes and absorbs the essence of the other in order to accumulate her (sometimes his) own strength and life force. Here Taoist techniques of yogic self-cultivation can be seen to merge with the sexual practices of the Chinese Art of the Bedchamber, in a cynical quest for self-empowerment at the expense of one's partner. Here we have in another guise the 'battle of stealing sexual essences', what the Dutch scholar Robert van Gulik has called the 'cruel sexual vampirism of the Taoist male alchemists' (Erotic Colour Prints of the Ming Period (Tokyo, 1951), p. 11). In this tale, the fox-spirit plays the role of vampire, treating her partners as mere instruments, human cauldrons and crucibles, in her search for the Golden Elixir. This theme recurs many times in the Strange Tales collection, and is developed at greater length in Tale 54, 'Lotus Fragrance'.

40.

THE LAUGHING GIRL.

Qiu Shengwei (1991) waxes lyrical at Pu Songling's description of the beauty and naive spontaneity of this young girl's pure nature, and praises her aspirations for freedom. He goes on to interpret her ultimate 'taming' as daughter-in-law in the Wang household as a tragic capitulation to feudalism. Her calculating destruction of the young man next door is an uncanny trait (yaoqi) inherited from her fox-mother, evidence of Pu Songling's supreme skill as a creator of complex character. Pu Songling himself, as Chronicler of the Strange, suggests a hidden depth of character beneath Yingning's mischievous spontaneity: 'If one considers merely her giggling and silliness, she seems a person without depth. But the nasty trick she plays beneath the wall shows her to be a person of the greatest cunning. And her deep love for her ghost-mother turns her laughter to tears. Beneath our Yingning's laughter lie hidden depths of emotion.' One early manuscript inserts here: 'Our Yingning was not silly at all.'

Judith T. Zeitlin has an ingenious take on the strange twist of the plot, whereby the story invented by Cousin Wu to bring Wang out of his premature decline 'turns out to be true': 'Although the girl proves to be a fox-spirit and the aunt is a ghost, this does not affect the inadvertent truth of the cousin's falsehood. In the fantastic world of Liaozhai, there are no real lies, because a lie comes true as soon as it is believed' (Historian of the Strange, p. 167).

my own cousin... getting married: Marriage between people of the same surname was normally forbidden by law. But a man could marry his cousins on the maternal side.

Year of the Horse: Chinese years are distinguished by the names of twelve animals: rat, ox, tiger, hare, dragon, serpent, horse, sheep, monkey, cock, dog and boar. To the common question 'What is your honourable age?', the reply was frequently 'I was born under the...' And the hearer by a short mental calculation could tell at once how old the speaker was. (See Giles, Strange Stories, p. 69, note 5.) your own niece... Your sister's daughter: Chinese terms of relationship are very specific, unlike our vague terms cousin, uncle and aunt. In Chinese, it is never open to doubt whether a cousin, nephew/ niece, or the cousin's parents (the uncle and aunt) are maternal or paternal, older or younger than the person referred to, etc. When a plot (like this one) depends on the exact nature of the relationship, one has to make it specific, even if to our ears it sounds a little clumsy.

a shadow like a normal living human: Ghosts were not supposed to have shadows, and they had very little appetite.

passionately fond of flowers: The word used here (pi) means obsession, mania, 'a pathological fondness for something'. Judith T. Zeitlin devotes a fascinating chapter of her Historian of the Strange (Chapter 3, 'Obsession') to the historical pedigree of this concept and its rise to prominence in the late Ming as a mode of self-expression and of self-realization. She quotes a passage from the late-Ming poet and essayist Yuan Hongdao (15681610) that perfectly evokes an obsession even more extreme than Yingning's passion for flowers: In antiquity when someone gripped by an obsession for flowers heard tell of a rare blossom, even if it were in a deep valley or in steep mountains, he would not be afraid of stumbling and would go in search of it... When a flower was about to bloom, he would move his pillow and mat and sleep alongside it to observe how the flower would evolve from budding to blooming to fading. Only after it lay withered on the ground would he take his leave... This is what is called a genuine love of flowers; this is what is called genuine connoisseurship.

banksia rose: A fragrant, damask rambling rose producing clusters of small, violet-scented, double white flowers in April and May. The plant was named after the wife of Sir Joseph Banks (17431820), the greatest botanist and plant collector of his time (he travelled with Captain Cook to the Pacific in 1768, and to Iceland in 1772). Banks, as President of the Royal Society, and founder of what became Kew Gardens, was instrumental in introducing to England such Chinese flowering plants as the Yulan magnolia, the japonica, the hydrangea, the wisteria, tree and herbaceous peonies, many varieties of roses, chrysanthemums and camellias, all carried back to London on the tea-clippers of the East India Company. A man after Yuan Hongdao's own heart!

Nine Springs: This has been a term for the Realm of the Dead ever since the Han dynasty.

41.

THE MAGIC SWORD AND THE MAGIC BAG.

When Little Beauty describes her techniques of enchantment, explaining that she uses 'whichever method seems most likely to work at the time', Dan Minglun (1842) comments: 'If a man is subject to lust, she uses her sensual beauty; if he is subject to greed, she uses gold. In reality it is the man who attracts the enchantment, not the demon who inflicts it.' Feng Zhenluan (1818) comments at the very outset of the story that Ning's uprightness and the single-mindedness of his affections (he only loves one woman) are what make him impervious both to the girl's sexual advances and to the lure of gold.

This is one of several tales that refer to the Martial Arts. Tales of the deeds of sword-wielding xia, sometimes translated as knights errant, with lesser or greater supernatural powers, have always been hugely popular with Chinese readers, and in our own times the works of Martial Arts novelists such as Louis Cha (Jin Yong) are best-sellers in Chinese communities all over the world. Cha himself was influenced by Strange Tales, and uses one of them to good effect in his novel The Deer and the Cauldron (3 vols., Oxford University Press, 19972003). The character Wu Liuqi, referred to in the novel as the 'Beggar in the Snow', is taken straight from the tale 'The Mighty General' (Zhang Youhe (1962), p. 220).

Surangama Sutra: A Tantric Buddhist scripture (Lengyan jing) translated into Chinese in 705 by the Indian Paramiti. Karl Ludvig Reichelt writes: 'Parts of this sutra are used every day during the morning mass in the temples. Often long sections are quoted in a phonetic transcription of the Sanskrit texts. These parts are said to be of the greatest importance in order to cleanse the heart for the new day. They work almost like a magic formula' (Truth and Tradition in Chinese Buddhism (Shanghai, 1927), p. 216).

42.

THE DEVOTED MOUSE.

Zhang Duqing: (1642?1716), a poet-friend of Pu Songling's, who like Pu was never appointed to an official position. His ballad, a poem in thirty-six lines, is extant. The contemporary poet and novelist Vikram Seth has retold this tale in verse in his collection Beastly Tales from Here and There (London, 1992).

43.

AN EARTHQUAKE.

Modern commentators note that a massive earthquake took place on 25 July 1668 (which corresponds with Pu Songling's lunar dating), with its epicentre in Shandong. Effects of the quake were felt as far away as the provinces of Jiangsu, Hebei, Henan, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Hubei and Zhejiang. Seismologists estimate that it must have registered 8.5 on the Richter scale.

44.

SNAKE ISLAND.

Dengzhou: Another name for the town of Penglai, where the northern Shandong coast reaches up towards the Liaodong Peninsula and the city of Dalian, across the Gulf of Bohai. Penglai was always a place associated with magic and the gods. Indeed, it was a name for a fabulous Taoist paradise, home of the Eight Immortals, a place where: the houses are made of gold and silver, the birds and animals are all white, and pearl and coral trees grow in profusion. The flowers and seeds all have a sweet flavour, and those who eat them do not grow old or die. There they drink of the fountain of life, and live in ease and pleasure. The Isles are surrounded with water that has no buoyancy, so it is impossible to approach them. They are inhabited only by the immortals who have supernatural powers of transportation.

(See E. T. C. Werner, Dictionary of Chinese Mythology (Shanghai, 1932), p. 372, and Plopper, Chinese Religion Seen through the Proverb, p. 359.) The indispensable Lonely Planet Guide to China (1994 edition) refers to 'the coastal castle of Penglai, a place of the gods often referred to in Chinese mythology, perched on a clifftop overlooking the sea' and to the 'optical illusion' for which Penglai is apparently still famous: 'The last full mirage seen from the castle was in July 1981 when two islands appeared, with roads, trees, buildings, people and vehicles. This phenomenon lasted about 40 minutes.'