Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio
Nearly five hundred short pieces about fox spirits, ghost brides, and examination candidates who wake to find the years gone: a scholar lodging in a ruined temple is visited by a woman who is not alive, a painted wall opens on a man who walks into it, a merchant's wife turns out to have been settling a debt from a previous life. Pu Songling, who sat the provincial examination and failed it for forty years, wrote them in terse classical Chinese and appended signed judgements in the voice of the Historian of the Strange. The high point of the zhiyi tradition, and the source of more Chinese opera and film than any other prose collection.
Open Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio in the archive — filters, lineage graph and full facet browsing.
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
Plot structure
Symbol / motif
Conflict
Culture / tradition
Closest analogues
- 53% · 11 shared
- 51% · 10 shared
- 51% · 9 shared
- 48% · 9 shared
- 48% · 9 shared
- 45% · 10 shared