In Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, Pu Songling assembled stories of fox spirits, ghosts, remarkable people, and unusual events. His short classical-language tales explore love, examinations, power, and social relationships.

The stories involve literary invention and should not be taken directly as historical events. They also allow researchers to examine ideas and narrative traditions in Qing society.

Historical context

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a collection of Classical Chinese stories by Qing dynasty writer Pu Songling, comprising close to 500 stories or "marvel tales" in the zhiguai and chuanqi styles, which according to some critics, served to implicitly criticise societal problems.

Written over a period of forty years from the late 1600s and ending in the early 1700s, it circulated in manuscripts that were copied and recopied among the author's friends but did not appear in print until 1766. Since then, many of the critically lauded stories have been adapted for other media such as film and television.

Publication history

Pu assembled the nearly five hundred short and lengthy tales over a period of forty years between the early 1670s and the early 1700s. As was the convention of his time, Pu titled his work using the sobriquet Liaozhai, translated into English as the "Studio of Conversation" or "Studio of Leisure".

The scholar Zhang Peiheng writes that the original Liaozhai comprised eight volumes, the earliest completed around 1681 and the latest completed between 1707 and 1714. The compilation was first circulated in scribal copies but it was not published until after the author's death in 1715. Around 1693, Shandong financial commissioner Yu Chenglong reportedly offered Pu a thousand taels in exchange for his Liaozhai manuscript, but Pu declined his offer.

The final manuscript was "carefully preserved" by the Pu family after his death, with many different individuals, including the local magistrate, requesting to make copies of it. The earliest surviving print version of Liaozhai was printed in 1766 in Hangzhou by publisher Zhao Qigao, who claimed that Pu originally intended for his anthology to be titled Tales of Ghosts and Foxes. Although Zhao also alleged that his publication was based on the "original manuscript" as was copied by a friend, it did not contain all the stories found in the original manuscript; in the preface to his publication, he writes, "I have expunged simple and brief notes which are dull and commonplace, forty-eight in all." Moreover, Zhao censored stories that had "brief references to sensitive topics". Nonetheless, the Zhao edition was well-received and was first republished by scholar Li Shixian in 1767.

At some point after 1871, Pu Jieren, a seventh-generation descendant of Pu Songling, had the original manuscript, which was reportedly made up of twenty volumes, rebound in eight volumes. They were then kept in two boxes, one of which disappeared "under circumstances which are still obscure". In 1950, the Pu family donated the surviving four volumes, which contained some 237 short stories, to the Liaoning Provincial Library.

Themes

Unlike much Chinese and Western horror fiction, the "scary stories" in Liaozhai are not intended to be frightening, but to blur the borders between the supernatural and everyday reality, using physical and psychological detail to make the move between these realms seem natural. These tales, which are "works rich in romanticism", explore the philosophical concept of qing, the passionate and emotional entanglement of the world, be it human or supernatural.