In the Library
Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio
Pu Songling, 1766
- Form
- Form Collection
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 12 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Herbert Giles (1880)
- Chapters
- Chapters 165
- Length
- Length 169k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
a hideous devil, with a green face and jagged teeth like a saw, spreading a human skin upon the bed and painting it
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
About the book
A demon peels off a painted human skin, spreads it across the bed, touches up the face with a brush, then puts it on again and walks out among the living. That is one tale of nearly five hundred here, in which foxes take the shape of women better read than the men who fall in love with them, and the clerks of hell accept bribes exactly as the clerks of earth do. Pu Songling failed the provincial examinations again and again, teaching in other men's houses into old age, and he set it all down in a classical Chinese so compressed that a courtship and a death can pass inside a single line. The strangeness is never the reason to read them. Read them because the fox is loyal, the ghost is generous, the neighbours and magistrates are not, and the tenderest marriage in the book is between a lonely man and something that must be gone by morning.