Nie Xiaoqian
聂小倩
A scholar spends the night in a deserted temple and is visited by a ghostly beauty — and by the swordsman who alone knows how to defeat the old demon that owns her.
GhostLoveSword
Story Library · 故事库
Tales of the Strange
Classical zhiguai and chuanqi, translated from the original texts — every story with its source, its original Chinese, and notes on the world it came from. Filter by era, book, or creature.
Showing all 64 stories
The Taoist of Mount Lao
崂山道士
A rich young man climbs Mount Lao to learn magic from a Taoist master, endures a month of woodcutting, and comes home certain he has mastered the art of walking through walls.
ImmortalTrickster
The Painted Skin
画皮
Wang takes in a beautiful runaway girl and hides her in his study — until he looks through the window one morning and sees what she wears when no one is watching.
GhostMonster
Xi Fangping Sues the Underworld
席方平
A son follows his murdered father into the Courts of the Dead and files a lawsuit — through every clerk, every magistrate, every torture the underworld can devise, up to the highest god there is.
UnderworldJusticeGhost
Yingning
婴宁
A laughing girl with a branch of plum blossom steals a scholar's heart — and only after he marries her does the family learn she is not entirely human, nor entirely of this world.
Fox SpiritLove
The Curly-Bearded Stranger
虬髯客传
A penniless strategist, an eloping palace girl with a whisk, and a red-bearded giant who wants the empire — until he sees one young man in a plain coat and quietly withdraws his claim.
SwordJusticeDeity
Liu Yi and the Dragon Princess
柳毅传
A failed examination candidate meets a ragged shepherdess on the road and discovers she is the daughter of the Dragon King of Lake Dongting, exiled by her cruel husband. He agrees to carry one letter — and sets the dragons to war.
DeityLoveJustice
Nie Yinniang
聂隐娘
A nun takes ten-year-old Nie Yinniang from her home and returns her five years later — trained to fly over rooftops, kill at a word, and carry a dagger two inches long. The greatest swordswoman in Chinese fiction comes home.
SwordTransformation
Miss Ren
任氏传
A poor scholar falls in love with a beautiful woman of mysterious means. She is a fox spirit — and she is also, by the end, the most faithful creature in the story. The oldest great fox-wife in Chinese fiction.
Fox SpiritLove
The Governor of South Bough
南柯太守传
Chunyu Fen drinks himself to sleep under the old ash tree and wakes as a royal son-in-law, governor of a province, with twenty years of triumph and ruin ahead of him. When he wakes, an afternoon has passed.
DreamsTransformation
The World Inside a Pillow
枕中记
At a roadside inn, a young scholar complaining about his failed life borrows a porcelain pillow from an old Taoist. Inside it: fifty years of power, marriage, slander and glory. Outside it: the millet is not yet cooked.
DreamsImmortal
The Cricket
促织
The emperor loves cricket-fighting, so every district must supply fighting crickets. One ruined family is saved by a champion the size of a man's little finger — which may be the soul of their dying son.
TransformationJustice
The Peony Spirit
香玉
A scholar lodging in a temple falls in love with a woman in white — who is the temple's white peony. When a visitor digs the flower up and takes it away, she dies, and he spends a year of mourning coaxing her back to life.
TransformationLove
Li Ji Slays the Serpent
李寄斩蛇
A giant serpent in the mountains has eaten nine girls, sent to it yearly as tribute. The tenth volunteer, thirteen-year-old Li Ji, goes up the mountain with a sword, a hound, and a plan.
MonsterJusticeSword
The Two Swords
干将莫邪（三王墓）
The smith Gan Jiang forges two perfect swords for the King of Chu and is murdered for it. His son Chi grows up to seek vengeance — and a stranger in black offers to do it for him, asking only the boy's head and his sword.
SwordJustice
Dong Yong and the Weaver Maid
董永
Dong Yong sells himself into servitude to pay for his father's burial. On the road to his master's house a woman offers to be his wife — and weaves ten bolts of perfect silk a day to buy back his freedom.
ImmortalLove
Song Dingbo Catches a Ghost
宋定伯捉鬼
Walking at night, Song Dingbo meets a ghost on the road. Unafraid, he claims to be a ghost too, learns its one weakness, carries it to market on his back — and sells it as a goat.
GhostTrickster
The Husband-and-Wife Tree
韩凭夫妇
The King of Song takes the beautiful wife of his retainer Han Ping. The lovers die defying him and are buried apart — and their graves grow two trees that bend across the road to intertwine.
LoveTransformationJustice
The Snail-Shell Girl
白水素女
A poor farmer finds a great river snail and keeps it in a jar. Soon he begins coming home to find his house swept and a hot meal waiting — and one day he doubles back early to catch his mysterious housekeeper.
TransformationLove
Jingwei Fills the Sea
精卫填海
The youngest daughter of the Flame Emperor drowns in the Eastern Sea. She returns as a small bird, and begins — twig by twig, pebble by pebble, forever — to fill the sea that killed her.
DeityMonsterTransformation
The Examination for City God
考城隍
A scholar is summoned in his sleep to sit an examination — but the post being filled is City God of a district in the underworld. His answer to one question gets him the job, and nine years of leave.
DeityUnderworldJustice
Wang Liulang
王六郎
Every night a fisherman pours a cup of wine on the ground for the drowned. One night the drowned one comes up and drinks with him — and their friendship ends in the strangest promotion in the collection.
GhostLoveJustice
Abao
阿宝
Sun Zichu is the most ridiculous scholar in the province — six fingers, no small talk, and a habit of running away from singing girls. Then he falls in love at first sight with a merchant's daughter, and there is nothing absurd about what he does next.
LoveTransformation
Red Thread
红线传
Red Thread is a palace maid who plays the lute and reads the histories. In one night she walks three hundred li, steals a gold box from a warlord's bedside, and stops a war — then asks to be released into the mountains.
Sword
The Soul That Left
离魂记
Qianniang is betrothed to her cousin, then promised to another man. On the night her lover sails away, a second Qianniang runs after him down the riverbank — while the first one lies in her room, sick and unmoving.
GhostLoveTransformation
The White Ape
补江总白猿传
General Ouyang Ge takes his beautiful wife on campaign. He locks her in a guarded room. In the morning she is gone — taken by something that lives in the mountains and collects women.
MonsterTrickster
The Goose-Cage Scholar
阳羡书生（鹅笼书生）
A scholar begs a lift inside a goose cage. He fits. Then, at dinner, he opens his mouth and produces a woman — who produces her own lover — who produces his. Four hundred words, and the strangest image in Chinese literature.
TransformationTrickster
The Peach-Blossom Spring of Mount Tiantai
刘晨阮肇入天台
Two men go into Mount Tiantai to gather bark, lose the path, and are fed hyssop cakes by two women who seem to know them already. They stay half a year. When they go home, seven generations have passed.
ImmortalLove
The Girl Who Sold Face Powder
卖胡粉女子
A rich man's son buys face powder every day from a girl in the market, and says nothing, until the day he says everything at once and dies of it. The girl comes to the funeral — and the body remembers her.
GhostLove
The Ghosts Who Avoided Jiang Sanmang
鬼避姜三莽
Having heard that Song Dingbo once sold a ghost for fifteen hundred cash, a brave fool decides to go into the ghost business. Every night he walks out to the graveyard with a rope. The ghosts move out.
GhostTrickster
Tan Sheng and the Ghost Wife
谈生
A poor scholar of forty is reading the Book of Songs alone at midnight when a girl comes to him and asks to be his wife. She has one condition: for three years, he must never light a lamp and look at her.
GhostLoveTransformation
Kuafu Chases the Sun
夸父逐日
A giant follows the sun across the sky, and drinks the Yellow River dry, and the Wei, and goes on north for more. He does not reach it. What he leaves behind is a forest of peaches.
DeityTransformation
The Kunlun Slave
昆仑奴
A young guardsman falls in love with a concubine who signals him in a code of fingers. His master's slave — a dark-skinned man called Mo Le — reads the code, and carries her over ten walls in one night.
SwordLoveTrickster
The Ancient Mirror
古镜记
A scholar inherits a bronze mirror eight inches across with a unicorn cast on its back. Wherever he carries it, the things that live in the dark are burned away — until one night the mirror says goodbye.
MonsterDeitySword
The Marriage Shop
定婚店（月下老人）
A young man waiting at an inn asks an old man reading by moonlight what book he has. The old man says: the register of marriages. And in his bag — red thread, for tying feet together.
DeityLoveJustice
Du Zichun and the Furnace
杜子春
A Taoist master has almost made the elixir twice, and twice it failed. He needs a man who can sit in front of the furnace and say nothing — through every hallucination hell can improvise. Du Zichun volunteers. He passes everything. Except one thing.
ImmortalTransformationDreams
Jiaona
娇娜
A stranded scholar is taken in by a family who are not human. He falls in love with the wrong sister — and when thunder comes for them, he finds out what the right one is worth.
Fox SpiritLoveJustice
Judge Lu
陆判
Dared to carry a statue out of the temple of the Ten Kings at midnight, Zhu Erdian brings home the green-faced Judge Lu — and gains a friend who will replace his stupid heart and his wife's unremarkable head.
UnderworldTransformationJustice
The Filial Wife of Donghai
东海孝妇
A widow serves her mother-in-law faithfully for ten years and is executed for murdering her. Her blood runs uphill. The province does not see rain again for three years.
JusticeGhostDeity
Chang'e Flies to the Moon
嫦娥奔月
The archer Yi obtains the elixir of immortality from the Queen Mother of the West. His wife Chang'e drinks it, and goes up — and the oldest telling says only that she was lonely there.
DeityImmortalTransformation
The Magistrate Who Went Down the Well
酆都知县
A county magistrate abolishes the annual tax that his people pay to Hell. The town tells him to explain himself to the gods. So he has himself lowered down a well — and meets Bao Zheng, and Guan Yu, and makes one fatal mistake.
UnderworldJusticeDeity
The Fox Licentiate
狐生员劝人修仙
A governor-general is reading late when a fox comes in sideways through the window crack, thickens into a scholar, bows — and delivers the most detailed cost-accounting of becoming an immortal anywhere in Chinese fiction.
Fox SpiritImmortalTransformation
The Scholar and the Rope
蔡书生
A scholar buys the haunted house nobody will live in. At midnight a woman in red silk ties a noose to the beam and beckons him. He puts one foot forward. She starts to cry.
GhostTrickster
The Friend Who Would Not Leave
南昌士人
A dead scholar comes back to his friend, says a proper goodbye, and asks three small favours. Then he stands there. His eyes go blank. His face starts to spoil. And the chase begins.
GhostMonster
The Return of Vice-Prefect Li
李通判
A Daoist offers to bring a rich young official back from the dead. The rule is that someone must die in his place — and the only volunteer is the old slave nobody counted.
JusticeGhostDeity
The Death-God in the Cangue
煞神受枷
On the seventh night the death-god comes for her husband's soul. Every relative is supposed to leave the house. She stays, hides in the bed-curtains — and twenty years later meets that god again, in a wooden collar.
GhostJusticeDeity
The Skull That Breathed
骷髅吹气
A chess player lies down in the east wing on a hot afternoon and feels a cold spot the size of a walnut on his back. It grows to the size of a plate. Then half the mat is cold, and it goes into his bones.
GhostMonster
The Debt of Seven Ounces
大乐上人
A poor yamen runner borrows seven ounces he can never repay, and tells the monk who lent it: in the next life let me be your donkey. That night, the donkey foals.
JusticeTransformation
The Palace Where the Earth Ends
地穷宫
A garrison captain dies, finds the afterlife much more comfortable than being alive, drifts southeast for hours through flying sand — and comes to a hall with a gold plaque over the door. He stands and stares. The guards tell him to move on. He argues.
UnderworldDeity
The Salt Rebel
蒲州盐枭
The salt pools stop making salt. The merchants pray. Lord Guan appears in a dream and explains: Chi You has taken the pool. His soul I can bind — but his wife is worse than he is, and for her I need my brother.
DeityMonster
The Borrowed Body
灵璧女借尸还魂
A blind, dropsical farmer's wife dies. Her husband buys a coffin. By the time he gets back she can see, her belly is flat — and she is asking where her parents are, because she is an unmarried girl from another village.
TransformationGhost
The Widow Who Sued from the Grave
田烈妻
A magistrate holding court one evening under a bright moon sees a woman kneeling at his gate with her face covered in black cloth. He has his clerk call out the writ: whoever has a grievance, let the soul come in.
JusticeGhost
The Ghost's Three Tricks
鬼有三技过此鬼道乃穷
A scholar walking home at dusk finds a rope dropped in the road by a woman who fled into a tree. He picks it up, smells it, and puts it in his coat. That is the beginning of the ghost's problem.
GhostTrickster
The Magistrate of Pingyang
平阳令
A magistrate famous for his cruelty to women spends the night in a locked loft that everyone says is haunted. An old god visits him first and tells him exactly what he wants to hear.
JusticeGhost
The Man Who Was Not Afraid
叶老脱
Four ghosts come into the room — a hanged woman with her eyes torn out, a headless thing carrying two heads, a black smear, and one vast and yellow. They search for him and cannot find him. Then one of them explains why.
GhostMonster
The God Who Gave a False Verdict
关神断狱
A stolen chicken is judged by casting the moon-blocks at the shrine of Lord Guan. The blocks come up guilty — for the wrong person. On purpose. Years later the god explains himself, and then explains something stranger.
DeityJusticeGhost
Climbing the Sunbeam
鬼攀日线才能托生
Asked how rebirth actually works, a spirit who has been dead four hundred years explains: on the winter solstice a single thread of sunlight falls across the Mountain of Shadows, the frozen dead thaw, and they climb.
GhostUnderworldImmortal
The Ghost of a Ghost
城隍杀鬼不许为聻
The City God sentences a rapist ghost to forty strokes and a public cangue. Three days later the ghost's wife comes back to avenge him. The second sentence is worse than the first.
GhostJusticeDeity
The Raksasa Bird
罗刹鸟
The bridal procession passes an old grave and a whirlwind comes out of the mound. At the groom's house the bearers lift the curtain — and two brides step out of the sedan chair.
MonsterGhost
The Rain God and the Usurper
董贤为神
A Qing official sent to pray for rain finds a shrine to a beautiful young man in Han court dress. He decides the god is bogus and plans to pull the temple down for its timber. That night the god comes and defends his reputation.
DeityJustice
The Man Who Entertained the Plague God
苏耽老饮疫神
On New Year's morning somebody paints the Plague God on paper and nails it to his door as a curse. He finds it, laughs, brings it in, gives it the seat of honour, drinks with it, and burns it.
DeityTrickster
The Shell of Heaven
天壳
In Shaanxi the ground sometimes splits open and a whole village drops in, and nobody has ever come back out. In 1646 one man did — nine days later, alone, black as charcoal.
UnderworldDeity
The Jar That Held a Soul
藏魂坛
A bully is beaten to death and thrown in the river. Three days later he walks home. Beheaded by imperial warrant, he is whole again in three days. His mother finally comes to court — carrying a jar.
JusticeTransformationMonster
The Little Magistrate
不倒翁
Something three inches tall in a black coat and a bailiff's cap crawls out from under the desk and glares at him. Then a whole procession arrives — banners, horses, a carriage, all the size of beans.
TricksterGhost
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