by Pu Songling
Xiaomei’s expression darkened as she called for her servants to shut and lock the gate. Wang’s scoundrel relatives wanted to resist, but it was as though their limbs were suddenly paralyzed. Xiaomei ordered them to be tied up, one after another, to the columns lining the verandas, where they were each fed three cups of thin rice congee each day.
Xiaomei dispatched an old servant to hurry and tell Master Huang what had happened, then afterwards entered the house, where she moaned and wept. Once her tears had stopped, she told the concubine, “This was fated. I’d previously intended to arrive last month, but then my mother fell ill, so I was delayed, and that’s why I’ve come now. But I never expected that while my eyes were turned elsewhere, our home could’ve been turned into such a wasteland!”
She asked about all their maidservants from before, and was told by the concubine that the thieving relatives had abducted all of them, which provoked even more sobbing. In the days that followed, as the maidservants heard that Xiaomei had come, they all escaped and returned home, and once they were reunited with her, they couldn’t help but burst into tears.
From the columns where they were bound, the scoundrels began crying out that the boy wasn’t really Wang Muzhen’s son, and Xiaomei refused to dispute with them. Subsequently, Master Huang arrived, and while Xiaomei was ushering him in, Xihong came out to welcome him. Huang grasped the boy’s arm, pushed up his sleeve, and witnessed the vivid red birthmark that he remembered so well, then showed the naked arm to the onlookers, which they were forced to take as proof of his authenticity.
Then Huang began carefully noting what property had been taken, recording in an account book the name of each man, ensuring that all of the relatives were reported to the city magistrate. The magistrate had the scoundrels arrested and each man was flogged forty times, then slapped into shackles and imprisoned; not many days later, the land and livestock had all been returned to its rightful master.
As Huang was about to return home, Xiaomei brought Xihong out and in tears did obeisance to him, saying, “I’m not a mortal being, and you, uncle, knew that all along. Now I entrust you to treat this boy as an uncle would, too.”
“As long as I live,” Huang assured her, “I’ll do everything I can to take care of him.” When Huang left, Xiaomei checked to see that everything was in order, then brought her son by the hand to Wang’s concubine, had food prepared, and took it to offer as a sacrifice at her husband’s tomb, but after half a day, she still hadn’t returned.
When they went to look for her, they discovered the sacrificial food and wine that she’d taken there, but she had disappeared.
The collector of these strange tales remarks, “If you help to preserve the last child of another family, in turn, that child won’t abandon the last child of your family—though this precept is actually carried out by human beings, the idea, in fact, comes from heaven. When you’re in the golden time of your life, you have friends and sedan chairs to share together; but when you’re poor, your friends resist caring for your wife and offspring out of fear that they won’t voluntarily leave eventually. Upon your death, if a friend won’t refuse to forget about you and to repay you out of past gratitude, how can she be considered merely human! Maybe she’s a fox! And if she’s wealthy, maybe she’ll hire me to be her steward.”
360. The Monk’s Medicine
A certain fellow from Jining happened upon a rural temple, where he spotted an itinerant monk lying in the sun as he picked lice from his clothing; he had a gourd hanging from a stick, as though advertising that he was an herbalist. Hence the man playfully asked him, “Do you also sell pills that improve lovemaking?”
“I do,” replied the monk. “If you’re impotent, they can make you potent, if you’re small, they can make you a giant, and you’ll be able to see the desired effects immediately, with no waiting.”
The Jining man was overjoyed, and begged to buy some. From a patched pocket in his robe, the monk took out a pill that looked like a large grain of millet, and told the fellow to swallow it. In about half the time it would take rice to cook, his private parts began to grow suddenly; after fifteen minutes, when he went to touch himself, he found it a third again as long as normal.
But he felt that this still wasn’t enough, so when he spotted the monk getting up to urinate, the fellow stealthily reached into the patched pocket, picked out two or three pills, and proceeded to gulp them down. Suddenly it felt as though his skin was splitting open, his organ expanding mightily while his neck compressed and his back hunched, but it just wouldn’t stop growing longer. Feeling terribly frightened, he didn’t know what to do.
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Jining: City located in southwestern Shandong province.
When the monk came back, he took a look at the fellow’s misshapen form and cried in alarm, “This is surely the result of stealing my medicine!” He hurriedly administered a different pill, and the Jining man began to feel the growing cease.
Once the fellow loosened his clothing to take a look at his two legs, it almost appeared as though he’d actually grown a third one. He stuffed himself back into his clothing and hobbled home, where his parents found themselves barely able to recognize him.
Henceforth, he found himself made impotent by his condition, and many passersby each day would observe him just lying beside the road.
361. Vice Censor Yu
Vice Censor Yu Chenglong was making an inspection tour of Gaoyou prefecture. It happened that an especially prominent family had been about to marry off its daughter, and had accumulated a considerable store of riches for her dowry, but that night someone had managed to dig under the family’s wall, gather up everything, and escape with it. The prefectural governor had no idea what to do.
Yu ordered all of the city’s gates to be shut securely, except for one that allowed pedestrian traffic in and out, and placed a minor official there as a guard, sternly inspecting everything being transported through the gate. In addition, he issued notices for everyone to return to wherever they were living, to await an inventory inspection the following day, thereby guaranteeing that the stolen goods would be located. Then Yu secretly told the minor official that anyone who happened to go out and then come back in through the gate again should be arrested.
That afternoon, two men came back in, and except for their clothing, neither one was outfitted for traveling. Yu told the minor official, “These are definitely the thieves.” The two men endlessly attempted to argue their innocence.
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Yu Chenglong: Yu, whose style name was Beiming, was a native of Yongning prefecture, in Shanxi province (part of modern Lishi county). See Zhu (3:1215n1).
Gaoyou: A prefecture in Pu’s time, now a county in Jiangsu province.
Yu ordered them to undo their clothing so he could search them and saw that underneath their robes they were wearing two sets of women’s clothing, all part of the stolen wedding goods. They’d been afraid of the big search coming the next day, so they hurriedly tried to move things—though there were so many that they had trouble carrying them all—and hence they had to smuggle them secretly under their clothing while repeatedly going in and out of the gate.
Then there was the time when Yu was a county magistrate, and came to a nearby village. It was about sunrise, and as he was passing the outer wall of the village, he spotted two men carrying an invalid’s bed that was covered with a large blanket; from the invalid’s head, which was resting with the hair exposed, part of a phoenix-shaped hairpin stuck out, while the individual lay asleep on the bed. Three or four strong men joined them, keeping the blanket pinned down over the person’s body, as if they were afraid of a draft getting in.
In a short while, as they stopped to rest by the roadside, the two men traded places with the others so they could continue carrying the bed. While they were passing by, Master Yu sent one of his servants over to ask what was going on, and he was told that the men were conveying their critically-i
ll younger sister to her husband’s home.
Magistrate Yu walked on another two or three li, then sent his servants back to see whether the men had reentered the village. As the servants followed, the men came to a cottage where two other men greeted them and they all went inside. The servants then returned to inform their master.
Yu asked the magistrate, “Have there been any thieves passing through this village lately?”
“Not to my knowledge,” he replied. At the time, the standards of judgment by officials were extremely severe throughout the empire and hence people were even afraid of making accusations of thievery, so some people wouldn’t even admit publicly that they’d had possessions stolen, choosing instead to endure their losses in silence.
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Li: A distance equal to 1/3 mile.
As Yu approached his lodgings, he had his servants make inquiries in the area and hence learned that thieves had forced their way into a rich family’s home, then tortured and murdered the master of the household. Yu summoned the man’s son to come see him and interrogated him to get his version of what had happened. The son firmly insisted that nothing had happened.
“I’ve already taken action to arrest the powerful thieves responsible for this,” Yu told him, “so they no longer have anything over you.” The son then began kowtowing and groaning tearfully, begging Yu to avenge his father’s death.
Yu went to see the county magistrate then, and afterwards sent some muscular servants to head out toward the village walls during the fourth watch before then proceeding to the cottage he’d spotted, where they arrested eight men who confessed to the murder after being interrogated. When Yu and the magistrate asked who was playing the part of the sick woman, the thieves admitted, “Last night we were at a brothel, so we plotted with a prostitute and put the gold on the bed where she would hold it while we carried her to the place where we could divide up the stolen goods.”
Everyone was convinced that Master Yu possessed godlike insights. When someone asked how he was able to figure out what the men had been up to, Yu replied, “This is a very easy matter to explain, for you haven’t paid enough attention to particular details. If there was just a young woman on the bed, why was it necessary for the men to hold the blanket down? They stopped to change places so they could continue carrying her, thus the bed must have been very heavy; she crossed her arms over her chest, hence she must have been holding onto something underneath the blanket.
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People were afraid . . . accusations of thievery: Judicial torture was a traditional information-gathering method and continued to be employed by magistrates until soon after the beginning of the twentieth century. If an individual made what proved to be an inaccurate accusation of criminal action, she or he would also be subject to torture, to determine whether the error had been intentional or not.
Fourth watch: The penultimate two-hour division of the night, spanning approximately 1:00-3:00 a.m.
“If a sick woman was being returned home, there would have to be some old woman there to wait on her; instead, there was just a group of men who didn’t show any surprise at her presence—hence it was obvious that they were the thieves.”
362. The Yamen Runners
When Wanli was emperor, the county magistrate of Licheng had a dream that the city god was soliciting him for some laborers, so he wrote the names of eight yamen runners on an official document, then had it burned in the city god’s temple; that night, the eight men all died. Just east of the temple there was a wine shop, and the shop owner happened to have been long acquainted with one of the yamen runners.
That same night, the man came into the shop to buy some wine, so the owner asked him, “What guests are you entertaining?”
“There’s a bunch of my colleagues from the office,” replied the yamen runner, “and I’m buying a big jar of wine, so we can chat and get to know each other better.”
At dawn, the shop owner saw some of the man’s fellow clerks and learned from them that his friend had died. As he entered the doors of the city god’s temple, he found the wine jar there that he’d sold his friend the night before. When he returned to his shop and looked at the money he’d been paid, he discovered it had all turned to ashes.
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Wanli: This Ming dynasty emperor ruled from 1563-1620.
Licheng: A county in Shandong province.
Yamen runners: Since a yamen (衙门) was a government office, the runner was generally an office clerk variously assigned to carry messages, or conduct minor business, on behalf of the official occupying the yamen.
The magistrate then commissioned portraits of the eight men and had them placed in the temple. From thence forward, whenever yamen runners were sent on an errand, they all stopped at the temple first to do obeisance to the eight, and then went on their ways; otherwise, they were sure to be beaten and cursed.
363. The Spinning Women
In Shaoxing, there was an old widow who was spinning thread one night, when suddenly a girl pushed open the door and entered with a smile, asking, “What’re you working on, granny?”
The widow looked up and noted that the girl was eighteen or nineteen, quite pretty and charming, and dressed in a dazzlingly-beautiful robe. “Why are you here?” asked the widow, in surprise.
“I pity you living alone,” replied the girl, “so I’ve come to be your companion.” The widow suspected that she might be a concubine who’d fled from some rich family, so she bluntly interrogated her about it. “Don’t worry about it,” the young woman told her. “I’m all alone, just as you are. I love your cleanliness, and that’s why we’d work well together. With the two of us, you’d never be lonesome, so why don’t you think it’d be a good idea?”
The widow then began to suspect that the girl was a fox, but was uncertain whether to mention it or not, so she remained silent. The girl proceeded to sit on the old woman’s bed and began twisting threads together, commenting, “There’s nothing to be concerned about, I’m really excellent at this kind of work, and if we share the labor, you certainly won’t be as tired from it.” When the widow saw how kind and lovely the girl was, she finally relaxed.
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Shaoxing: A city located in Zhejiang province.
Late that night, the girl told the widow, “I was carrying a quilt and pillow with me when I arrived, and they’re still outside your gate, so when you go out to pee, I hope I can trouble you to bring them in for me.” When the widow went outside, she found everything wrapped up in a single bundle.
Once the girl untied the bundle on the bed, the widow couldn’t identify the source of the brocade on the bedclothes, but it was incomparably well-crafted. She then set out some additional cloths so the girl could share the bed with her. As the girl’s quilt was unfolded and spread out, a rare fragrance filled the room.
After the girl fell asleep, the widow privately thought to herself: having met this beauty reminds me what a pity it is that I’m not a man. From her side of the bed, the girl laughed and declared, “You’re eighty years old, granny, and yet you still have those kinds of thoughts?”
“Of course not,” the widow replied.
“If you’re not holding onto regrets,” the girl remarked, “then why dwell on the fact that you’re not a man?” This made the widow even more convinced that the girl was a fox, and she became quite frightened. With a laugh, the girl told her, “Just because you want to think about becoming a man, why be scared of me?”
This simply increased the widow’s fright, causing her legs to tremble and shake in bed. “Oh come now!” the girl exclaimed. “You have so little nerve, how can you dream of being a man! I’ll tell you the truth: I’m really an immortal, but I’m not going to cause you any misfortune. Indeed, if you’re careful about what you say, you’ll have all the clothing and food that you need.”
Right away, the widow got up and kowtowed next
to the girl’s side of the bed. When the girl pulled her arm out from under the quilt, it was slick like it’d been greased, and gave off a sweet fragrance; as the old woman touched the girl’s flesh, the skin felt very soft. The widow actually found herself aroused by it, as though she was experiencing some kind of daydream.
The girl smiled as she said, “Old woman, as soon as you stop shaking, look at where your heart goes! If you really make yourself a man, you may die of sheer ardor.”
“If I could really take you the way a man would,” replied the widow, “I wouldn’t even want to live beyond tonight!”
Thereafter, the two did everything together, performing the same manual work every day. One could see that as they twisted their fibers, the resulting threads were fine and lustrous; and the cloth that they wove from it was as brilliant and lush as brocade, bringing them a price for it that was often three times higher than for other cloth. When the widow went out, the girl locked their doors; and whenever anyone came to visit the old woman, the girl always stayed in her room. They lived this way for six months, and no one else knew about the girl.
After that, the widow gradually began to inform her relatives that there was a girl living with her. Her sisters all came from the village on various pretexts and begged to see the girl. The girl consequently told the widow, “You’ve spoken ill-advisedly, for now I won’t be able to live with you much longer.”
The old woman regretted having told her relatives, feeling full of self-recrimination; but the requests to see the girl came in greater numbers every day, and those who came tried to force the widow to let them see her. The old woman tearfully reported this to the girl. She replied, “If they were all female companions, then I don’t see that there’s any problem; but I worry that there’ll be someone frivolous among them.” The widow repeated her sorrowful request, and the girl finally relented.