by Mei Yüan
Yang was greatly excited at this opportunity, and rather proud of his prowess in the "battle of the flower pickers," so he quickly joined her in bed. However, it wasn't very long before he had spent all his sperm, and he fell to the floor, limp and exhausted.
The nun got up and shouted viciously at him, "Pass on the Dao! Pass on the Dao! Evil invites an evil revenge!" She laughed a raucous laugh and left.
Yang regained consciousness at the fifth watch. Looking around, he realized he was lying in a ramshackle shed. He could make out the calls of a bean curd vendor nearby, and in his pitiful state he crawled outside. While waiting for his family to come and carry him home Yang told his tale to the bean curd vendor.
Three days later Yang was dead.
The Wooden Guardsmen
In the capital, the Currency Board's main compound has a small temple dedicated to a local god. The temple is protected by the wooden statues of four guardsmen. The coppersmiths working at the Currency Board would regularly worship at the temple, since they all lived in the compound.
One night it happened that the younger men among the team had an identical nightmare. They dreamed that they were sodomized but despite the nausea and pain were unable to shout or move. It was as if their feet and hands had been bound. When they woke the next morning and rubbed their sore anuses, each discovered his own to be caked with a black mud.
This pattern continued for over a month and the coppersmiths were at a loss to know who or what was taking advantage of them.
Eventually, one of the victims, while making an offering at the temple, recognized the face of one of the wooden guards as that of the rapist. He promptly informed the others and they reported it to the magistrate. The feet of this wooden statue were then nailed down as a punishment and precaution. After this, the strange nightly visits ceased.
A Woman Transforms into a Man
The Xue family from Leiyang County had a daughter by the name of Xue Mei. They betrothed her to a boy from the Huang family, but just before the wedding Xue Mei was struck by a mysterious sickness that made her dangerously ill.
While delirious she was approached by a white-haired old man. He began to massage her all over, gradually working his way down to her hips and genitals. She became very embarrassed and tried to stop him, but he continued to massage the area.
Before he left, he forcefully inserted something into her genital area. Xue Mei cried out and her worried parents came running in to see what was wrong. Then they saw that although her illness had passed she had been transformed into a man in the process.
The acting magistrate was Zhang Xizu, and he and another official, Tao Huixuan, who happened to be in the prefecture on other business, came to the Xue house to examine the girl. They officially confirmed that Xue Mei had become a man. Her voice and facial features were still those of a woman, but in her groin she had a penis and all that remained of her vagina was a crack in the skin.
The Xue family changed her name from Xue Mei to Xue Lai and so the number of sons in the household increased from two to three.
The Prince of Guazhou
In Hangzhou there is a place called Da Fangbo where the Hu family lived, the two sisters-in-law sharing the same floor.
One day during the grave-sweeping festival of Qing Ming, one of the sisters-in-law noticed a small bridgelike structure on the roof. It was made from willow twigs so she assumed that the children had put it there. She used a long bamboo pole to scrape it off the roof and into the rubbish bin.
That night she dreamed that a young man dressed in the manner of a Daoist appeared before her.
"I am the Prince of Guazhou and it is my fate that I live with you and your sister-in-law," he said.
"I made a lover's bridge and placed it on your roof so that we could meet during Qing Ming. Why did you throw it away?"
From this day on, the so-called prince stayed in the women's room, taking advantage of them as he pleased.
The scandalized Hu family then called a Daoist priest to scare away the intruding demon by chanting the Jade Emperor Sutra. However, when the priest arrived the monster threw a chamber pot at him, soaking him and his sacred books in urine. The priest ran off, humiliated.
Mr. Hu then decided to hire five old women to chaperone the two younger women. Mysteriously, the old women's hair became plaited together so that they were unable to move backwards or forwards without pulling the others' hair.
This continued for over a month, until it was time for one of the women to be married to her betrothed. Mr. Hu chose an appropriate day and married her off.
The monster then confronted Mr. Hu in person, saying, "I am not fated to be with the man you have married her to, so I can't go. I could stay on here and enjoy myself with the remaining sister-in-law, but it is rather boring to have only one beautiful woman to play around with, so I think I'll just say goodbye.
"I've really caused you a lot of trouble and I have no way of repaying your generosity. But I do have an extremely beautiful young sister whom I could give to you as a concubine, if you like," he continued.
Mr. Hu asked to see the sister in question and sure enough when they went out into the hall, there stood a young girl of exceptional beauty.
Hu asked hastily how long it would take to arrange the wedding and the monster replied, "Although I am quite happy to have you as my brother-in-law, my sister doesn't want to marry you because you are old and ugly. However, if you shaved your beard she would consider marrying you."
Mr. Hu was indeed a corpulent, full-bearded man of more than fifty. He believed the monster and dutifully shaved off his beard, but after he had done so the monster merely laughed coarsely at him, leaped into the air, and flew off.
Of course, the beautiful sister never did come back.
Yang Er
Yang Er of Hangzhou was skilled in the martial arts and particularly adept with his fists and his staff. One summer night while he was sitting in the cool of a rocky outcrop on a small seat carved out of the stone, he saw a tiny head emerging from a crack in a nearby rock. The hair appeared first and the face quietly followed.
The terrified Yang Er grabbed his staff and struck the protruding head, which quickly popped back into its little crevice.
While Yang Er was in his room the next day, he heard the click clack of clogs from the floor below. He was pretty sure that this was no thief, since thieves would not be so foolish as to wear clogs. It wasn't long before the click-clack noise came up the staircase towards Yang Er's room.
At the doorway there appeared a man dressed from head to toe in white. He wore a tall hat and in his hand he held a box lantern. When the man in white saw Yang Er, he burst into a raucous cackle.
Confronted with this creature, Yang Er promptly struck him with an iron ruler, causing him to topple backwards down the staircase.
The man in white shouted angrily back up the stairs, "You call that a good thrashing! Well, wait till I get my gang onto you. Then I'll show you a thing or two!"
Yang Er called his disciples together and told them of the threats made against him by the ghost.
These rascally disciples roared with indignation and bravado. "So what if they've formed a gang? So have we! We'll defend out master! We'll go up there and beat the living daylights out of them!" they cried.
The men first had themselves a feast, eating and drinking until they were satisfied. Finally they grabbed their weapons and headed upstairs to Yang Er's room. The ghosts, however, were nowhere to be seen.
By the time the cock crowed to herald the new day, these scoundrels had all tired of their mission and fallen asleep. When they finally awoke it was too late. They found Yang Er dead on the bamboo matting in the room below.
Helping a Ghost Get Revenge
The express postman in the Bureau of Salt Transport was a man by the name of Ma Jixian. In the course of his employment he had become quite wealthy, so he purchased for his son, Huanzhang, a position as a minor official.
Now the son himself
became a very talented bureaucrat, and he soon grew even wealthier than his father. It wasn't long before the Ma family were millionaires.
Years passed and Jixian, now an old man, bought a concubine whose surname was also Ma. The two of them developed a deep and trusting bond. Jixian was so appreciative of his concubine's efforts that he said to her one day, in reference to his accumulated wealth of several thousand caddies of gold, "You have been such a loyal and attentive assistant in my old age that I have decided to leave you all my property when I die. I don't mind whether you stay on with my family or remarry after my death. It is up to you."
Five or six years later Ma Jixian became gravely ill and called his son to his side. "This woman has been a devoted concubine. I want all my savings passed to her when I die."
However, after his father's death Huanzhang did nothing of the sort.
He and his uncle, Mr. Wu, a former prefect in Quanzhou, plotted to ensure that the money stayed with them.
Huanzhang explained his problem to Wu, concluding, "Who would have thought that my father would want to leave all his wealth to this woman? What a dreadful waste!"
"This shouldn't be too difficult to sort out. I'll come and help you chase her out of the house," Wu responded.
Several days later Huanzhang told the concubine to leave the house where she and Jixian had lived, using the excuse that she should sit with the coffin and wait until the soul had left the body. As soon as she was out of the house, Huanzhang and his wife transferred all the dead man's possessions, including all his treasures, into their own room. They then locked the door of the old man's house.
Naturally, the concubine remained oblivious to the theft.
When the seven days of mourning were over and Ma Jixian's soul had left his body, the concubine returned to the house planning to go back to her rooms in the inner chambers and begin her life as a widow.
Mr. Wu then suddenly shouted harshly at her, "Aunty Concubine! Don't go back in there! You're too young to remain a chaste widow all your life. Why don't you pack up your things and go home to your mother? She'll find you another man! I'll make sure the young master gives you some money."
Wu then asked Huanzhang to take fifty caddies of silver to the concubine.
Huanzhang hurried out saying, "Look, I've got it all ready for you!"
But the concubine insisted that she wanted to return to her rooms.
"I'm sorry," Huanzhang said, "but this is what our uncle, Prefect Wu, has instructed. I'm sure he's not mistaken in this regard. We've packed all your belongings into boxes, so there is no need for you to go back into the house."
The concubine, accustomed to obeying the orders of her husband and stepson, was also afraid of the power of Prefect Wu. She had no option but to order a carriage and leave, barely able to suppress her tears.
Huanzhang, needless to say, was extremely grateful to Wu for devising such a scheme.
Several months later, during the preparations for the Ghost Festival of July fifteenth, the concubine decided to return to the Ma residence to make some offerings in honor of her dead husband's spirit. By this time, the money she had taken home had been squandered by her brothers and parents. On the twelfth of July, she took some incense and other paraphernalia for worship and set off for the Ma residence.
Huanzhang's wife saw her approaching and hurried out shouting abusively, "You're a shameless hussy! Coming back after you've left the family!"
Her entry to the main rooms thus blocked, the concubine was ordered to remain in the corridors that ran through the outer sections of the residence and instructed to spend the night there before making her offerings.
"You must leave as soon as you complete the worship. I won't allow you to stay a minute longer," she was told.
The concubine cried and sobbed all night long, the noise ceasing only around the fifth watch. The next day, her body was discovered hanging from a roof beam. Huanzhang bought a coffin for the body and performed the appropriate funeral rituals for her.
The concubine's family made no complaints, nor did they call for any investigation of the death, since they too were frightened of Wu's authority. For his part, Huanzhang felt uncomfortable remaining in a house where a ghost might be living, so he sold it to a Mr. Zhang and bought an even more luxurious mansion.
Mr. Zhang had been a devout Buddhist from a very young age. During his nightly prayers he often encountered the spirit of the sobbing concubine. He eventually found out what had happened. In addition to being angry at having been sold a haunted house, he was quite indignant at the injustice of the concubine's treatment.
He said to the ghost, "Mistress Ma, my family and I paid a lot of money for this house. It wasn't as if we took it by force or anything like that. The hatred you have for Mr. Wu and Huanzhang, moreover, has nothing to do with my family. How would it be if I delivered you to Huanzhang's new house myself, tomorrow night, around the second watch?"
The ghost smiled her assent and disappeared.
The next night, Zhang made a tablet for the ghost, burned incense in preparation, then delivered her to the gate of Huanzhang's new residence.
"Wait here. I'll go knock on the door," he whispered to the tablet.
He then walked over, knocked on the door, and addressed the doorman. "Has your master returned for the night?"
"Not yet, sir," came the reply.
Zhang turned to the ghost and said, "You might as well go in now and prepare to take your revenge."
The doorman laughed, thinking Zhang some sort of lunatic talking nonsense to himself, and thought nothing more of it. For his part, Zhang returned home and spent an anxious night without sleep. Even before the sun had risen the next morning he had rushed back to the Ma residence to find out what had happened.
The same doorman was standing at the entrance. Zhang asked him, "Why are you working so early?"
"You know, as soon as the master returned last night he became gravely ill. His situation is quite critical now," replied the doorman.
Zhang was terrified at this news and hurried back home. Late that afternoon he made his way back to the Ma's mansion and discovered that Huanzhang had already died. Several days later Mr. Wu also passed away.
Huanzhang had died without sons, so his property was claimed by relatives. Wu also had no descendants, so the fortunes of this line of his family also went into an immediate decline.
A Donkey Helps Solve a Strange Case
This strange tale occurred in 1788 during the reign of the Qianlong emperor.
In Baoding Prefecture, Qingwan County, the Li and Zhang families were joined by the marriage of the Zhangs' son to one of the Li family's daughters.
The distance between the Li family home and the Zhangs' village was more than a hundred miles, and so the customary visit of the bride to her parents after a month of marriage was not a simple matter.
However, the new Madam Zhang made the journey, and when it came time to return she was picked up by her husband. He brought a donkey for her to ride while he walked behind.
About twenty miles from the Zhangs' village they passed through a village where the husband had a number of good friends. They got caught up in conversation and eventually Zhang suggested to his wife that she start off for home before him. The donkey knew the road so there was supposedly little danger that she would get lost.
She had gone only six or seven miles when she came to an intersection. The western path led to the Zhangs' village and the eastern path to Renqiu County.
Just as the donkey was about to cross to the western path, a carriage owned by a wealthy young Renqiu man by the name of Liu came hurtling past. It pushed the donkey off the road leaving the poor animal quite disoriented. The donkey then resumed its steady pace, but this time on the eastern path towards Renqiu, away from the Zhangs' village.
Towards dusk, the young bride began to suspect something had gone terribly wrong. Coming across the wealthy young Renqiu man, whose carriage had stopped, she nervously asked how far s
he was from Zhang Village.
"You're going the wrong way for Zhang Village. You should have gone west," the young man replied.
"This road goes to Renqiu. You're only a couple of dozen miles away! It's too late to stay on the road, though.
"Come with me and I'll find you lodgings for the night. In the morning I'll send someone over to see you home. How does that sound?"
There was little that Madam Zhang could do, so she muttered her tentative assent to the stranger's plan. He led her to one of his nearby properties. The tenant of the estate was a Mr. Kong and he agreed to provide a bed for Madam Zhang.
By coincidence, Kong's newly married daughter was also back visiting her parents for the first time since her marriage. Faced with a shortage of suitable beds, Kong asked his daughter if she could go back to her husband's, for the night.
"Our landlord's here and we can't offend him, so why don't you head back to your husband's, and when Liu has gone I'll come and fetch you back again."
The daughter saw the predicament her father was in, so she returned to her new husband's house. The room where she had planned to stay was then prepared for Madam Zhang and Landlord Liu. Liu's carriage driver slept outside and Madam Zhang's donkey was tied under the eaves at the eastern end of the house.
The next day at noon, when the two guests had still not emerged from behind their locked door, Kong peeked through a crack in the window to see what was going on. There lying on the bed were two headless corpses; the heads lay on the floor. The young woman's donkey had also disappeared during the night.
Kong and Liu's driver were terrified. Both men trembled helplessly in the face of this disaster.