Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 6

by Pu Songling

  A year went by, and when spring was half over, he returned, transporting rare plants from the south. With them, he set up a botanical shop where he proceeded to sell all of his stock in ten days, so he returned to Ma’s courtyard to grow more chrysanthemums. When Ma made inquiries among the flower buyers from the previous year, he discovered that once they planted their bulbs, the results eventually degenerated into inferior flowers, so they were going to try to buy some more from Tao.

  Tao consequently grew richer by the day: in a year he was building new rooms onto his home, and in two years he built a summer house. He initiated the construction work whenever the idea occurred to him, without discussing his plans with his host. Gradually the flower beds of the former days were replaced by verandas and additional buildings. In addition, Tao bought a section of land outside the courtyard’s walls, built a high wall around it, and filled it with chrysanthemums.

  When autumn arrived, he carted off his flowers again, but spring came without him returning. Then Ma’s wife fell ill and died. Ma started thinking about marrying Huangying, so he soon sent someone to determine her disposition towards the possibility. Huangying replied with a little smile, which seemed to indicate that she’d agree to the proposal, but not until Tao came back.

  A year passed, but Tao never returned home. Huangying instructed servants to plant the chrysanthemums, following Tao’s technique. The profits on them were added to their business capital, so Huangying acquired twenty qing of fertile farmland outside the village, and had an even more magnificent mansion built there.

  _________

  Qing: An area equal to 100 mu, or 6.667 hectares.

  A traveler from the coastal areas of southeast China arrived all of a sudden, bearing a letter from Tao, urging Ma to marry his sister. When he looked closely at the date of the letter, it proved to be the very day that Ma’s wife had died; at that moment, Ma recalled that their festivities among the gardens had taken place precisely forty-three months earlier. It seemed really strange to him.

  He showed the letter to Huangying, then asked her “where to send the betrothal gifts.” Huangying replied that she wouldn’t accept anything from him. Then, because she considered his residence too small and inferior, she said she wanted him to move into the mansion on the south side, as if he was marrying into her family. Ma couldn’t bring himself to agree, but he proceeded to select a date for the ceremonial welcoming of the bride into his family.

  After Huangying married Ma, she had a doorway placed in the wall around Ma’s property, so she could walk through it each day to oversee the servants at the Tao mansion. Ma felt it was a disgrace to him for his wife to be so wealthy, so he always reminded her to keep separate financial records for the two households, to guard against any confusion about what belonged to whom. Yet whenever his family needed anything, Huangying always provided it from the southern household.

  In less than six months, there were things from the Tao household all over Ma’s house. The moment he realized this, Ma dispatched servants to take each of the items, one by one, back to where they came from, and admonished Huangying not to bring them back again. But before even ten days had elapsed, things from her household were once again mixed in with his. This proceeded to take place so many times that Ma couldn’t stand all the hassle.

  Huangying laughed, “Do you still think that all of this comes from work not worth doing?” Ma felt ashamed, and no longer pushed the matter, leaving the supervision of the households entirely to Huangying. She assembled workers and managed supplies as more construction sprung up, and Ma was powerless to forbid it.

  After several months, there were adjoined pavilions and halls, and the residences of the two families’ were joined as one, without any boundaries to divide them. Nevertheless, Huangying did as Ma asked by closing their gates to any further chrysanthemum business, though they continued to enjoy financial advantages exceeding even those of aristocratic families. Ma felt uneasy about it all and remarked, “I lived in virtuous purity for thirty years before getting involved with you. Now my entire world consists of just watching and breathing, I do what my wife tells me in order to get my daily meals—there’s really not a breath of manliness left in me. People everywhere else wish for wealth, while I just wish I was poor again!”

  “It’s not like I’m insatiably avaricious,” Huangying replied; “but if we don’t do everything we can to make ourselves rich, then people in a thousand years will still be saying that our ancestor, Tao Yuanming, was poor because he didn’t have what it took to make money, and hasn’t made his mark in the world even after a hundred generations. That’s why we do everything we can so they’ll stop making fun of our family’s Pengze county magistrate. Yet it’s tough for a poor person who wants to become wealthy; but if a rich person wants to become poor, it’s certainly no problem at all. You can throw away the money stashed under your beds if you want—I have no objections.”

  “It just feels wrong to give away someone else’s money,” replied Ma.

  _________

  Tao Yuanming . . . Pengze county: A scholar/poet (365-427) famous for his disdain of compromising personal values for the sake of success, Tao resigned his seals eighty days after having been named to the position of magistrate for Pengze county, refusing to ingratiate himself to others just in order to live a wealthy lifestyle (Mayers 232), prefering instead to “devote his life to poetry, music, wine, and chrysanthemum growing”

  (Perkins 88).

  “You don’t want to be wealthy,” said Huangying, “but I can’t stand to be poor. I’ll just have to split off from your household: you can keep yourself pure, and I’ll just contaminate myself with my desire for wealth—no harm in that.” Then she proceeded to have a thatched hut built for him and selected her most beautiful maidservants to wait upon Ma.

  Ma felt relieved. Yet after a few days had passed, he began to miss her terribly. He had her summoned, but she was unwilling to come; he had no alternative, so he went to see her. Ma took to staying overnight there on a regular basis. Huangying smiled and commented, “Eating at one household, then sleeping at the other, doesn’t exactly seem like the behavior of a pure individual.” This made Ma smile, too, since he had no comeback response for her, and thus they opened their houses to each other like before.

  On a certain occasion, Ma happened to be traveling in Jinling on business just as the chrysanthemums reached their mature flowering. One morning he passed a flower shop, where he saw pots arranged meticulously in a large display of wondrously attractive flowers, which startled him, and he began to suspect Tao’s hand in their cultivation.

  Soon, when the owner of the shop appeared, it proved to be Tao himself. Ma was overjoyed and after both had described the business they’d been conducting, Ma wanted Tao to return to Shuntian with him. “Jinling has become my home base,” Tao told him, “and hence I’m about to get married. I’ve been accumulating a bit of money that I hope I can trouble you to take to my sister. At the end of the year, I’ll make a short visit.”

  Ma refused to listen, begging him even more insistently to return with him. “Your family has plenty of money,” he urged Tao, “so you should sit back and enjoy it, without having to be involved in business any more.” While they sat there in the shop, Ma had his servants set such low prices on his stock that within a few days, Tao had sold absolutely everything. Ma urged him to pack up everything into a bag, hired a boat, and they headed northward.

  By the time they entered Ma’s gates, Huangying had already set up space to house her brother—a bed and mattress had both been prepared for him, as if she’d known beforehand that he’d be coming. Upon walking in, Tao unpacked his clothes and instructed servants to renovate the pavilions in the garden while he spent his days drinking and playing chess together with Ma, no longer interacting with traveling merchants.

  When Ma offered to help him select a wife, he proved unwilling and refused. Huangying sent two maidservants to serve him in the bedroom, and three or four years lat
er, one of them gave birth to a daughter.

  Tao often drank prodigious quantities of wine, but never became drunk or disoriented. He had a friend named Zeng, who had a similar capacity for drinking. He happened to be passing by Ma’s house, so Ma sent Tao out to invite him in to drink with them. In absolute accord, Zeng and Tao gleefully drank uninhibitedly, and Ma was sorry that they hadn’t met earlier. From morning until the fourth watch they drank, draining what added up to a hundred pots of wine. Zeng became dead drunk, falling fast asleep where he was seated.

  Tao stood up to go to his own quarters to sleep, but walked out the door and into one of the chrysanthemum beds, where he collapsed in his drunkenness, and as his clothes slid off him, he changed into a chrysanthemum that was as tall as a man; it had more than ten blossoms, each one the size of a fist. Ma, astonished, went to tell Huangying what had happened.

  She hurried outside, pulled the plant out and laid it on the ground, exclaiming, “This is what comes of drunkenness!” She took his clothing and covered him up, then urged Ma to stay away, warning him not to watch. When morning came and he went out to look, he found Tao lying beside the flower bed. Ma finally realized that the brother and sister were both chrysanthemum spirits, so he treated them with greater respect than ever before. Since Tao had revealed his true self, he began drinking with even greater abandon, constantly sending invitations for Zeng to join him. Hence they became inseparable.

  _________

  Fourth watch: The penultimate of the night’s five two-hour divisions, from about 1:00-3:00 a.m.

  On the day of the Flower Fairy Festival, Zeng showed up with two servants carrying a large jar of herb-infused sorghum wine for Tao to join him in emptying. Even when the jar was almost empty, however, the two men were still not very drunk. Then Ma stealthily poured in some wine from another container, which the two men proceeded to finish off.

  Once Zeng was drunk enough to pass out, his servants lifted him by the shoulders and carried him out. Tao went to lie down on the ground and again turned into a chrysanthemum. Ma, now used to seeing this happen, wasn’t at all shocked and did as he’d seen Huangying do, pulling the giant flower from the ground, then watched for him to make his usual transformation.

  As time kept passing, the flower’s foliage became increasingly withered. Ma felt so scared that he finally went and informed Huangying. When she heard what he’d done, she cried, “You’ve killed my brother!”

  They rushed out to look, but the flower’s roots and stalk were all dried up. In tormented desperation, they clutched the flower by the stem, placed it in a pot and covered it with dirt, then carried it into their bedroom, where they watered it daily. Ma deeply regretted his decision to pull up the flower, but really blamed Zeng for everything. After several days, they heard that Zeng had drunk himself to death.

  In its pot, the flower gradually began to put out new shoots, and by September it began to bloom, then shortly after produced pale-colored flowers with a scent like fragrant wine, so it was called “Drunken Tao,” and they watered it with plenty of wine. After their daughter had grown up, she married into a very influential family. Huangying spent her remaining years there without anything of a unusual nature taking place.

  _________

  Flower Fairy Festival: Traditionally celebrated on the twelfth day of the second lunar month, to coincide with the awakening of dormant flowers and the onset of spring.

  The collector of these strange tales remarks, “Like the man of green hills and white clouds, Tao also drank himself to death, and though the world may feel sorry for him, he might not have seen it as such a bad way to go. If you plant this type of chrysanthemum in your courtyard, it’ll be like seeing a good friend, or being with a beautiful woman, so you definitely need to find this species.”

  _________

  Man of green hills and white clouds: Zhu identifies him as Fu Yi, and claims that, like Zeng and Tao, he drank himself to death (3:1434n48). Mayers notes that the seventh-century B.C.E. historiographer was famous for denouncing the doctrines of Buddhism, particularly “its tenets of celibacy” (47) and withdrawal from engagement with the world.

  415. The Bookworm

  The ancestors of Lang Yuzhu, from Pengcheng, who had been officials for generations and had once attained the title of prefectural chief at the height of their prominence, didn’t invest their income in business, but instead acquired books which accumulated until they filled the house. By the time this legacy reached Lang Yuzhu, however, he was even more fanatical about it: his family was so painfully poor that there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t sell—except for the books in his father’s library, for he couldn’t bear to part with even one of them.

  During his lifetime, Lang’s father had once written out a copy of the Encouragement of Learning, which he then pasted up for its words of wisdom, and Lang Yuzhu recited it every day; he protected the text with a band of plain gauze, for fear that it might otherwise be rubbed off. He wasn’t trying to secure an official’s position for himself, but truly believed that the greatest wealth of all was to be found in books. Day and night he studied and read intensively, impervious to cold or heat.

  By the time he reached his twenties, he hadn’t asked anyone to marry him, but hoped that one of the beauties like those in his books might come to him. When he was in the company of guests or relatives, he didn’t know how to go about just chatting sociably with them, and after a few words of greeting he’d leave, reciting literary passages, abandoning his visitors.

  _________

  Pengcheng: An ancient county name, now the modern city of Xuzhou, in Jiangsu province.

  Encouragement of Learning: Written by Song dynasty emperor Zhenzong (born Zhao Dechang), who ruled 998-1022.

  Whenever the provincial education commissioner came around to administer qualifying examinations, Lang always placed first, but then at the triennial civil service examination, he never performed very well.

  One day, he happened to be reading when suddenly a mighty gust of wind blew away his book. He quickly chased after it, and as he was walking, his foot sank into a soft spot in the ground there; when he bent to find out what it was, he discovered moldy straw in a hole. After digging it out, he uncovered an ancient storehouse of millet, now so decayed and rotten that it had long since turned to compost. Even though it was no longer edible, he firmly believed it to be related to the reference to “a thousand zhong” in the Encouragement of Learning, so he began studying the text with even greater diligence.

  Another day, he was climbing a ladder to reach a high shelf, and in among the jumble of books there, he found a golden model of an imperial carriage that was a chi in length, which made him overjoyed, for he related it to a passage from the Encouragement of Learning that mentioned a “golden room.” He took it out and showed it to someone who revealed it to be gilt, not really gold. Privately, he felt resentful that the ancients had deceived him.

  Not long after this, a former classmate of his father, who served as a supervisory commissioner for Pengcheng and who was a devout Buddhist, visited the area. Someone advised Lang to make the commissioner a present of the golden carriage for his private Buddha shrine. The commissioner was so very pleased that in return he gave him three hundred gold taels and a pair of horses. Jubilant, Lang believed that the golden room, the carriage, and the horses were all references drawn from his study of the Encouragement of Learning, so he became even more assiduous in his scrutiny of the text.

  _________

  A thousand zhong: One zhong equals four dou, so a thousand zhong would equal a measure of approximately four thousand decaliters.

  Chi: A measure equal to 1/3 meter.

  Supervisory commissioner: See Hucker (283).

  When someone suggested to him that he should get married, he cited the passage, “‘In books, you’ll find a jade-like beauty,’ so why should I worry about finding an attractive wife?” Thus he continued his studies for two or three years, but without any additional benefits, so people s
tarted making snide comments about him.

  There was a rumor making the rounds at that time that the Weaving Girl had absconded from the heavens. Someone teased Lang, “The heavenly princess must have run off to be with you.” Lang knew this was just a joke at his expense, so he didn’t think anything about it.

  One night, Lang was reading the eighth book of the History of the Han Dynasty, and just as he was about halfway through, he came across a gauze cut-out of a beautiful woman pressed between its pages. Surprised, he exclaimed, “Is this what is meant by the jade-like beauties to be found in books?” He felt disappointed and disheartened. Yet when he looked carefully at the beauty, he found that she had lifelike features; on the back of the cut-out, “Weaving Girl” was written faintly, in very small characters. It was very strange.

  He put it on top of his stack of books every day, to enjoy looking at it over and over, till he even began to forget about eating and sleeping. One day, while he was staring at it, the beauty suddenly bent forward and stood up, then took a seat on the stack of books, smiling at him. Lang was quite startled, and began kowtowing next to his table in obeisance to her.

  _________

  Weaving Girl: Daughter of the Jade Emperor and the Queen Mother of the West, she secretly descended from the heavens to marry a cowherd, but the two were separated by a line drawn in the air with the disapproving Queen Mother’s hairpin: it became the Milky Way, which keeps the lovers separated except on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month, when they are reunited (Yang and An 221).

  By the time he’d finished and stood up again, she’d already grown to a chi in size. Even more astonished, Lang resumed his kowtowing. She stepped down from the table and stood above Lang, looking as vivid as the most beautiful woman alive.