In the early years of the Qing dynasty, a failed bureaucrat named Pu Songling (1640–1715) compiled a collection of stories with strange themes in his remote home province of Shandong. Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio featured many kinds of indigenous Chinese spirits and their dealings with human beings. Chief among them were the fox-spirits (hulijing). Mercurial, sexually charged, and often dangerous, these were-vixens preyed upon young men and caused all manner of physical and emotional disorders. Other nameless demons haunted these pages as well. Some lurked on the outskirts of battlefields to devour the corpses of the fallen, while others infiltrated the bodies of their victims, who could hear their voices ringing inside their heads.
Dong Xiasi was a young gentleman who lived in the westernmost part of Qingzhou prefecture. One winter evening, he spread the bedding on his couch, lit a good fire in the brazier and was just trimming his lamp when a friend called by to haul him off for a drink. He bolted his door and off they went.
Among the guests at his friend’s house was a physician well-versed in the arcane art of fortune-telling known as the Tai Su, or Primordial Method, performed by reading the pulse. The physician was demonstrating this skill of his for the benefit of all the guests present, and finally came to Dong and to another friend of his, by the name of Wang Jiusi.
“I have read many pulses in my time,” he pronounced. “But you two gentlemen have the strangest and most contradictory configurations I have ever encountered. One of you shows Long Life, side by side with contraindications of Premature Demise; the other one shows Prosperity, but with contraindications of Poverty. Strange indeed! And quite beyond my competence, I fear. Yours, sir,” he said, turning to Dong, “is the more extreme of the two.”
The two men were appalled, and requested some elucidation.
“I fear this has taken me to the very limit of my art. I simply can go no further. I can only beg you both to exercise the utmost caution.”
At first they were greatly distressed by the learned physician’s remarks. But then they reflected on the almost too-carefully worded ambivalence of his prognosis and decided not to pay it undue attention.
Dong returned home late that same night and was exceedingly surprised to find the door of his study standing ajar. He had drunk a great deal, and in his inebriated state he concluded that he must have forgotten to bolt the door earlier that evening. He had after all set off in rather a hurry. In he went and, without bothering to light the lamp, reached under the covers, to feel if there was any warmth left in the bed. His hand encountered the soft skin of a sleeping body, and he withdrew it in some trepidation. Hurriedly lighting the lamp, he beheld a young girl of extraordinary beauty lying there in his bed, and stood for a moment ecstatically contemplating her ethereal features. Then he began to caress her and fondle her body, allowing his hand to stray to her nether regions, where to his great alarm he encountered a long bushy tail. His attempt to effect a speedy escape was cut short by the girl, who was now wide awake and seized hold of him by the arm.
“Where are you going, sir?”
Dong stood there trembling in fear. “Madam Fairy,” he pleaded with her, “I beseech you, have mercy!”
“What have you seen to make you so afraid of me?” said the girl, with a smile.
“It wasn’t your face…” Dong stammered. “It was your tail.”
She laughed. “What tail? You must have made some mistake.”
She guided Dong’s hand down beneath the covers again, drawing it across the firm, smooth flesh of her buttocks, and resting it gently on the tip of her backbone, which this time was indeed quite hairless to the touch.
“See!” she said, smiling more sweetly than ever. “You were just tipsy and letting your imagination run away with you. You really shouldn’t say such unkind things.”
Dong drank in her beauty with his eyes, by now totally spellbound and greatly regretting his initial misgivings—though he still found himself vaguely wondering what she was doing in his room and in his bed. She seemed to divine his thoughts.
“Don’t you remember the girl next door, with the brown hair? It must be ten years now since my family moved away. I was not more than a child then, and you were just a little boy.”
“Ah Suo!” cried Dong as the memory returned to him. “You mean the Zhous’ little girl!”
“That’s right.”
“I do remember you! What a beautiful young lady you have become! But what are you doing here, in my bed?”
“For five long years I was wife to a simpleton. Both my parents-in-law passed away, and then my husband died, leaving me a widow and quite alone in the world. I thought of you, my childhood friend, and came here to seek you out. When I arrived it was already evening, and a moment later your friend called and invited you out, so I looked for a place where I could hide and wait for you to return. You were such a very long time, and I was beginning to shiver with cold, so I crept under your quilt to keep myself warm. You don’t mind, do you?”
Ecstatically Dong stripped off his clothes and climbed under the quilt with her. His subsequent joy can well be imagined.
A month went by, and gradually Dong began to waste away. His family commented on his worsening condition, and expressed their concern, which he dismissed as groundless. But with time his features grew quite haggard and he himself began to take fright. He went to consult the same learned physician, who took his pulses again and declared, “You are clearly bewitched. My earlier prognosis of Premature Demise has been borne out. I fear there is no cure for you.”
Dong burst into tears and refused to leave the physician, who performed acupuncture on his hand and moxibustion on his navel, and gave him certain herbal remedies to take.
“If anything untoward should cross your path, be sure to resist it with all your might.”
Dong went away fearing for his life.
When he reached home, the girl greeted him with sweet smiles and wanted him in bed with her at once. He protested vehemently, “Leave me alone! Can’t you see that I am at death’s door!”
He turned his back on her.
“Do you really think you can still live?” she cried bitterly, shame and anger mingling in her voice.
That night, Dong took his medicine and slept alone, but the moment he closed his eyes in sleep, he dreamed he was making love to the girl again, and when he awoke he found that he had ejaculated in his bed. He grew more afraid than ever, and went in to sleep with his wife, who lit a lamp and kept close watch over him. Still the dreams continued, and yet every time he awoke the girl was nowhere to be seen. A few days later, he began to cough up large quantities of blood, and before long he was dead.
Now some while after this, Wang (the friend whose fortune had also been told on that fateful evening) was sitting in his own study one day when a young girl entered unannounced. He was immediately taken with her beauty, and made love to her without further ado. He asked her who she was and where she was from.
“I am a neighbour of your friend Dong, who was also a dear friend of mine,” she replied. “Poor man! A fox cast a spell on him and he is with us no more! Foxes can cast powerful spells. Young gentlemen in particular, such as you and your friend, should guard against them.”
Wang was deeply moved by her words and loved her all the more. As the days went by, he too began to waste away and his reason started to wander. One night, in a dream, Dong came and spoke to him: “Beware! Your lover is a fox. First she took my life, and now she wants yours. I have already laid charges against her before the courts of the Nether World, hoping to bring some comfort to my wounded spirit. On the night of the seventh day, you must burn some incense outside your room. On no account must you forget these words!”
Wang awoke and marvelled at his strange dream. He decided to speak to the girl.
“I am seriously ill,” he said, “and it may soon be all up with me. It would be advisable for us never to make love again.”
“Do not worry,” she replied. “All is destiny. If you are destined for a long life, then no amount of love-making is going to kill you. And if you are destined to die, no amount of abstinence will save you.”
She sat by him and toyed with him, smiling so sweetly the while that Wang was unable to restrain himself and soon found himself in her arms again. Every time they made love, he was filled with remorse. But he was incapable of resisting her advances.
The evening of the seventh day, he lit sticks of incense and stuck them in his door, but she pulled them out and threw them away. That same night, in a dream, Dong came to him again and reproached him for having failed to act on his advice. The next night, Wang secretly instructed his servants to wait until he was asleep and then to light the incense.
The girl was already in his bed.
“That incense again!” she cried, suddenly waking.
“What incense?” protested Wang, feigning ignorance.
She rose at once, and taking the sticks of incense, broke them into little pieces.
“Who told you to do this?” she said, as she returned to their room.
“My wife,” lied Wang. “She is concerned at my illness, and believes that it can be exorcized.”
The girl paced up and down, greatly perturbed.
One of the servants, meanwhile, seeing that the incense sticks had been extinguished, lit some more.
“Ah!” cried the girl. “Your aura of good luck is too strong for me. I shall have to tell you the truth. Yes, I did hurt your friend, and yes, then I came running after you next. I have done great wrong. I must go to the Nether World now and face your friend in the court of Yama. If you remember your love for me, I beg you, keep my body from harm.”
With these words she climbed slowly from the bed and then promptly lay down and died. When he lit the lamp, he saw the body of a fox on the ground. Fearing it might come to life again, he instructed his servants to skin it and hang up the pelt.
His illness now entered a critical phase. One day, he saw a fox come loping towards him.
“I have been before the court of the Nether World,” said the fox. “Judgement was given against your friend Dong, whose death was reckoned to have been the consequence of his own lust. But I was still found guilty of enchantment. They took away my Golden Elixir, the fruit of all my years of toil. They have sent me back to be reborn. Where is my body?”
“My servants knew no better and skinned it.”
The fox was greatly distressed. “It is true that I drove many men to their death. I deserved to die long ago. But nonetheless, what a heartless man you are!”
She took her leave, sadly, bitterly.
Wang all but died of his illness. But after six months he was restored to health.
During the rebellion led by Yu Qi, men died in countless numbers, mown down like fields of hemp. At this time, a peasant by the name of Li Hualong was trying to find his way home through the hills when he came across a detachment of government troops on a night march. Afraid of being rounded up indiscriminately as a bandit, and seeing nowhere to hide, he lay down in a heap of decapitated corpses, pretending to be dead himself and staying there until long after the troops had passed.
Then suddenly he saw the corpses, for the most part headless and armless, stand up in serried ranks like trees in a forest. One among them, his head still dangling from his shoulders, gasped, “The wild dog is coming! We are done for!”
The others answered in a ragged chorus, “Done for! Done for!”
The next instant, they all tumbled down again and lay there in motionless silence. Li was about to rise to his feet (trembling with fear though he was), when he saw a creature coming towards him, with the head of an animal and the body of a man. As the “wild dog” came nearer, it bent down, sank its teeth into one after another of the heads and sucked out their brains. In terror, Li buried his own head under the nearest corpse. The monster tugged at Li’s shoulder to get at his head, but Li burrowed down still further and succeeded for a while in staying out of its reach, until finally the monster pushed the corpse aside, thus exposing Li’s head.
The terrified Li, groping around desperately on the ground beneath him, grabbed hold of a big stone the size of a bowl and clutched it tightly in his hand. As the creature bent down to bite into him, he heaved himself up and with a great cry smashed the stone into its mouth. The thing made an odd hooting noise like an owl and ran off clutching its face and spitting mouthfuls of blood on to the road. In the blood, Li discovered, when he looked more closely, two fangs, curved and tapering to a sharp point, each one over four inches long. He took them home with him to show his friends, none of whom had any idea what sort of a strange beast it might have been.
In the city of Chang’an there lived a man by the name of Fang Dong, known as a gentleman of considerable accomplishments, while at the same time having a reputation as an unprincipled libertine. If ever a pretty woman caught his eye on the street, he would trail her and do his utmost to seduce her.
The day before the Qing Ming Festival, he happened to be out strolling in the countryside when he saw a small carriage pass by, with red curtains and embroidered blinds. It was followed by a train of servants and horses, including one particular maid on a pony, who struck Fang as being very good-looking. He went closer to get a better view of the girl on the pony and, as he did so, noticed through the slightly parted curtains of the carriage a young lady, about sixteen years old, gorgeously attired and of a beauty such as he had never witnessed in his life. He gazed at her dumbfounded, rooted to the spot, and then proceeded to keep up with the carriage for several miles, now walking slightly ahead, now trailing behind. Finally he heard the young lady command her maid to come to the side of her carriage.
“Let the blinds down, girl! Who does that wild young man think he is, the one who keeps ogling me in that insolent fashion!”
The maid let down the blinds and spoke angrily to Fang. “My lady is the bride of the seventh young lord of Hibiscus Town, and she is on her way to visit her parents. She is no village lass for the likes of you to gawp at!”
So saying, she took a pinch of dust from the ground by the carriage wheel and threw it in his face. Fang was momentarily blinded and could not even open his eyes. He rubbed them, and when finally he did succeed in opening them, carriage and horses, young lady and maid, had all vanished into thin air! He returned home in great perplexity of spirit, all the time aware of a continuing discomfort in his eyes. He asked a friend to lift up his eyelids and take a look inside, and the friend told him that there was a clearly visible film over each of his eyeballs. The next morning, the condition was still more pronounced and there was an unstoppable flow of tears from each eye. The film continued to thicken, and after a few days it was as thick as a copper coin. In addition, a spiral-shaped protuberance began growing from the right eye, which resisted any treatment.
Fang was now totally blind, and his condition filled him with despair and remorse. Hearing that a Buddhist scripture, known as The Sutra of Light, had the power to cure ailments such as his, he acquired a copy and found a person to teach it to him so that he could recite it by heart. For a certain period of time, his physical discomfort and mental perplexity continued unabated, but after a while he began to find a certain peace of mind. Morning and evening, he sat cross-legged chanting the sutra and counting the beads of his rosary, and after a year of this he eventually succeeded in attaining a state of genuine detachment and serenity.
Then one day, out of the blue, he heard a voice, quiet as a fly, coming from within his left eye. This is what it said: “It’s pitch black in here! Unbearable!”
From his right eye came the reply, “Why don’t we go out for a little stroll? It might help us shake off this gloom.”
Then he felt a slight irritation in both nostrils, as if two little creatures were wriggling down his nose. After a while he felt the creatures return and make their way back up his nostrils and into his eye sockets again.
“I hadn’t seen the garden for ages!” said one voice. “Aren’t the Pearl Orchids looking withered!”
Now Fang had always been especially fond of orchids, and cultivated several varieties in his garden, which he had been in the habit of watering himself every day. But ever since losing his sight, he had lost all interest in them and had completely neglected them. Hearing this exchange, he promptly asked his wife why his orchids had been allowed to wither away. She in turn asked him how he even knew this to be the case, since he was blind, whereupon he told her about his strange experience. She went out into the garden, and sure enough, the flowers were quite dead. Greatly intrigued by what her husband had told her, she decided to hide herself in his room and keep watch. It was not long before she saw two little mannikins—neither of them any larger than a bean—emerge from his nose and fly buzzing out of the door. They were soon well out of sight, but were back again in next to no time, flying together up on to his face and in at his nostrils, like a pair of homing bees or ants.
They did the same thing two or three days running. Then Fang heard a voice speak from within his left eye.
“That tunnel is a dreadfully roundabout way of going in and out. Most inconvenient. We really should think of making ourselves a proper doorway.”
“The wall on my side is very thick,” replied the right eye. “It won’t be easy.”
“I’ll try to make an opening on my side,” said the left eye. “Then we can share my door.”
Presently Fang thought he felt a scratching and a splitting in his left eye socket, and an instant later, he could see! He could see everything around him with absolute clarity. Beside himself with delight, he promptly informed his wife, who inspected his eyes afresh and found that in the left eye a minute aperture had appeared in the film, a hole no larger than a cracked peppercorn, through which gleamed the black globe of a pupil. By the next morning, the film in the left eye had disappeared altogether. But the strangest thing of all was that, on careful inspection, there were now two pupils visible in that eye, while the right eye was still obscured by its spiral-shaped growth. Apparently both of the two eye-mannikins, his talking pupils, had now taken up residence in the left eye. So although Fang was still blind in one eye, he could see better with his one good eye than he had ever done with two.
From that day forth, he was a great deal more circumspect in his behaviour, and acquired an impeccable reputation in the district.
A certain gentleman by the name of Wang, from the city of Tai-yuan, was out walking early one morning when a young woman passed him carrying a bundle, hurrying along on her own, though with considerable difficulty. He caught up with her, and saw at once that she was a girl of about sixteen, and very beautiful.
“What are you doing out here all alone at this early hour?” he asked, instantly smitten.
“Why do you bother to ask, since you are only a passer-by and can do nothing to ease my troubles?” was her reply.
“Tell me, what has caused this sorrow of yours? I will do anything I can to help you.”
“My parents were greedy for money,” she replied sadly, “and sold me as a concubine into a rich man’s household. The master’s wife was jealous of me, and she was always screaming at me and beating me, until in the end I could bear it no longer and decided to run away.”
“Where are you going?”
“I am a fugitive. I have no place to go.”
“My own humble abode is not far from here,” said Wang. “I should be honoured if you were to accompany me there.”
She seemed only too pleased at this suggestion and followed him home, Wang carrying her bundle for her. When they arrived, she observed that the house was empty.
“Do you have no family of your own?” she asked.
“This is my private study,” he replied.
“It seems an excellent place to me,” she said. “But I must ask you to keep my presence here a secret and not to breathe a word of it to anyone. My very life depends upon it.”
He swore to this.
That night they slept together, and for several days he kept her hidden in his study without anyone knowing that she was there. Then he decided to confide in his wife, the lady Chen. She feared the consequences if the girl should turn out to have escaped from some influential family, and advised him to send her away. But he paid no heed to her advice.
A few days later, in the marketplace, Wang ran into a Taoist priest, who studied his face with grave concern. “What strange thing have you encountered?”
“Why, nothing!” replied Wang.
“Nothing? Your whole being is wrapped in an evil aura,” insisted the Taoist. “I tell you, you are bewitched!”
Wang protested vehemently that he was speaking the truth.
“Bewitched!” muttered the Taoist, as he went on his way. “Poor fool! Some men blind themselves to the truth even when death is staring them in the face!”
Something in the Taoist’s strange words set Wang wondering, and he began to have serious misgivings about the young woman he had taken in. But he could not bring himself to believe that such a pretty young thing could have cast an evil spell on him. Instead he persuaded himself that the Taoist was making it all up, trying to put the wind up him in the hope of being retained for a costly rite of exorcism. And so he put the matter out of his mind and returned home.
He reached his study to find the outer door barred. He was unable to enter his own home. His suspicions now genuinely aroused, he clambered into the courtyard through a hole in the wall, only to find that the inner door was also closed. Creeping stealthily up to a window, he peeped through and saw the most hideous sight, a green-faced monster, a ghoul with great jagged teeth like a saw, leaning over a human pelt, the skin of an entire human body, spread on the bed—on his bed. The monster had a paintbrush in its hand and was in the process of touching up the skin in lifelike colour. When the painting was done, it threw down the brush, lifted up the skin, shook it out like a cloak and wrapped itself in it—whereupon it was instantly transformed into his pretty young “fugitive” friend.
Wang was absolutely terrified by what he had seen, and crept away on all fours. He went at once in search of the Taoist, but did not know where to find him. He looked for him everywhere and eventually found him out in the fields. Falling on his knees, he begged the priest to save him.
“I can drive her away from you,” said the Taoist. “But I cannot bring myself to take her life. The poor creature must have suffered greatly and is clearly close to finding a substitute and thus ending her torment.”
He gave Wang a fly-whisk and told him to hang it outside his bedroom door, instructing him to come and find him again in the Temple of the Green Emperor.
Wang returned home. This time he did not dare to go into his study, but slept with his wife, hanging the fly-whisk outside their bedroom. Late that night he heard a faint sound at the door, and not having the courage to look himself, he asked his wife to go. It was the “girl.” She had come, but had halted on seeing the fly-whisk and was standing there grinding her teeth. Eventually she went away, only to return after a little while.
“That priest thought to scare me!” she cried. “I’ll never give up! Not now, not when I am so close! Does he think that I’m going to spit it out, when I’m so near to swallowing it!”
She tore down the fly-whisk and ripped it to pieces, then broke down the door and burst into the bedroom. Climbing straight up on to the bed, she tore open Wang’s chest, plucked out his heart and made off with it into the night. Wang’s wife began screaming, and a maid came hurrying with a lamp, to find her master lying dead on the bed, his chest a bloody pulp, and her mistress sobbing in silent horror beside him, incapable of uttering a word.
The next morning, they sent Wang’s younger brother off at once to find the Taoist.
“To think that I took pity on her!” cried the priest angrily. “Clearly that fiend will stop at nothing!”
He followed Wang’s brother back to the house. By now, of course there was no trace of the “girl.” The Taoist gazed around him. “Fortunately she is still close at hand.”
He went on to ask, “Who lives in the house to the south?”
“That is my family compound,” replied Wang’s brother.
“That is where she is now,” said the priest.
Wang’s brother was appalled at the idea and could not bring himself to believe it.
“Has a stranger come to your house today?” asked the priest.
“How would I know?” replied the brother. “I went out first thing to the Temple of the Green Emperor to fetch you. I shall have to go home and ask.”
Presently he returned to report that there had indeed been an old lady. “She called first thing this morning, saying she wanted to work for us. My wife kept her on, and she is still there.”
“That’s the very person we’re looking for!” cried the Taoist. He strode next door immediately with the brother, and took up a stance in the middle of the courtyard, brandishing his wooden sword.
“Come out, evil one!” he cried. “Give me back my fly-whisk!”
The old woman came hurtling out of the building, her face deathly pale, and made a frantic attempt to escape, but the Taoist pursued her and struck her down. As she fell to the ground the human pelt slipped from her, to reveal her as the vile fiend she really was, grovelling on the ground and grunting like a pig. The Taoist swung his wooden sword again and chopped off the monster’s head, whereupon its body was transformed into a thick cloud of smoke hovering above the ground. The Taoist now took out a bottle-gourd, removed the stopper and placed it in the midst of the smoke. With a whooshing sound the smoke was sucked into the gourd, leaving no trace in the courtyard. He replaced the stopper and slipped the gourd back into his bag.
When they examined the pelt, it was complete in every human detail—the eyes, the hands and feet. The Taoist proceeded to roll it up like a scroll (it even made the same sound), placed it in his bag and set off…