Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale

348 Pages·1997·7.306 MB·English

by  Judith T. Zeitlin

Historian of the Strange
Pu Songling and the
Chinese Classical Tale
Strange
Historian of the
Pu Songling and the
Chinese Classical Tale
Judith T. Zeitlin
Stanford University Press Stanford, California 1993
Stanford University Press
Stanford, California
© 1993 by the Board of Trustees
of the Leland Stanford Junior University
Printed in the United States of America
CIP data are at the end of the book
Frontispiece: Anonymous Song painting of an immortal.
Reproduced by permission of the Palace Museum, Beijing.
To my parents,
George and Froma Zeitlin

In 8i i, the sixth year of the Yuanhe reign period, Zhang journeyed
to Huaiyang, where he stopped for the night at the government inn.
The official in charge of the inn threw a banquet for the guests at
which the following drinking game was decided upon: those present
would take turns recounting a strange experience that had befallen
them, being obliged to drink a forfeit if the experience were judged
insufficiently strange.
—Li Fuyan，Sequel to Records of the Strange and the Mysterious

Acknowledgments
I have accumulated many debts in the preparation of this book, and I
express my gratitude to the teachers, colleagues, friends, and in­
stitutions who have so generously helped me: to Patrick Hanan,
who directed this study in its first incarnation as a doctoral disserta­
tion; to Stephen Owen, for his inspiration and critical involvement
throughout; to Yuan Shishuo and Ma Ruifang of the Chinese de­
partment of Shandong University for sharing their expertise and
resources on Pu Songling, and to Lu Fan for helping to make my
stay at Shandong University fruitful; to Jonathan Spence and the
Society for the Humanities at Yale for their help and support during
the postdoctoral year I spent revising the manuscript. I especially
thank Allan Barr for his advice in the initial stages of this project and
for his meticulous reading ofthe final manuscript and Ellen Widmcr
for her help in navigating rare book collections and for sharing rare
materials and unpublished works of her own with me. A number of
other readers took time from their own work to make valuable
suggestions on the manuscript at various stages of the project: Val­
erie Hansen, Sue Naquin, Joanna Handlin Smith, Sarah Queen,
Cynthia Zarin, Nancy Berliner, Marston Anderson, Ariel Zeitlin,
and Froma Zeitlin.
I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the American
Council of Learned Societies, the Mrs. Giles S. Whiting Founda­
tion, and the National Resource Council. I also thank Eugene Wu
and the staff ofthe Harvard-Yenching Library, especially Sidney Tai;
Mi-chu Wiens and the staff of the Chinese collection at the Library
x Acknowledgments
of Congress; and the staff of the Rare Book Rooms of the Shandong
Provincial Library, the Beijing Library, and the Academy of Sci­
ences Library in Beijing. Jinhua Emma Teng provided crucial assis­
tance with the last stages of the manuscript and the index. Finally, I
thank Helen Tartar and John R. Ziemer, my editors at Stanford
University Press, for their invaluable editorial assistance and sup­
port.
My biggest debt of all is to Wu Hung, who shared my obsession
with Pu Songling for so long and who contributed so much intellec­
tually and emotionally to this study. Without him this book would
never have been written.
J.T.Z.