Song Dingbo of Nanyang was walking by night when he met a ghost on the road.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am a ghost,” it said. “And who are you?”
Song Dingbo lied without a blink. “I am a ghost too.”
“Where are you bound?”
“To Wan market.”
“Why, so am I,” said the ghost, and they walked on together.
After a few li the ghost said, “Walking is slow work. Let us carry each other by turns.” Song Dingbo agreed, and the ghost took him on its back first. After a few li it said, “You are heavy. Are you sure you are a ghost?”
“I am newly dead,” said Song Dingbo. “That is why I am still heavy.”
Then it was his turn to carry the ghost, and it weighed no more than a coat. As they went, he asked, as one ghost to another, “I died only recently, so I don’t know the ways of our kind. What is it that ghosts most fear?”
“Human spit,” said the ghost. “We cannot abide it.”
They came to a river. The ghost crossed without a sound; Song Dingbo splashed. “Why so loud?” said the ghost.
“I am newly dead,” said Song Dingbo. “I haven’t yet learned to cross water properly.”
And the ghost, to its undoing, believed him a second time.
So they came near Wan market. And there, with the lights of the town in sight, Song Dingbo suddenly threw the ghost over his shoulder and held it fast. The ghost squalled and struggled and changed shape and changed shape again, and he held on, and at last, writhing, it turned into a goat. Song Dingbo spat on it — once, twice, thoroughly — so that it could change no more, and carried it into the market and sold it for fifteen hundred cash, and went home with the money.
And that, says Gan Bao, is why there is a saying in Nanyang: Song Dingbo sold a ghost for fifteen hundred.
It is a joke, of course — the earliest ghost story in the collection that ends in a punchline rather than a moral. But it is a joke with a sharp point, and Gan Bao knew it: the ghost had every advantage. It was strong, it was swift, it could change its shape, and it walked beside its victim for ten li of dark road, needing only one moment of his fear to take him. It never got it. The only thing in the whole story that was ever afraid was the ghost — afraid of a mouthful of spit, and of a man who was not afraid of it.
