Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 4

by Pu Songling

  Shortly afterwards, Master Zhou Yuanliang was appointed to serve as governor of Qingzhou, and when reviewing reports on prisoners came across Wu’s case, which caused him to become lost in thought. Soon he asked, “What reliable evidence is there that this Wu killed the woman?” Fan Xiaoshan produced the inscribed fan in response. Master Zhou scrutinized the fan, then asked, “Who is this Wang Sheng?” He was told that no one knew anything about him.

  Then upon reviewing the records of the case, Master Zhou ordered Wu’s shackles to be removed, and had Wu transferred from his condemned man’s confinement to an ordinary jail cell. Fan argued strongly against this. “Do you want just anyone executed for the deed, or do you really want to solve this murder?” Zhou demanded angrily. People began to suspect that the governor was privately trying to help Wu, but no one dared to say anything.

  Master Zhou wrote out a warrant, calling for the arrest of a certain shop owner located near the southern wall of the village. The man was startled, claiming he didn’t know anything about the matter. When he was brought forward, Master Zhou asked him, “When was the poem that’s on your shop’s wall, composed by Li Xiu of Dongwan, actually written?”

  _______________________________

  Li: A distance equal to 1/3 mile.

  The shop owner replied, “Last year, when the Commissioner of Education was in town, Li was with a group of other drunken scholars from Rizhao when he wrote it, but I don’t know where he’s living now.” The governor dispatched officers to Rizhao, to arrest Li Xiu.

  After several days, Li arrived. Master Zhou angrily demanded, “After having been made a xiucai, how could you kill a man?”

  Li suddenly shook his head in stunned denial, exclaiming, “I didn’t!”

  Master Zhou threw down the fan, ordering Li to examine it, and declared, “You wrote the poem inscribed there, so why pretend that it was written by Wang Sheng?”

  Li examined it closely and replied, “I did indeed compose the poem, but the writing isn’t my calligraphy.”

  “Since it’s one of your poems,” Master Zhou noted, “it must have been written by one of your friends. Who could have written it?”

  “It looks like the work of Wang Zuo, from Yizhou,” said Li. The governer accordingly sent officers to arrest Wang Zuo.

  When Zuo arrived, Master Zhou asked him the same sort of questions he’d asked Li. Zuo confessed, “This was written for Zhang Cheng, an iron merchant from Yidu, who told me Wang Sheng was his cousin, even though their surnames are different.”

  “This is the murdering thief,” declared Master Zhou. Zhang was seized and brought before him, where he was interrogated until he admitted his guilt.

  Originally, after Zhang had spied Fan’s wife, the beautiful He, he wanted to have sex with her, but was afraid she wouldn’t agree to it. He thought about Wu, and how people would surely believe he was the person responsible, so Zhang had the fake fan made with Wu’s name on it, and took it with him to see her. If she agreed, he would tell her his name, and if she refused, he’d tell her his name was Wu, but he definitely didn’t have any intention of killing her.

  _______________________________

  Dongwan: Ju county, in modern Shandong province.

  Rizhao: Part of modern Ju county.

  Xiucai: A successful candidate in the county level of the imperial civil service examination.

  Once he’d climbed over the wall and entered the house, he attempted to rape her. Since He slept alone while Fan was traveling, she often kept a knife near her for defense. As soon as she realized there was an intruder, she grabbed onto Zhang’s clothing, and jumped up with the knife in hand. In alarm, Zhang snatched the knife away from her. Hanging onto his clothing with all her strength, He kept him from getting away, shouting for help all the while. Zhang became increasingly panicked, so he killed her, left the fan behind, and ran off. A miscarriage of justice lasting three years was finally reexamined and reversed, and Master Zhou’s deduction was praised as nothing short of godlike.

  Only then did Wu realize that the dream about his “inner nature” being “auspicious” was a reference to the character for the name “Zhou.” Yet in the end, he still couldn’t figure out how Master Zhou had arrived at his conclusion.

  Afterwards, when a nobleman seized the opportunity to ask Master Zhou how he’d done it, he laughed and replied, “This was quite easy to figure out. After careful review of the case records, I learned that He had been killed early in April; it was rainy that night, and the weather was still cold, so there’d have been no need for a fan, and if the perpetrator was preoccupied by murderous intent at the time, he’d hardly have had the leisure to consider bringing along a fan, unless he intended to use it to impute blame elsewhere. I happened to enter the shop near the south wall of the village to get out of the rain, and there I saw a poem on the wall that was similar in style to the one written on the fan, and so I mistakenly thought it was Li who’d done it, then armed with this clue, I pursued the matter and hence uncovered the real murderer.” Hearing this, the nobleman simply sighed in admiration.

  _______________________________

  His “inner nature” being “auspicious”: In this visual puzzle, the character for Zhou’s name (周) is composed of the character ji (吉), meaning “auspicious” or “lucky,” contained inside/ underneath the “borders” radical.

  The collector of these strange tales remarks, “The individual who can discover the deep logic in such matters can make use of little facts. Words and articles bring glory to our nation, yet an official who’s able to predict other scholars’ characters and fates by reading their words and articles could truly be called a Sun Yang. Isn’t Zhou such a master of deduction? He just transferred this method of judging and applied it to criminal matters. The Book of Changes says, ‘Understanding almost makes one a god.’ Master Zhou had such understanding.”

  _______________________________

  Sun Yang: Better known as Bole, famous for being able to assess a horse’s merit from details he noticed about its appearance, Sun lived during the Spring & Autumn Period (770-476 B.C.E.). Book of Changes: The Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the passage Pu is thinking about is “When the laws of the whole world are grasped, therein lies perfection” (287).

  329. The Deer with the Grass in Their Mouths

  There are many deer in Shanhaiguan Pass. The local people there put on deer heads and hide in the grass, making the sound of rolling in the leaves, till the deer arrive in herds. However there are few bucks and many does among them.

  The bucks mate with the herds of does, no matter how many of them, until they’re dead from exhaustion. The throngs of does sniff at them, and once they realize the bucks are dead, they split up and begin wandering through the mountain valleys till they find and pick up a rare grass between their lips, then place it under the noses of the bucks, who instantly begin to revive.

  At that point, the locals quickly start beating on gongs to make a huge noise, till the herds of frightened deer run away. They do this so they can pick up the grass, which can then be used to bring others back to life.

  _______________________________

  Shanhaiguan Pass: The strategic area at the easternmost end of the Great Wall, on the border beween Hebei and Liaoning provinces, traditionally employed to regulate movement between northeastern and northern China.

  330. The Tiny Coffins

  At Tianjin, there was a certain boatman who dreamed one night that a man came and instructed him, “Tomorrow a man carrying a bamboo case will ask to hire your boat, and you must demand a thousand taels from him; otherwise, don’t let him cross with you.” After the boatman had been startled awake, he put little credence in the dream.

  Returning to sleep, he began dreaming again, but there were only three characters written on the wall, and a voice urging him, “If he’s stingy about the price, just show him what’s written here.” The boatman found this very strange. But he didn’t recognize the characters, so he also did
n’t understand what they meant.

  All the next day, he was careful to keep an eye out for the traveler described in his dream. When the sun began to set, it happened that a man driving a mule and carrying a bamboo case arrived and asked if his boat was available. The boatman realized that this was what his dream had described, so he demanded a thousand taels. The man just laughed at him. After hesitating for a long time, the boatmen grabbed the man’s hand and wrote the characters from his dream on it. The man was so stunned by this that he immediately died.

  _______________________________

  Tianjin: A port near Beijing.

  Three characters: These three nonsense characters all begin with the cliff radical (厂), the first containing two cowrie shells (贝贝) inside it, the second containing three, and the third containing four.

  When the boatman searched the bamboo case, he found it filled with a large number of tiny coffins, each only about as long as a finger, and containing drops of blood. The boatman took a copy of the three characters and showed them around to people near and far, but no one recognized them.

  Before long, Wu Sangui’s rebellion came to pass, and once his partisans were executed, their corpses were displayed—in almost exactly the same number as the many coffins in the bamboo case. Xu Baishan told me this.

  _______________________________

  Wu Sangui’s rebellion: The military commander whose treaty with Manchu leaders helped to catalyze the overthrow of the Ming dynasty in favor of the Qing. Later, however, pursuing his own ambitions, he opposed the Qing hierarchy, fomenting rebellion in Guangdong and Fukien provinces, but proved unsuccessful and died in 1678.

  Works Cited

  Primary Source

  Zhu, Qikai, ed. Liaozhai zhi yi. 3 vols. Beijing: People’s Literary Press, 1995. Volume 2 (zhong).

  Secondary and Contextual Sources

  Ames, Roger T.. and Henry Rosemont, Jr., trans. The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998.

  The Book of History (尚書). Trans. Du Ruiqing. Weifang: Shandong Friendship Press, 1998.

  The Book of Rites (Selections) (礼记). Ed. Xu Chao. Trans. Lao An. Weifang: Shandong Friendship Press, 2000.

  Bremness, Lesley. Herbs. New York: Dorling Kindersley, 1994.

  Cahill, Suzanne. Transcendence and Divine Passion: The Queen Mother of the West in Medieval China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

  Campany, Robert Ford. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

  Chan, Leo Tak-hung. The Discourse of Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati Storytelling. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1998.

  Cheng, Chung-ying. “A Theory of Confucian Selfhood: Self-Cultivation and Free Will in Confucian Philosophy.” Confucian Ethics: A Comparative Study of Self, Autonomy, and Community. Ed. Shun Kwongloi and David B. Wong. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 124-47.

  Chow, Kai-wing. The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial china: Ethics, Classics, and Lineage Discourse. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

  The Classic of Filial Piety (孝经). Trans. Liu Ruxiang and Lin Zhihe. Weifang: Shandong Friendship Press, 1998.

  Clements, Jonathan. Confucius: A Biography. Phoenix Mill, Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton Publishing Limited, 2004.

  Eberhard, Wolfram. A Dictionary of Chinese Symbols: Hidden Symbols in Chinese Life and Thought. New York: Routledge, 1986.

  Ebrey, Patricia. “Concubines in Sung China.” Journal of Family History 11.1 (1986): 1-24.

  ---. Women and the Family in Chinese History. New York: Routledge, 2002.

  Hsiung, Ping-chen. “Treading the Weedy Path: T’ang Chen (1630-1704) and the World of the Confucian Middlebrow.” Imagining Boundaries: Changing Confucian Doctrines, Texts, and Hermeneutics. Ed. Chow Kai-wing, Ng On-cho, and John B. Henderson. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999. 195-211.

  Hucker, Charles O. A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China. Taipei: SMC Publishing, Inc., 1985.

  The I Ching, or Book of Changes (易经). Trans. Richard Wilhelm and Cary F. Baynes. 1950; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.

  Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

  Lu, Tina. Persons, Roles, and Minds: Identity in Peony Pavilion and Peach Blossom Fan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

  Luo, Guanzhong. Three Kingdoms. Trans. Moss Roberts. 3 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

  Mann, Susan. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

  Mayers, William Frederick. The Chinese Reader’s Manual. 1874; rpt. Shanghai: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1910.

  Mencius (孟子). Trans. Zhao Zhentao, Zhang Wenting, and Zhou Dingzhi. Changsha: Hunan People’s Publishing House, 1999.

  Miyazaki, Ichisada. China’s Examination Hell: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China. Trans. Conrad Schirokauer. New York: John Weatherhill, Inc., 1976.

  Paludan, Ann. Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors: The Reign-by-Reign Record of the Rulers of Imperial China. London: Thames & Hudson, 1998.

  Palmer, Martin et al., eds. and trans. T’ung Shu: The Ancient Chinese Almanac. London: Rider & Company, 1986.

  Perkins, Dorothy. Encyclopedia of China: The Essential Reference to China, Its History and Culture. New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1999.

  Pines, Yuri. Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqiu Period,722-453 B.C.E. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2002.

  Rainey, Lee Dian. Confucius & Confucianism: The Essentials. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

  Reed, Bradley Ward. Talons and Teeth: County Clerks and Runners in the Qing Dynasty. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.

  Sang, Tze-lan Deborah. The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

  Shun, Kwong-loi. “Conception of the Person in Early Confucian Thought.” Confucian Ethics: A Com- parative Study of Self, Autonomy, and Community. Ed. Shun and David B. Wong. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2004. 183-99.

  Sinn, Elizabeth. “Chinese Patriarchy and the Protection of Women in 19th-century Hong Kong.” Women & Chinese Patriarchy: Submission, Servitude and Escape. Ed. Maria Jaschok and Suzanne Miers. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1994. 141-70.

  Sondergard, Sidney L., and Will G. Collins. “Young and Dangerous(ly Traditional): Reading Guangong and the Act of Obeisance in Hong Kong Films Since 1986.” Studies in the Humanities 32.1 (2005): 50-73.

  Soothill, William Edward, and Lewis Hodous. A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms with Sanskrit and English Equivalents and a Sanskrit-Pali Index. 1937; rpt. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2005.

  Sterckx, Roel. The Animal and the Daemon in Early China. Albany: SUNY Press, 2002.

  von Glahn, Richard. The Sinister Way: The Divine and the Demonic in Chinese Religious Culture. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004.

  Wu, Yenna. The Chinese Virago: A Literary Theme. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

  Yang, Lihui, and Deming An, with Jessica Anderson Turner. Handbook of Chinese Mythology. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2005.

  The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine. Trans. Ni Maoshing. Boston: Shambhala, 1995.

  Yip, Wai-Lin, ed. and trans. Chinese Poetry: An Anthology of Major Modes and Genres. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997.

  Zeitlin, Judith T. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songlin and the Chinese Classical Tale. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993.

  ---. “Two Ghost Stories by Pu Songling.” Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History. Ed. Susan Mann and Yu-Yin Cheng. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 197-214.

  ng, Strange Tales from Liaozhai--Volume 4