Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, Vol. 1 | Ebook

Few works occupy the place in Chinese letters that the Liaozhai Zhiyi (聊斋志异) holds: at once the summit of the classical-language short story and one of the sharpest social documents of the early Qing dynasty.

Its author, Pu Songling (1640–1715), spent his life on the losing side of the imperial examination system — a man of exceptional literary gifts who never advanced past the first degree. The nearly 500 tales he compiled in response are far more than ghost stories. Beneath the fox spirits, ghost brides, and underworld magistrates runs a sustained, ironic critique of the examination system, official corruption, and Confucian social convention — the supernatural deployed as the one register in which a provincial tutor could say what he actually thought. Historians of the Qing, scholars of Chinese religion, and students of comparative folklore have been mining the collection ever since.

This is Volume I of Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 translation — the first substantial rendering of Pu Songling into English and a foundational document in the history of Western sinology. Giles, later Professor of Chinese at Cambridge and co-creator of the Wade–Giles romanization system, produced a Victorian text that is itself now a primary source: his selections, his annotations, and famously his omissions reveal as much about nineteenth-century European engagement with China as about the tales themselves.

An essential text for readers of Chinese literature, Qing social history, folklore and religious studies, and the history of translation — and, three centuries on, still remarkably good company after dark.