StrangeTalesfromaChineseStudio

STRANGE TALES FROM A CHINESE STUDIO PU SONGLING (1640–1715) wrote his Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Liaozhai zhiyi) over several decades, during a life spent in obscurity in his home province of Shandong, in northern China. The book amounted to nearly five hundred items of greatly varying lengths, from short anecdotes and jottings to fully fledged stories, on a wide variety of ‘strange’ themes. It was never published in his lifetime, and at first circulated in hand-copied versions. It was finally printed in 1766, in the southern city of Hangzhou, and was reprinted countless times, attracting many commentaries and imitations. It rapidly came to be considered the supreme work of fiction in the classical Chinese language, just as The Story of the Stone (also published in Penguin Classics, in five volumes (1973–86)) came to be considered the pinnacle of fiction in the vernacular. This new translation introduces a selection of 104 tales from the original work. JOHN MINFORD studied Chinese at Oxford and at the Australian National University and has taught in China, Hong Kong and New Zealand. He edited (with Geremie Barmé) Seeds of F......