A villager of Xing’an prefecture in Shaanxi took a wife in the sixth month. The day was high summer and the road was long, and the bride, her head wrapped in a red scarf, could not bear the stifling heat — she died suddenly in the cart.
Her parents were wild with grief. They bought a coffin and laid her in it, but it was not convenient to carry her home, so they lodged the coffin behind an old temple outside the city walls. The coffin was not very stout. It chanced to rain hard, the cool air soaked into the coffin, and the girl revived, groaning aloud.
In the temple were a monk and his disciple, who heard her and came to look. They opened the coffin — a lovely young woman, smiling faintly. They lifted her up, revived her with broth and medicines, and carried her into the temple. But the disciple, wishing to keep the girl for himself alone, sent his master to buy wine, and when the man came back half drunk he killed him with an axe. He laid the master’s corpse in the girl’s own coffin behind the temple, and fled with the girl to a Wenchang shrine in another village, where he grew his hair and set up as a lay Taoist.
More than a year passed.
Then, one night, a tiger suddenly leapt into the shrine, seized the head of the clay image of the Lord Wenchang in its jaws, and carried it off — leaving three suckling tiger cubs behind.
The neighbors spread the news and everyone crowded to see the cubs. The girl’s parents came too — and suddenly saw their daughter. They thought she was a ghost, and wept holding her for a long time. The girl could hide no longer. She told the whole story from the beginning, and told them also of the stolen wife and the murdered monk.
Her parents laid an accusation before the magistrate. On examination the truth came out; they dug up and verified the monk’s corpse; the disciple was dealt with according to law; and the girl was given into her parents’ keeping and taken home.
The reader-in-waiting Yan Dongyou told me this himself on his return from Shaanxi.
