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Nie Xiaoqian
Pu Songling
A young scholar, traveling alone through ruined country, spends a night in a derelict temple and meets the beautiful ghost girl who has been bound by a demon to lure travelers to their deaths. What she asks of him is no more than a grave, and what she gives him in return is a loyalty that outlasts the grave.
👁 690 reads
The Painted Skin
Pu Songling
A gentle scholar shelters a beautiful runaway he finds weeping by the road, never guessing that the Taoist priest who warns him speaks of a thing that wears a painted human face like a garment. What follows is a slow, patient horror that ends in blood, and a demon's true face beneath the beauty.
👁 615 reads
The River God's Bride
Gan Bao
For generations, the villages of Ye have drowned a young maiden every spring to wed the River God and keep his waters calm. When the new magistrate Ximen Bao arrives, he pretends the chosen bride is too ugly to please the river — and sends the sorcerers and corrupt elders themselves to make the delivery. A tale of courage that unmasks a cruelty hidden behind piety.
👁 579 reads
Green Phoenix
Pu Songling
Beneath the dripping eaves of a ruined mansion, a traveling scholar takes shelter from a storm and finds a household that should not exist: an elegant old man, his sharp-eyed niece, and a warmth that smells of woodsmoke and wild jasmine. When he learns they are fox spirits marked for destruction by a hunter's charm, he must choose between his own small future and a love that has already cost him nothing but his heart.
👁 532 reads
The Mural
Pu Songling
On a quiet autumn morning, two scholars visit an old temple, and the younger of them leans too close to a faded painting of a heavenly maiden on the north wall. The wall opens like a door, and he steps through into a painted country where a perfect hour waits for him, and his friend is left outside calling a man who is not yet ready to come back.
👁 499 reads
Ye Xian: The Cinderella of China
Duan Chengshi
Long before the name Cinderella was ever heard in the West, a ninth-century Chinese girl named Ye Xian lost her parents, was abused by her stepmother, and found her only friend in a golden fish that came to her call. When the fish was cruelly killed, its buried bones answered her grief with a magic robe, golden slippers, and a path out of bondage — the oldest Cinderella ever written down.
👁 466 reads
The Ghost Bride
Ji Yun
When a young man dies unwed, his grieving parents do what the old custom allows: they find him a bride among the dead, so that he may not be alone in the dark. They do not expect her to come and thank them. They do not expect, either, to be so gently understood.
👁 435 reads
Xun Siniang
Pu Songling
A bright and steadfast fox-spirit takes a reckless young scholar as her husband, and by wit and quiet magic shields him from his own folly and from a corrupt magistrate who means him ruin. When his own hot temper lands him in a dark cell, she must choose between hiding her true nature or breaking the rules of heaven to save the man she loves.
👁 401 reads
The Cowherd and the Weaver Girl
Anonymous
An orphaned cowherd, left nothing but an old ox, is told by the beast that the youngest daughter of the Queen Mother of the West comes down to bathe in a heavenly river. He takes her robe, wins her, and they live in perfect love — until the Queen Mother draws the Silver River across the sky and parts them forever, save for one night a year, when the magpies build a bridge. The Qixi legend.
👁 376 reads
The Ancient Bronze Mirror
Wang Du
A scholar of the Sui dynasty, traveling through a broken age, is given a small bronze mirror older than any dynasty he knows. Held to a face, it shows not the skin but the truth within: the fox beneath the beauty, the demon at the sickbed, the illness hiding in the body. He uses it to unmask spirits and cure the dying, until the mirror itself decides to leave him.
👁 350 reads