University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

The magic mirror: representations of monsters in Chinese classical tales

(USC Thesis Other)

The magic mirror: representations of monsters in Chinese classical tales

PDF

Download a page range

Download transcript

Copy asset link

Request this asset

Transcript (if available)

Content THE MAGIC MIRROR:
REPRESETATIONS OF MONSTERS IN CHINESE CLASSICAL TALES

by

Jingyu Xue

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND CULTURES)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Jingyu Xue
ii

Acknowledgements
First and foremost, I would like to thank my devoted and dedicated professors,
without whom this dissertation would not have become possible. I owe my deepest
gratitude to my advisor, Professor Dominic Cheung, whose unwavering support,
inspiring guidance, and brilliant suggestions have made the writing of this dissertation
such a rewarding experience for me. His good humor, his graciousness and his wisdom
have helped me to keep a good perspective on matters academic and beyond. I also owe
great thanks to Professor Bettine Birge, who has been tremendously supportive and has
helped me immeasurably at every stage of my work with her careful reading of my
chapters, her insightful suggestions for revision, and her constant encouragement in the
entire course of this project. I am grateful to Professor Stanley Rosen for being most
willing to read and to offer me invaluable feedback from different perspectives on the
drafts of this dissertation.
Many professors and friends at University of Southern California and elsewhere
have enriched my graduate experience and generously contributed to my intellectual
progresses and personal development in a myriad of ways: Professor George Hayden,
Professor David Bialock, Yanhong Zhu, Gladys Mac, and Hao Yang. I would like to
thank my parents for their enthusiastic support and profound kindness. I am also grateful
to my husband, Shouwei Wang, for being my unfailing source of love and inspiration
throughout the years of my graduate study. Special thanks to my daughter Carina, who
has spent many hours playing around my computer desk, and has shared with me her joy
in storytelling and story reading.
iii

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract iv
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Desires and Anxieties: Monsters as the Other 19
I. The Male Sexual Predator 20
II. The Femme Fatale 43
III. The Poltergeist 61
IV. Conclusion 67

Chapter 2: Ideals and Fantasies: Monsters Humanized 70
I. Miss Ren and the Origins of Humanized Monsters 72
II. The Ideal Lover 78
III. The Perfect Wife 89
IV. The Savior and Mentor 98
V. That Which Cannot Be Tamed 107
VI. Conclusion 112
Chapter 3: Problems of Human Interior: Monsters Internalized 114
I. Cultural Background 115
II. Monsters Summoned by Desire and Imagination 121
III. Monsters Summoned by Moral Weakness 134
IV. Fake Monsters 146
V. Conclusion 152

Conclusion 154

Bibliography 163

iv

Abstract
This dissertation is a systematic examination on the literary representations of
monsters throughout the life span of Chinese classical tales, from the Six Dynasties
period to the end of the Qing dynasty. Monsters are anomalous, spiritualized animals,
plants or objects, alien to human kind, yet almost all monsters in China are human-like:
some have acquired certain human qualities, while others can even assume human forms.
At the center of the Chinese conception of monsters is their ambiguous relationship with
humans: monsters are like humans, but not humans. The majority of Chinese accounts on
monsters exist in the form of classical tales, stories written down in classical language by
elite authors. These monster tales form a distinct body of texts where men of letters are
allowed to address a complex set of cultural concerns about the boundaries around the
human realm through constructing images of monsters in various ways.
Focusing on the intricate relationship between monsters and humans, I will
delineate three distinct literary conventions of representing monsters in classical tales. 1),
monsters are often portrayed as the “other” to humans, a strange existence outside of
social structure and cultural norms. Yet in a sense, they are also a mirror that reflects
human desires and human anxieties that have been repudiated, externalized and defeated.
2), monsters can be domesticated and humanized, turning into exact mirror images of
human beings, even the epitome of human virtues. 3), monsters can also be demystified
and internalized as the product of human mind and human behavior, making human
beings mirror images of the otherness and monstrosity originally attributed to monsters.
Each chapter explores one of the three traditions of representing monsters and its
v

complex meanings. I will also trace the changes in the representations of monsters over
history and in different social and cultural contexts within each literary tradition that I
have identified, as well as the interplay of all three traditions during the late imperial
period, which, as I argue, makes it possible for the monsters to straddle various culturally
constructed borders.

1

Introduction
Ghosts and monsters are the most common denizens of Chinese literary
imagination. Much scholarly attention has been directed to ghosts as a category for
dealing with mortality, and their paradoxical role of both delineating and transgressing
the boundaries between life and death.
1
The most commonly used term to denote monsters is yao 妖. The meaning of yao
has undergone a few changes throughout history. According to an early definition from
Zuozhuan 左傳, “When the seasons of heaven are reversed, we have calamities; when the
creatures of the earth are reversed, we have portents [yao 妖]; when the virtues of men
are reversed, we have disorders. And with disorder are born calamities and portents 天反
時為災，地反物為妖，人反德為亂，亂則妖災生,”
But the larger and more complex category of
monsters is seldom adequately dealt with. By monsters I refer to the category of
anomalous, spiritualized animals, plants or objects that have acquired human qualities or
assumed human shape.
2

1
See, for example, Anthony C. Yu, “‘Rest, Rest, Perturbed Spirit!’ Ghosts in Traditional Chinese Prose
Fiction,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 47:2 (Dec., 1987): 397-434, Xu Hualong 徐華龍, zhongguo
gui wenhua 中國鬼文化 (Shanghai: Shaihai wenyi chubanshe, 1991), and Judith T. Zeitlin, The Phantom
Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese Literature (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i
Press, 2006).
the term yao refers to portents,
natural prodigies that emerge as a result of moral and social disorder. The concept of
portent was further developed in the doctrine of Heaven and Earth (tianren shuo 天人說)
that was influential in late Warring State times and Han dynasty. It views the cosmos as

2
Yang Bojun 楊伯駿, Chunqiu zuozhuan zhu 春秋左傳注 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju 1981) 763. All
translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

2

an organic whole, and emphasizes the resonance between Heaven and the humanity.
Portents are thought to be unusual natural occurrences that carry Heaven’s messages to
the humanity.
3
They are carefully recorded and interpreted by scholars such as Dong
Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 195-105 B.C.) as a means of checking the political authority of the
emperor. Heaven brings about portents to warn an emperor about his errors in the hope
that he will mend his ways, and if he does not make due corrections, these portents may
be interpreted as a prediction of the end of his rule.
4
During the Pre-Qin and Qin-Han period, demons and evil spirits were subsumed
under the generic term gui 鬼, which may denote any denizens of the unseen spiritual
world, including ghosts, ancestors, gods or deities. For example, a demon that attacks
people for no reason was called a ci gui 刺鬼 in a demonographic text found in Shuihudi
睡虎地that dates back to the third century B. C.

5
In the past when the Xia dynasty was still virtuous, the distant quarters
made diagrams of all creatures, contributed metal to the Nine Herdsmen,
and cast cauldrons to replicate the creatures. Du to this the hundred
creatures were fully revealed, enabling people to recognize the
Records of these terrifying spirits can
be found in number of early texts. Zuozhuan preserves the tale that Yu the Great had
cauldrons cast which were emblazoned with images of spirit creatures of the entire
terrestrial realm:

3
Robert F. Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1996) 116.

4
Michael Loewe, Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994) 95.

5
Donald Harper, “A Chinese Demonography of the Third Century B.C.,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 45:2 (1985): 459-98.

3

machinations of spirits. Thus the people entered rivers and marshes,
mountains and forests, and did not encounter the unseemly. None of the
chimei and wangliang was able to waylay them.

昔夏之方有德也，遠方圖物，貢金九牧，鑄鼎象物，百物而為之備。
使民知神姦。故民入川澤山林，不逢不若，魑魅魍魎，莫能逢之。
6

In this text, chimei 魑魅and wangliang 魍魎, all with the radical gui 鬼, typify the
harmful spirits that hide in the natural world waiting for human victims. The Shanhaijing
山海經 is another early text that contains information about demons and spirits. Dating
from as early as the Warring States period, this text is especially rich in its descriptions of
demons and other inauspicious creatures, and traditionally regarded as a textual
counterpart to the cauldrons.
7
The concept of monster as non-human creatures acquiring human qualities was
first enunciated by Wang Chong 王充 (ca. 27-97) in his Lun heng 論衡:

Some maintain that ghosts are the essence of old creatures. When
creatures grow old, their essence form a human being, but there are also
those, which by their nature can be transformed, before they are old, and
then take a human shape.

一曰鬼者，老物精也。夫物之老者，其精為人，亦有未老，性能變化，
象人之形。
8

When anomalies and deviations [yaoguai 妖怪] come forth, they take
human form, or they imitate the human voice to respond. Once moved,
they do not give up human shape. Between heaven and earth there are

6
Chunqiu zuozhuan zhu, 669-71.

7
See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1954) 3: 503.

8
Yuan Huazhong, Fang Jiachang 袁華忠, 方家常, Lun heng quanyi 論衡全譯 (Guiyang: Guizhou renmin
chubanshe, 1993) 877. Translation based on Alfred Forke trans., Lun-heng: Philosophical Essays of Wang
Ch’ung (New York: Paragon Book Gallery, 1962) 241.

4

many anomalies and deviations, in words, in sound, and in writing. Either
does the anomalous energy assume a human shape, or a man has it in
himself to become an anomaly. The demons, which are seen by all, are all
anomalies in human shape. Men possessing anomalous energy within
them are sorcerers.

故妖怪之動，象人之形，或象人之聲為應，故其妖動不離人形。天地
之間，妖怪非一，言有妖，聲有妖，文有妖。或妖氣象人之形，或人
含氣為妖。象人之形，諸所見鬼是也，人含氣為妖，巫之類是也。
9

In this text, monsters are still subsumed under the rubric of gui 鬼. According to Wang
Chong, when a thing (wu 物) is aged, its essence can acquire human form. His theory
about the origin of monster was adopted by many later writers. In the second quote, the
term yao 妖 means anomaly or anomalous, not too far away from its original meaning of
portents, yet it was first used in conjunction with the concept of human-like monsters. In
Wang Chong’s theory, when yaoqi 妖氣 (anomalous energy) assumes human shape, it
becomes gui 鬼, which can be either ghosts or monsters.
In the fourth century text Soushen ji 搜神記, the meaning of yao started to shift
toward human-like monsters. The sixth chapter of Shoushen ji is devoted entirely to
yaoguai 妖怪, and the author Gan Bao 干寶 offered a definition of yaoguai at the
beginning of the chapter:
Possessions and anomalies [yaoguai 妖怪] generally come about when
elemental energies inform some object. These energies being disordered
within, the manifestation of the object transforms visibly. Configuration,
spirit, energy, and substance are functions of the invisible inner and the
manifest outer.
In any event, on the basis of the Five Phases of metal, wood, water, fire,
and earth, which make themselves visible by means of the Five

9
Lun heng quanyi, 879. Translation based on Alfred Forke, 244.

5

Engagements – though they may contract or expand, rise or fall, and
undergo ten thousand transformations – yet if we ask divination and
prognosis, we may still give these phenomena certain boundaries and
discuss them.

妖怪者，蓋精氣之依物者也。氣亂於中，物變於外，形神氣質，表裡
之用也。本於五行，通於五事，雖消息升降，化動萬端，其於休咎之
徵，皆可得域而論矣。
10

This definition of yaoguai is very much in line with its original meaning as portents, as it
is connected with the theories of Five Phases and divination. And the yaoguai recorded in
this chapter are mostly portents that are recorded and interpreted to indicate bad
government or to predict the downfall of a ruler. For example, a tortoise that grew hair
and a rabbit that grew horns were seen as signs of impending war.
11
A horse that gave
birth to a human was interpreted as an ill omen for the internal strife between princes.
12
In the twelfth chapter, Gan Bao also discussed the transformation of things and its
connection to yao, and divided them into several categories:

The thousand-year pheasant enters the sea and becomes the ch’en clam;
the hundred year sparrow enters the ocean and becomes the oyster. The
thousand-year turtle speaks with men; the thousand-year fox becomes a
beautiful woman. The serpent of a thousand years can heal its severed
body; the hundred year rat can foresee good and ill: changes wrought by
great longevity.
At the vernal equinox the hawk becomes a dove; on the last day of fall the
dove becomes a hawk: metamorphoses from changes in seasons.
Therefore doth the rotted grass become glowing insects; thus do hollow
rushes become crickets, rice straws beget beetles, wheat stalks generate
butterflies. Wings are created, eyes are formed, and perception exists in

10
Gan Bao, Soushen ji (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979) 67. Translation quoted from Kenneth J. DeWoskin
and J. I. Crump, Jr. trans., In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record (Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 1996) 62.

11
Soushenji 69.

12
Soushenji 71.
6

them. Thus, from the insentient comes sentience, and the energies
transform.
So does the crane become a roebuck, the serpent a turtle, and the
cockchafer a shrimp. Here they retain their like-bloodedness, but their
forms and natures metamorphose. Examples of this are beyond count.
The movement of things in response to change follow constant ways, and
it is only when things take a wrong direction that injurious anomalies
appear. Thus, when the lower body grows where the upper should, or the
upper grows in place of the lower – these are contrary energies. If a human
begets a beast or a beast begets a human – this is energy in chaos. When a
man becomes a woman or a woman becomes a man, it is energy
transposition.

千歲之雉，入海為蜃；百年之雀，入海為蛤；千歲龜黿，能與人語；
千歲之狐，起為美女；千歲之蛇，斷而復續；百年之鼠，而能相卜：
數之至也。春分之日，鷹變為鳩；秋分之日，鳩變為鷹：時之化也。
故腐草之為螢也，朽葦之為蛬也，稻之為也，麥之為蝴蝶也；羽翼
生焉，眼目成焉，心智在焉：此自無知化為有知，而氣易也。雀之為
獐也，蛬之為蝦也：不失其血氣，而形性變也。若此之類，不可勝論。
應變而動，是為順常；苟錯其方，則為妖眚。故下體生於上，上體
生於下：氣之反者也。人生獸，獸生人：氣之亂者也。男化為女，女
化為男：氣之貿者也。
13

A few things are notable in this passage. First, Gan Bao identifies two types of
transformations: the normal transformations that follow the constant ways, and the
abnormal transformations that happen when things take a wrong direction. What he calls
yao is the abnormal transformations where the energy (qi 氣) is reversed, in disorder, or
transposed. Second, in this context Gan Bao employs the term yao to discuss the normal
and abnormal movement of the qi, without any reference to portents and divination. It
seems that the political implications of portents is stripped from term yao. Third, Gan
Bao seems to have accepted Wang Chong’s theory that an aged thing can acquire human
qualities. A turtle can speak human language when it reaches a thousand years old; a

13
Soushenji 146-47. Kenneth J. DeWoskin and J. I. Crump, 143.

7

thousand-year-old fox can transform into a beautiful woman; snakes and rats, when they
are old enough, can also acquire magical powers. Yet Gan Bao sees these transformations
as normal, since they are brought about by longevity instead of the wrong movement of
qi.
He offers a different definition of yao yet again in chapter nineteen, mouthed by
Confucius himself. A huge man intruded Confucius’ room, and one of his disciples, Zilu,
wrestled with him. Confucius saw the opening between his armor and jaw, and told Zilu
to attack that opening. Zilu did as he said and managed to subjugate the man, who turned
out to be a huge sheat fish. Upon seeing its original form, Confucius said,
There are six classes of things which nourish life. They are tortoise, snakes,
fish, turtles, grasses, and trees. As they age, spirit beings reside in them,
and then they can cause anomalies. For this reason they are called the
“five you” – “five” because all the five directions know them, and “you”
because it is the last or oldest of the earthly branches. When an object
attains great age, it produces a malignant spirit. When it is killed, that is
the end of the spirit, and there is no need for regret.

夫六畜之物，及龜蛇魚鱉草木之屬，久者神皆憑依，能為妖怪，故謂
之『五酉』。『五酉』者，五行之方，皆有其物，酉者，老也，物老
則為怪，殺之則已，夫何患焉。
14

Here the sheat fish that transformed into a man is called a yaoguai. When a thing is old
enough, spirit will evolve, enabling it to acquire human qualities or even transform into
human. A lot of creatures like this are called yaoguai in Soushen ji, such as the rift spirit
that makes trouble for travelers along the river,
15

14
Soushenji 234. Kenneth J. DeWoskin and J. I. Crump, 234.
and the deer spirit that turns into a man

15
Soushenji 133.

8

in yellow clothes and kills people.
16
Ge Hong 葛洪 (284-363) defines monsters in the
same manner: “The spirits in old objects are capable of assuming human shape for the
purpose of confusing human vision and constantly putting human beings to a test 萬物之
老者，其精悉能假托人形，以眩人目，而常試人.”
17
The majority of Chinese accounts on monsters exist in the form of classical tales
(wenyan xiaoshuo 文言小說), stories written down in classical language by elite authors.
Unlike vernacular stories, which are closer to the Western models of fiction and arguably
unfold in a space clearly demarcated as fictional, these classical tales straddle the border
between fiction and nonfiction. They form a distinct body of texts where men of letters
are allowed to address a complex set of cultural concerns about the boundaries around the
human realm through constructing images of monsters in various ways. What are the
literary traditions for portraying monsters? How and why do they change over time and in
It is this definition of yao that
became most prevalent in later traditions. My dissertation will also focus on this category
of yao as monsters: spiritual things, either sentient or insentient, that have acquired
human qualities as they age. Overall, the term yao has a broader spectrum of meaning
than does the English word “monster”. The richness of this concept will emerge more
fully in the subsequent chapters. The most important difference is that unlike the English
word monster, yao does not have to be malicious. As with its original meaning as
portents, the term yao suggests something deviant from the norm, but not necessarily evil.

16
Soushenji 225.
17
Ge Hong, Baopu zi neipian 抱樸子內篇 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996) 17:300. Translation quoted
from James R. Ware trans., Alchemy, Medicine, Religion in the China of A. D. 320: The Nei P’ien of Ko
Hung (Pao-p’u tzu) (Cambridge, Mass: The M. I. T. Press, 1966) 281.

9

different cultural contexts? And what can they tell us about the desires, hopes, anxieties,
and fears of the cultures from which they emerge? This study attempts to answer these
questions.
Many previous studies on monsters have concentrated on folk belief and popular
religion, reading monster tales as repositories of religious beliefs or superstitions of the
Chinese. Therefore, a lot of emphasis has been placed on taxonomic classification of
monsters and identification of certain persisting patterns in monster tales, in order to
provide a sweeping order and unity to the huge amount of monsters in Chinese culture.
For example, J. J. M. De Groot divides monsters into six large categories, covering
almost every type of naturalistic phenomenon. His categories include mountain and forest
demons, water demons, ground demons, animal demons, and plant demons.
18

18
J. J. M. De Groot, The Religious System of China, vol. 5 (Taibei: Chengwen Publising, 1967). Works the
employ similar approach include Henri Dore, Researches into Chinese Superstitions, trans. M. Kennelly
(Taibei: Chengwen Publishing, 1966), Jennifer Fyler, “The Social Context of Belief: Female Demons in
Six Dynasties Chih-kuai,” Tamkang Review, 21:3 (1990/91): 255-67. Most scholarships in Chinese
language also take this approach, for example, Li Jianguo 李劍國, Zhongguo hu wenhua 中國狐文化
(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001), and Wang Li 王麗, “Gu xiaoshuo ren hua yilei moshi yu bentu bianxing
guannian de xingcheng 古小說人化異類模式與本土變形觀念的形成,” Xinan shifan daxue xuebao 西南
師範大學學報, 28:1 (Jan., 2002): 141-47.
Centered
on belief system and popular religion, this type of studies tends to overlook the literary
value of monster tales. After all, a monster is always an image, historically and culturally
constructed, and constantly renewed through writing and reading. Therefore we will have
to consider what it means to represent monsters in a given time and context. Moving
beyond this typological approach, in recent years a growing body of scholarship has
developed around the monster’s transgressive power, tracing a series of culturally

10

constructed boundaries that are constantly tested and violated by monsters.
19
Building on the efforts of these studies, I attempt to conduct a systematic
examination on the literary representations of monsters throughout the life span of
classical tales, and to explore the complex meanings of these representations. The
emphasis on representation does not mean that I treat the entire body of monster tales as
literary fiction. The paradigm that views Six Dynasties zhiguai 志怪 (records of
anomalies) accounts as the “birth of fiction” in China
Provocative
as they are, the scope of this type of inquiries is usually limited to the late imperial period,
and fox spirit is the only species of monsters that has received much scholarly attention.
20
has rightly come under attack by
a number of scholars. For example, Robert Campany argues that these zhiguai accounts
were rather perceived as records of real events compiled for serious purposes at the time
of their production.
21
Leo Tak-hung Chan also recognized the widespread belief in ghosts
and spirits during the eighteenth century China, and argues that the eighteenth century
writer Ji Yun 紀昀not only believed in ghosts and spirits but also used his collection of
strange tales to present a rational argument in favor of this belief.
22

19
Some examples are Judith Zeitlin’s discussion of monsters in Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and
the Chinese Classical Tale (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), Yen Ping-Chiu, Chinese Demon
Tales: Meanings and Parallels in Oral Tradition (New York: Garland Publishing, 1990), and Rania
Huntington, Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 2003).
Alister Inglis also

20
This argument was proposed by Lu Xun 魯迅 in his Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue 中國小說史略 (Shanghai:
Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1998), and endorsed by Western scholars such as Kenneth J. Dewoskin in his
“The Six Dynasties Chih-kuai and the Birth of Fiction,” in Andrew H. Plaks, ed., Chinese Narraive:
Critical and Theoretical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977) 21-52.

21
Robert F. Campany, 101-60.

22
Leo Tak-hung Chan, The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-Century Literati
Storytelling (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998).
11

points out in his study of Hong Mai 洪邁’s Yijian zhi that Hong Mai’s work is still firmly
grounded in the Six Dynasties zhiguai tradition, which valued reliability and factuality
much more than the fictionality or literariness of the strange accounts.
23
In this sense, the Chinese concept of monster differs from Western notions of the
supernatural, fantastic or marvelous, all of which are predicated on the fictionality of a
narrated event in the real world outside of the text in which it exists. This opposition
between the possible and the impossible underlies most contemporary Western theories
of the fantastic, most notably Tzvetan Todorov’s influential study on the fantastic.
According to Todorov, if a narrated event can be explained by natural causes, we are in
the realm of the uncanny; if it has to be explained by supernatural causes, we have
entered the realm of the marvelous; only when the reader hesitates between these two
alternatives are we in the realm of the fantastic.

24
By natural causes he actually means the
laws of post-Enlightenment scientific common sense. As Judith Zeitlin has aptly pointed
out, we cannot assume the same laws of commonsense reality are at work in other
cultures or during other historical periods.
25

23
Alister David Inglis, Hong Mai’s Record of the Listner and its Song Dynasty Context (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 2006).
Monsters in Chinese classical tales, although
not totally devoid of fictitious tracts, cannot be seen as purely supernatural as their
counterpart in the eighteenth century European literature.

24
Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1973) 24-40.

25
Judith Zeitlin, Historian of the Strange 7.

12

Rather than the possible versus the impossible, or the real versus the unreal, the
focal point of Chinese monster tales is really the human versus the non-human. Monsters
are anomalous, spiritualized animals, plants or objects, alien to human kind, yet almost
all monsters in China are human-like: some have acquired certain human qualities, while
others can even assume human forms. Inherent in the Chinese conception of monsters is
their ambiguous relationship with humans: monsters are like humans, but not humans.
The following tale demonstrates the most contested boundaries that monsters straddle,
and is worth quoting in its entirety.
There was a son of a rich family in Xinjiang, with an obese body and a
waddling gait. Since he also did not take care of his appearance, his face
was always covered with grime. Nevertheless, he was fond of wandering
the pleasure quarters; whenever he met a woman, he was sure to stare at
her. One day when he was walking alone, he met a young woman of
striking style and beauty. Since at that time the roads were slippery after
rain, he went forward to proposition her, “It’s so slippery; wouldn’t you
like someone to support you?” She replied with a stern expression, “Don’t
bother me. I am a fox spirit. All my life I have only prayed to the moon to
refine my form; I’ve never seduced men to drain their energy. Who do you
think you are to dare say this? I will bring misfortune down on you!” With
that she threw sand in his face. In his surprise, he lost his footing and
suddenly fell into the ditch. By the time he had crawled out with
considerable effort, he did not know where she had gone. After this he was
uneasy, worrying she would haunt him, but nothing happened after all.

Some days later his friends invited him to drink. A young courtesan who
had just made her debut was pouring the wine. When he looked at her
closely, he recognized the young woman from before. Suspicious and
confused, he knew not what to do. He forced himself to ask her, “On that
day after the rain, did you go to the east village?” The courtesan replied,
“My elder sister went to the east village that day to see our aunt, but I
didn’t go. My sister resembles me, and you must have met her.” Her
words were extremely confusing. Since he was unable to judge whether
she was a monster or a human, one woman or two, he made an excuse to
flee the party.

13

After he left, the courtesan told the story: “In truth I loathed his ugliness
and feared he would be violent; so I invented lies hoping to avoid him.
Fortunately, when he fell over on his own, I hid behind the heaps of
firewood in the field. I didn’t expect he would think it was real.” Everyone
at the gathering collapsed with laughter.

One guest said, “Since you’ve already entered the brothel, how can you
choose your customers? He is a man who can buy your smile with a
thousand pieces of gold. Why don’t I take you to visit him?” He took her
along to the fooled man’s place. Only when she told him the names of her
“parents” and husband in the brothel were his doubts dispelled. She
apologized, “When you favored me with your affections the other day, I
had only known you for a short time, and so I answered you in jest. I dared
to bring my blanket and pillow to present myself as recompense.” Her
words were elegant, her seductive poses lavish. He was enchanted by her
and kept her there for several nights. He summoned her “husband” and
gave his the fees per month for her company. They were intimate for a
year, and he finally died of “wasting thirst.”

My late brother Qinghu said: “When she appeared to be a fox in human
form, he feared her, fearing death. When she was a human acting as a fox,
he did not fear her, nor did he fear death. This shows that she could
qualify as a member of this category of fox spirits. She had already told
him, ‘I will bring misfortune down on you.’ This man dies at the hands of
a prostitute, but one could also say that he died of a fox.
26

At the center of this story is the opposition between human and monster, rather
than that between the real and unreal. As Leo Chan has pointed out, Ji Yun, the author of
this tale, also believed in the existence of ghosts and spirits. And everyone on this tale
takes monsters as real. The man from Xinjiang attempted to accost a beautiful woman.
She told him that she was a fox spirit, and acted the way a fox spirit would do by
throwing sand into his eyes and disappearing in a blink of eyes. It is later revealed that
her miraculous disappearance was merely a coincidence: he slipped on his own into the

26
Ji Yun 紀昀, Yuewei caotang biji 閱微草堂筆記, (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1980) 20:493-
494. Translation based on Rania Huntington, 190-92.

14

ditch, and she had the time to hide behind the heaps of firewood before he got up again.
She admitted that it was pure luck: she had not expected that her trick would work. Yet
from his perspective, what had happened did indicate that she was a fox spirit who could
play all kinds of tricks on men, and he immediately believed her words, fearing that she
would come back and haunt him even after she was gone. For him, the existence of fox
spirits was as real as that of mortal women. He had as much of a chance of encountering
a fox spirit as encountering a solitary woman who walked alone on the road. As for the
young prostitute, her act of pretending to be a fox spirit to avoid the advancement of a
man reveals that she also viewed fox spirits as something that did exist in real world, and
she was merely claiming membership in a category of women with the power to reject a
man.
Real confusion only came when the man met the same woman at a drinking party
and she was introduced as a prostitute. He tried to determine who she really was, and was
met with a vague answer. He was confused, “unable to judge whether she was a monster
or a human, one woman or two 莫決是怪是人，是一是二.” What had transpired in this
tale up to this point can be interpreted in two different ways from the man’s point of view:
it is either a trick played by a human woman, or he had really met a fox spirit. Both
interpretations were natural and possible for him and his contemporaries. The story is
about belonging to categories. Yet both categories are real, and the central question is to
which category this particular woman should be put into.
From this point on, fox spirits and women are being compared side by side. The
young prostitute was forced to fulfill the role of the category that she properly belonged
15

and became intimate with the man for a year, as a prostitute, and for a profit. The effect
that she was able to bring was exactly the same as what a fox spirit could do to a man by
means of “seducing men to drain their energy”: an illness named “wasting thirst (xiaoke
消渴)” that is characterized by excessive thirst, excessive urination, weight loss, and was
thought to be connected to sexual spending. In this tale, the category of prostitute proves
to be interchangeable with the kind of fox as sexual predator that she claimed not to be at
the beginning of the tale.
The comments made by the author’s brother Qinghu also cast the human and the
monster against each other: When the prostitute first pretended to be a fox spirit and
rejected the man, she appeared to be a fox in human shape, and when she engaged in
excessive sexual activities with the man and depleted him, she was a human acting like a
fox. When Qinghu finally declared that the man died at the hands of a fox, he put the
prostitute into the category of monster, the luminal space between the human and the
non-human. In this tale, the difference between the human and the monster lies in
function, not in species. And the act of seducing men and draining their sexual energy is
what defines both fox spirits and prostitute. By casting them in the same category, the
tale actually both delineates and problematizes the boundaries of humanity: a human
woman does not and should not sexually deplete a man, yet there exists a grey area where
creatures between the human and the non-human do act like sexual predators.
When discussing the spectral region of the fantastic, Rosemary Jackson employed
the optical term of “paraxis” as a telling notion in relation to the space of the fantastic, as
it implies an inextricable link to the main body of the “real” which it threatens. A paraxial
16

region is an area at the back of a mirror or lens in which light rays seem to unite at a point
after refraction. In this area, object and image seem to collide, but in fact neither object
nor reconstituted image genuinely resides there. For Jackson, the object is the real, and
the image is the unreal, and the fantastic is neither real nor unreal, but is located
somewhere indeterminately between the two.
27
As discussed above, in the Chinese tales of monsters, the central opposition is not
between the real and unreal, but the human and the non-human. If we replace the real in
Jackson’s schema with the human, and unreal with the non-human, the space occupied by
the monster becomes immediately clear: it is also the paraxial area behind the mirror,
neither human nor non-human, but somewhere in between.

There is not a single, unified answer to the meaning of monsters. However, by
focusing on the intricate relationship between monsters and humans, I will delineate three
distinct literary conventions of representing monsters in classical tales. 1), monsters are
often portrayed as the “other” to humans, a strange existence outside of social structure
and cultural norms. Yet in a sense, they are also a mirror which reflects human desires
and human anxieties that have been repudiated, externalized and defeated. 2), monsters
can be domesticated and humanized, turning into exact mirror images of human beings,
even the epitome of human virtues. Like a mirror, it reflects human ideals and fantasies
that can hardly be fully realized within human society. 3), monsters can also be
demystified and internalized as the product of human mind and human behavior, making

27
Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge, 1986) 19-
20.

17

human beings mirror images of the otherness and monstrosity originally attributed to
monsters. The broad scope of this study allows me to trace the changes in the
representation of monsters over time within each tradition. Like a magic mirror that
exposes the original forms of monsters, the monster tales also reveal the anxieties,
fantasies, and problems of human beings.
Each chapter of my dissertation will examine one particular tradition of
representing monsters. Chapter 1 deals with monsters portrayed as the other to the human.
This is the earliest and most prevalent literary convention for representing monsters. A
culture tends to exclude as monstrous anything radically different from itself, or which
constitutes an urgent threat to its own existence. In this tradition, monsters are portrayed
as an otherworldly, evil force that disrupts social and moral orders and the harmonious
balance of the cosmos. Killing or banishing the monsters through exorcism is an integral
part of this mode of representation. Almost ironically, just like the magic mirror used in
exorcism that can expose the true forms of monsters, these tales are particularly revealing
about a society’s deepest anxieties and desires within the human realm. Representations
of monsters transform over time with shifts in cultural values. This chapter traces the
changing face of monsters as the externalization of human fears and desires.
Chapter 2 explores the ways in which monsters are humanized and domesticated,
and eventually turned into a purely aestheticized female ideal. In contrast to the images of
monsters as the sexual predator or femme fatale discussed in the previous chapter, starting
from the Tang dynasty, a large number of monsters are humanized and portrayed as the
ideal lover. Their difference from humanity is almost erased and their own marvel greatly
18

effaced. However domesticated or humanized they might become, it is monsters that are
being domesticated, after all. I will also discuss the difficulty or impossibility of
completely assimilating monsters into the human world.
The last chapter examines the shift in the representation of monsters toward
demystification and internalization that took place during the late imperial period. A lot
of writers of classical tales during this time are preoccupied with domesticating and
demystifying monsters through the affirmation of the human origin of monsters. As a
result, monstrosity is not so much expelled as it is internalized into human mind and
displaced into the human realm of everyday life. Monsters are portrayed as human
fabrications granted reality only by human mind, or involuntary responses to human
moral weakness.
Although the three distinct literary traditions for representing monsters emerge in
a chronological sequence, rather than replacing one another, they exist alongside and
interplay with each other. During the late imperial period the three modes of representing
monsters form a paradoxical condition where the images of humans and monsters are
constantly reflected upon each other and the boundaries between them evaporates,
making it increasingly difficult to locate monstrosity.

19

Chapter 1
Desires and Anxieties: Monsters as the Other
The earliest and most common way to represent monsters in classical tales is to
portray them as the other. It seems natural considering the alien nature of monsters.
Unlike ghosts who in their previous lives existed as humans and within the human world,
monsters are complete outsiders that evolve from animals, plants, or even inanimate
objects. They may acquire human qualities, yet they have never existed as humans, and
usually do not share the social, cultural, and moral values of the human world. Therefore,
they are like humans, but not humans. As the other to human beings, they delineate the
boundaries between the human and the non-human. Their otherness is usually manifested
in their total disregard of the social order and cultural norms of the human society. In this
sense, monsters represented as the other are expressions of repressed human desire that is
a disturbing element which threatens cultural order and continuity.
These monsters are generally nameless and their ties to the human world are
ambiguous. Oftentimes there are no reasons for their interference in human lives. They
are considered a disrupting agent that breaks the balance of the cosmos and therefore
have to be banished from the human world. As J. J. M. de Groot points out, “They are all
detrimental to the good of the world, destroy the prosperity and peace which are the
highest good of man, and as a consequence, all good, beneficial government; they may
thus endanger the world and the Throne. If they proceed from men, they ought to be
20

combated by everybody, and eradicated.”
28
A close examination of monsters represented as the other in classical tales can
reveal the repressed desires and the society’s anxiety and fear over them. Since the
successful repression of these desires marks one as a human, these monsters also
delineate the boundaries that separate the human from the non-human. In this chapter, I
will examine three types of monsters that are most commonly found in classical tales, as
well as the desires and fears that underlie their representations.
As we can see, the representation of monsters
as the other also reveals the society’s deep anxiety over the disruptive potential of the
repressed desires.

I. The Male Sexual Predator

Monsters are often represented as male sexual predators. One of the most
common sexual predators is the monkey/ape. Monkeys are traditionally believed to be
lecherous, and stories about monkeys stealing women have been circulating since
antiquity. Scholars have connected these stories to the totem worship of early Qiang 羌
people in today’s Sichuan and Yunnan Province, who believed that they were
descendents from a male monkey and the daughter of a god.
29

28
J. J. M. De Groot, 2:467.
In the following poem

29
See, for example, Wu Guangzheng 吳光正, Zhongguo gudai xiaoshuo de yuanxing yu muti 中國古代小
說的原型與母題 (Beijing: shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2002) 301-03.

21

from the Han text Yilin 易林 (Forest of Changes), a man laments his helplessness over
the abduction of his favorite concubine by a huge monkey:
The gigantic monkey from the South Mountain
Had stolen my charming concubine;
Too afraid to chase after it,
I could only retire and spend the night alone.

南山大玃，
盜我媚妾。
怯不敢逐，
退然獨宿。
30

In this poem, the monkey is portrayed as gigantic and formidable, yet nothing is
mentioned about whether it has acquired any human qualities or magical powers besides
its lust for human women.
A more detailed story is recorded by Zhang Hua 張華 (232-300) in his Bowuzhi
博物志 (A Treatise on Curiosities). The creature is named houjue 猴玃, seven feet tall,
stands on two feet, and looks like a huge macaque monkey. They live in the remote
mountains of the southwestern part of Shuzhong 蜀中, and abduct any good-looking
women among the travelers that pass by. The tale even specifies these women’s fate after
being abducted:
They take these women and set up families with them. The younger
women are not allowed to return home for their entire lives. After ten
years, their looks all come to resemble monkeys, and their minds are also
confused, not thinking of going home any more. If they bear any children,
the children are returned to their mother’s family. They are all like human.
If the family refuses to raise the children, the mother will be killed.
Therefore no families dare to abandon these children. When they grow up,

30
Quoted from Li Jianguo 李劍國, Tangqian zhiguai xiaoshui jizhi 唐前志怪小說集釋 (Shanghai:
Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986) 178.

22

they are no different from human, and all named with the surname Yang.
Today in the west part of Shuzhong there are many people named Yang,
all descendants of jiajue or mahua,
31

and some of them even have claws
like monkeys.
取去為室家。其年少者，終身不得還，十年之后，形皆類之，意亦迷
惑，不復思歸。有子者，輒俱送還其家，產子皆如人。有不食養者，
其母輒死，故無敢不養也。及長，與人無異，皆以楊為姓，故今蜀中
西界多謂楊，率皆猳玃、馬化之子孫，時時相有玃爪者也。
32

In this tale the houjue monkey is clearly portrayed as the other to human beings.
Walking on two feet and desiring beautiful women, they are no ordinary monkeys, but
very similar to human beings. Yet they are an alien kind, and therefore exist outside of
any cultural or moral orders of the human society. Their otherness is manifested not only
in their biological features, including appearance and habitat, but also in their primitive
sexual desire completely unchecked by the social and cultural constraints of the human
world.
Underlie the image of houjue is the society’s deep anxiety over the threat of
sexual aggression from an outside male. The houjue monkeys steal attractive women who
were wives or daughters in settled households, and should have remained in the domestic
sphere proper to them. They have even gone one step further than simply having sexual
intercourse with human women and disrupting traditional family order in human society;
they also threaten family descent lines with pollution and disorder. The hybrid children
born from a monkey father and a human mother are returned to the human society and
forced upon their mother’s families. The families have no choice but to raise these

31
Other names for houjue.

32
Zhang Hua, Bowuzhi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980) 36.
23

children with tainted blood, for fear that their mothers might be killed by the houjue
monkeys. All they can do is to give these hybrid children a different surname, and thus
exclude them from the patriarchal family structure. Aside from being marked with the
common surname Yang, the offspring of houjue monkeys can very easily blend into
human society, because they are “no different from human 與人無异”, except for the
monkey claws some of them occasionally brandish.
The houjue monkey may be a monster imagined, but the anxiety that underlies
this image is very much real in traditional Chinese society. Matthew M. Sommer has
observed the same anxiety over sexual assault from outsiders in his examination of rape
law in imperial China. He argues that in the legal context, the stereotypical rapist was
often characterized as an outside male, a rootless rascal (guanggun 光棍) who “existed
outside the mainstream pattern of settled households, the network of family and
community relationships that the ideal Confucian scheme depended on to enmesh and
socialize individuals.”
33
He had no wife, family, property, status or prospects, and hence
no obvious stake in the social and moral order. He would covet the wives and daughters
of better-established householders, and there was very little at stake for him to keep his
sexual desires in check. Sommer also points out that the gun (stick) in the term guanggun
(bare stick) is a metaphor for an erect penis, and that the image of guanggun can be seen
as “a specifically phallic threat to social order”.
34

33
Matthew H. Sommer, Sex, Law, and society in Late Imperial China (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2000) 98.
This image of guanggun is strikingly

34
Sommer, 99.

24

similar to that of the houjue monkey, who is also an outsider of the family-based social
order, and, as an alien kind, does not conform to any social and cultural restraints. In this
tale, the society’s anxiety over the threat of sexual aggression from an outside male and
the resulting contamination of family descent lines is displaced onto and represented in
the monstrous image of the houjue monkey.
A less prominent anxiety revealed in this tale is about the corrupting influence of
the outsider. The women stolen by the houjue have all undergone significant
transformations both physically and psychologically after spending 10 years among them.
Their appearance has come to resemble the monkeys, and their minds have also become
so confused that they no longer want to return home. They have physically settled down
among the monkeys, and their psychological ties to their own family and the human
society are also severed. In other words, these women are gradually losing human
qualities and changing into monkeys, not just in appearance, but in their personal, social
and cultural identification. Under the corrupting influence of the houjue monkey, the
boundary between human beings and animals becomes fluid and volatile.
When the monkey that steals human women appears again in the 5
th
century text
Soushen houji 搜神後記 (Further Records of a Search of the Supernatural),
35
During the Taiyuan era of the Jin dynasty, Zhai Zhao, the prince of
Dingling, kept a macaque monkey in his inner palace, in front of the
residence of his palace courtesans. The courtesans who lived in the front
and back of the monkey got pregnant at the same time, and each gave birth
to three babies. The babies started to jump right after birth, and it was not
it has
acquired the magical ability of transforming into a human being:

35
For a discussion of the date and authorship of Soushen houji, see Wang Guoliang 王國良, Soushen houji
yanjiu 搜神後記研究 (Taibei: Wenshizhe chubanshe, 1978) 2-4.
25

until then that Zhao realized that it had been the monkey’s doing. He
killed the monkey and its ten babies, and the six courtesans wailed all at
once. When Zhao questioned them, the courtesans said: “At the beginning
we saw a young man, wearing a gown of yellow silk and a jacket of white
muslin, very pleasant, speaking and laughing just like human.”

晉太元中，丁零王翟昭，后宮養一獼猴，在妓女房前。前后妓女，同
時懷妊，各産子三頭，出便跳躍，昭方知是猴所為，乃殺猴及十子。
六妓同時號哭，昭問之云：“初見一年少，著黃練單衣，白紗袷，甚
可愛，笑語如人。”
36

Unlike the houjue monkey in Bowuzhi, this macaque monkey was not only lustful,
but also deceptive. It did not approach the palace courtesans in its original form. Rather,
it came in disguise of a well-dressed young man very pleasant in both appearance and
deportment, and successfully seduced the courtesans, who were not aware of its true
identity until they gave birth to the hybrid babies. Compared to the houjue monkeys who
lived in remote mountains and were only able to seize the women who travelled through
their territories, this macaque monkey was even more threatening, as it took on human
form and infiltrated the inner palace of the prince of Dingling. This tale reveals a
deepening anxiety over the sexual aggression from an outsider who is able to enter the
domestic sphere by means of disguise and deception.
Furthermore, contrary to the houjue monkey’s hybrid children who were
essentially no difference from humans, the offspring of the macaque monkey did have
distinct monkey traits. They were able to jump like monkeys right after their birth, and
the measure word tou 頭 used for these hybrid babies in this tale also implies that they
were more monkey than human. The prince reacted with utmost detest and fury, putting

36
In Li Fang 李昉, Taiping guangji 太平廣記 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961), 446:3645.

26

both the monkey and its hybrid children to death. In this tale, these hybrid children were
not only excluded from the traditional family structure, but entirely wiped out from the
human world. The increased hostility toward them belies an intensified anxiety over the
contamination and disorder in blood line that an outsider could create.
The image of the monkey that seizes women becomes much more complex in the
Tang tale “Bu Jiang Zong baiyuan zhuan” 補江總白猿傳 (Supplement to Jiang Zong’s
Biography of a White Ape) by an unknown author.
37

37
For a discussion of recent scholarship on the authorship of this tale, see Chen Jue 陳玨, “Bu Jiang Zong
baiyuan zhuan nianbiao cuoluan kao 《補江總白猿傳》年錶錯亂考,” Hanxue yanjiu 漢學研究 20:2 (Dec.
2002): 400.
The historical setting of the tale is
during the Datong 大同 era (535-546) of the Liang dynasty, and the location is in the
mountainous area near today’s Guilin in Guangxi Province, which is also a remote area
on the periphery of central China. Ouyang He 歐陽紇 (538-570), a general in the Liang
government and a real historical figure, was sent to the southern frontier on a campaign to
suppress the barbarian revolt. He was warned about a white ape that stole good-looking
young women, and thus took every precaution to protect his wife, who was “slender and
fair, very beautiful”. One night his wife was nonetheless spirited away from a heavily
guarded, locked room in his army encampment. Ouyang He went on a search with his
soldiers and eventually found the residence of the white ape. The ape happened to be
absent, and Ouyang met his wife and other captive women. They told him the secret
weakness of the ape: the only place that weapons could penetrate on his iron hard body is
a soft spot a few inches below his navel. Together they made a plan to slay the ape spirit.
The women offered the ape dogs, his favorite food, and strong wine. After he was

27

thoroughly drunk, they bound him up on the bed with cloth and hemp cords. Ouyang took
the opportunity and succeeded in striking a blow at the secret spot under his navel,
eventually killing him and reclaiming his wife. Before his death, the ape spirit told
Ouyang that his wife was pregnant, and asked that they keep the hybrid child alive,
because one day he would “come before a sage emperor and bring honor to his ancestors
將逢圣帝，必大其宗.”
38
This tale is traditionally believed to be written for the particular purpose of
slandering Ouyang Xun 歐陽詢 (557－641), a prominent court official and calligrapher
of the early Tang. The Song scholar Chen Zhensun 陳振孫 (ca. 1183-1262) points out
that Ouyang He in this tale is the father of Ouyang Xun, who did look like a macaque
monkey.
After a year, Ouyang’s wife gave birth to a boy, who looked
like the white ape but grew up to be an exceptionally intelligent man, well known for his
talent in literature and calligraphy.
39
Hu Yinglin 胡應麟 (1551-1602) holds the same view: “‘The Biography of the
White Ape’ was written by Tang people to slander Ouyang Xun. Xun was thin and
haggard like an ape, and therefore an unknown contemporary of his made up this story to
defame him 白猿傳，唐人以謗歐陽詢者。詢狀頗瘦削類猿猴，故當時無名子造言以
謗之. ”
40

38
Bu Jiang Zong baiyuan zhuan 補江總白猿傳, in Wang Pijiang 汪辟疆 ed., Tangren xiaoshuo 唐人小說
(Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1978) 15-16.
Later scholars mostly agree that this tale was fabricated out of the traditional

39
Chen Zhensun, Zhizhai shulu jieti 直齋書錄解題 (shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1987) 317.

40
Hu Yinglin, Shaoshi shanfang bicong 少室山房筆叢 (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian, 2001) 320.

28

narrative plot of monkeys abducting human women and used to spread slander about
Ouyang Xun.
41
The central plot of this tale may have come from earlier narrative tradition such as
the houjue monkey in Bowuzhi and the macaque monkey in Soushen houji, but the image
of the white ape is very different from its precedents. The final part of this tale is a very
detailed description of the white ape’s characteristics by the women he had captured.

[Ouyang He] searched his storage. Expensive vessels were amply piled up,
and rare foods of every kind spread out on the tables and counters.
Everything that people valued was abundantly available. There were also
hundreds of gallons of famous aromatics, and a pair of precious swords.
The women [that he had abducted] were all extremely beautiful. The one
who stayed the longest had been there for ten years. They say, “When a
woman’s beauty faded, the white ape would take her away to somewhere
nobody knew of. He was the only one who practice caibu [harvesting yin
from women in order to replenish yang], and did not have any
accomplices. He washed up every morning, put on a hat, a white jacket
and white silk robe, no matter what season it was. He had white hair all
over his body, several inches long. He often read slips of wood inscribed
in characters like charms or seal-script, completely unintelligible, and put
them under the stone stairs when he finished reading. On sunny days he
sometimes danced with his pair of swords, which he swung so rapidly that
they flashed around him like lightening, bright as the full moon. He did
not eat and drink regularly. His favorite foods were fruits and chestnuts,
especially dogs, which he chewed and drank the blood. He disappeared
every day shortly after noon time, and travelled thousands of miles in a
half day, returning every night. That was his routine. Everything he
needed had to be served immediately. During the night he had sex with
every woman, not ever sleeping. He talked quite eloquently, his words full
of flourish. But his appearance was just like monkeys. This past spring, all
of a sudden he sadly said, ‘I was prosecuted by the mountain spirit, and
will be put to death. If I seek the protection from other spirits, perhaps my
life can be spared.’ On the sixteenth day of last month, he lit a fire on the
stone stairs and burned all his wood slips. He seemed upset and lost in his

41
See, for example, Chen Jue, 399-430, and Bian Xiaoxuan 卞孝萱, “‘Bu Jiang Zong baiyuan zhuan’
xintan 《補江總白猿傳》新探,” in Tangdai Wenxue Yanjiu Disanji 唐代文學研究第三輯 (Shanghai:
Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 1992) 577-590.

29

own thoughts, saying, ‘I have lived a thousand years without siring a son.
Now I am about to have one, but my life is coming to an end.’ He then
broke into tears and looked at the women for a long time, and said, ‘this
mountain is secluded from the world, and no humans have ever been here.
No woodcutters can be seen even if you climb to the highest place, and
down below there are many tigers, wolves, and other strange animal. How
could anyone reach this place, if he is not aided by Heaven?’”
42

It is worth noting that this final part is solely devoted to the characteristics of the
white ape, and almost independent from the central plot of the tale. Some scholars even
suggest that it is a later addition while the central plot of this tale is derived from the
traditional narrative about the monkey that steals women.
43
Wu Hung argues that this
new addition is meant to create a new image of the ape with embellished characteristics
that is “more appealing to contemporary taste”.
44
Moreover, we can also see the influence of Religious Daoism in the image of the
white ape. Chen Jue argues that the characterization of the white ape is actually based on
the image of a Daoist priest. He points out that the white ape was clearly engaging in
Indeed, although the white ape retained
the lascivious nature of the monkeys in previous tales, he was much more culturally
refined than his predecessors. When transformed into human shape, he was a handsome
man with a magnificent beard. He was well-versed in swordplay, his speech elegant and
embellished, and he seemed to have a good taste in every aspect of his life, including
food, clothing, utensils, and even his choice of women. His cultural refinement and
physical prowess make him almost an ideal image of an aristocrat of the Tang dynasty.

42
Wang Pijiang, 16-17

43
See Wu Hung, “The Earliest Representations of Ape Tales: an Interdisciplinary Study of Early Chinese
Narrative Art and Literature,” T’oung Pao, Second Series, Vol 73:1 (1987): 97.

44
Wu Hung, 97-98.

30

some sort of Daoist self-cultivation, as he purified and strengthened his body so the only
weak point is the place a few inches below his navel, which is the dantian 丹田 (Elixir
Field), the center of qi according to the Daoist human anatomy, and usually the last
vulnerable spot left on a person who practices Inner Alchemy, and more importantly, he
did practice caibu 採捕, the act of nourishing his yang essence through sexual conquest
of many partners to gain their yin essence, which is an essential part of the bedchamber
arts of Religious Daoism.
45
The image of the white ape reveals the society’s anxiety and fear over the possible
sexual assault from practitioners of Religious Daoism. Religious Daoism enjoyed
imperial patronage during the Tang dynasty. Because the surname of the Tang royal
family was Li, the Tang emperors claimed that they were the descendents of the Daoist
sage Laozi, as an attempt to enhance the family’s prestige.

46
But that does not mean
Daoist monks were not sometimes viewed with uneasiness. They stood outside of
mainstream family order, and their practice of Inner Alchemy, especially the bedchamber
arts could also rouse anxiety and suspicion from the lay world. According to Sommer,
Daoist monks, along with members of Buddhist clergy, were often seen as potential
sexual predators and singled out for special scrutiny in the rape laws of the Tang
dynasty.
47

45
Chen Jue, “‘Bu Jiang Zong baiyuan zhuan’ wenzhong suo yun daojiao secai kao 《補江總白猿傳》文
中所蘊道教色彩考,” in Chutang chuanqi wen gouchen 初唐傳奇文鈎沈 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji
chubanshe, 2006) 245-82.
This anxiety is reflected in the image of the white ape as a dangerous outsider

46
See Timothy Hugh Barrett, Taoism under the T’ang: Religion and Empire During the Golden Age of
Chinese (Floating World: 2005) 19-20.

47
Sommer, 99-100.
31

who abducted and had illicit sex with women for his own benefit in his efforts to pursue
Daoist self-cultivation.
What most scholars overlook in the image of the white ape is its resemblance to
foreigners, who often traveled to China during the Tang dynasty and took residence in
many cities. Foreigners, or barbarians, were often viewed as monkeys. Huineng 慧能
(638-713), the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism, was also once called a monkey because
of his origin in southern China, which were supposed to be inhabited by barbarians. The
term used for him is geliao 獦獠, which refers to both southern barbarian and a species of
monkeys.
48
Zheng Huixia has noted the possible connections between the white ape and
foreigners in her discussion on the authorial intent of this tale. She points out that in
Chinese language, a common name for monkeys is husun 猢猻, and hu 猢 (the monkey)
and hu 胡 (the barbarian) are homophones.
49
During the Tang dynasty, the term hu
mostly referred to foreigners who came from Central Asia, and it was also loosely used to
label all non-Chinese people from the north and west.
50

They came to China for political
interests, religious beliefs, or commercial profit, and gradually became part of the Tang
society. The correlation between the white ape and foreigners did not derive only from
linguistic coincidence; the characteristics of the white ape are also very similar to these
48
See Walen Lai, “From Protean Ape to Handsome Saint: The Monkey King,” Asian Folklore Studies 53:1
(1994) 45.

49
Zheng Huixia 鄭慧霞, “‘Bu Jiang Zong baiyuan zhuan’ chuangzuo zhuzhi tanwei 《補江總白猿傳》創
作主旨探微,” Wenyi Pinglun 文藝評論 (Jun. 2011): 71-72.

50
See Kang Xiaofei, “The Fox [hu 狐] and the Barbarian [hu 胡]: Unraveling Representations of the Other
in Late Tang Tales,” Journal of Chinese Religion 27 (1999):49.

32

foreigners in many aspects. The white ape in his human form always wore a white jacket
(baijia 白袷) and white silk robe (su luoyi 素羅衣), regardless of the seasons. Wearing
white was actually the custom of the Central Asians. According to the records left by
Monk Huilin 慧琳 (ca. 733-817) of the Tang dynasty, Central Asians all wore white
garments except for Buddhist monks, who clothed themselves in black. Xuan Zang 玄奘
(602-664) also mentioned multiple times the custom of wearing white among Central
Asian countries in his Datang xiyu ji 大唐西域記.
51
Besides his clothing, the white ape’s
secret knowledge in mysterious foreign texts also resembles that of foreigners. The wood
slips that he read daily were inscribed in strange characters that resemble charms or seal-
scripts that were impossible to understand for the women he captured. These texts are
very likely to have been written in foreign script. And it was also from these texts that the
white ape gained the knowledge necessary to predict his own death, which makes him a
close parallel to the erudite foreign monks who mastered esoteric skills such as magic,
divination, and medicine, from their knowledge of Sanskrit or Sogdian scriptures.
52

Moreover, the white ape also possessed many exotic treasures of foreign origin, including
rare foods, expensive utensils, and most notably, famous aromatics, which foreign
merchants brought into China in large quantities during the Tang dynasty.
53

51
See Wang Qing 王青, “Zaoqi huguai gushi: wenhua pianjia xia de guren xingxiang 早期狐怪故事：文
化偏見下的胡人形象,” Xiyu yanjiu 西域研究 4 (2003): 94.

52
For examples of these foreign monks, see Wang Qing, 95.

53
See Edward H. Schafer, The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) 155-175.

33

Like Daost priests, foreigners during the Tang dynasty were also treated with
ambivalence. The Chinese traditionally described people who lived outside of the
Chinese cultural boundaries as barbarians who were less than human.
54
However, the
Tang dynasty, characterized by its open-mindedness and cosmopolitanism, witnessed the
high point of interracial mingling and multicultural exchanges in Chinese history, as
thousands of foreigners traveled to China and settled down. Foreign trade was
encouraged, and foreign exotics were greatly appreciated. Yet foreigners were still
distrusted and even persecuted at times. As Edward Schafer has noted, “distrust or hatred
of foreigners was, in short, not at all incompatible with a love of exotic things.”
55
And the
Chinese were particularly anxious to protect their women from being taken away by
foreigners. Foreigners may marry Chinese women, but according to a decree issued in
628, under no circumstance could they take a Chinese woman to their homeland.
56

Throughout the Tang dynasty, several edicts were issued ordering the Central Asians
living in the Tang capital to wear their native costume, and forbidding them to pass
themselves off as Chinese and lure Chinese women into marrying them.
57

54
For a discussion on the Chinese attitude toward barbarians, see Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in
Modern China (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1992): 1-20.
The image of
foreigners who disguised as Chinese and took Chinese wives is very similar to the white
ape who could metamorphose into a handsome man, sexually assault and abduct women.
Considering the occasional ethnic tension during the Tang dynasty, it is no wonder that

55
Schafer, 23.

56
Schafer, 25.

57
Schafer, 22.

34

the white ape, as an embodiment of the sexual threat from outsiders, would display a few
foreign traits.
As a cultural construct, the image of the white ape is deeply embedded in the
social and cultural environment of the historical moment that he was created. Many
scholars have noted the inconsistency of the white ape’s personality.
58
The anonymous
author seemed to be unable to make up his mind whether to portray him as a hero or as a
monster. He was a monster who stole women and used them for selfish purposes. Yet at
the same time, he was handsome, culturally refined, and well-versed in both martial arts
and esoteric skills. Even his defeat was portrayed as a heroic act. His last words, “It is
Heaven who kills me, not something within your abilities 此天殺我，豈爾之能,”
59

immediately recall what Xiang Yu 項羽(232-202 B. C.) said at the end of his life:
“Heaven would destroy me, not because I have committed any fault in battle 天亡我，非
戰之罪也.”
60

58
See, for example, Uchiyama Chinari 內山知也, “‘Bu Jiang Zong baiyuan zhuan’ kaolun 《補江總白猿
傳》考論,” in Suitang xiaoshuo yanjiu 隋唐小說研究 (Shanghai: Shanghai fudan daxue chubanshe, 2010)
89.
The white ape is portrayed as possessing such extraordinary power and
heroic characteristic that only Heaven was capable to put an end to his life. Even his son,
who took after him in appearance, was not killed or alienated from the society. After
Ouyang’s death, his friend Jiang Zong truly appreciated the hybrid child’s intelligence
and brought him up. This child later fulfilled the white ape’s prediction and became well
known for his talent in literature and calligraphy. This ambiguous attitude toward the

59
Wang Pijiang, 17

60
Sima Qian 司馬遷, Shiji 史記 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959) 7:334.

35

white ape closely mirrors the mixed feelings toward Daoist practitioners and foreigners of
the Tang dynasty: they are admired and detested all at once.
The Ming dynasty tale “Shenyangdong ji 申陽洞記” by Qu You瞿佑 (1347-1403)
also deals with the theme of a monkey stealing women, and many scholars believe that it
is heavily influenced by “Biography of the White Ape”.
61

61
See Zhou Lengjia 周楞伽, “Jiandeng xinhua yu tangsong xiaoshuo de shicheng guanxi ji yishu tese 《剪
燈新話》與唐宋小說的師承關繫及藝術特色,” Mingqing xiaoshuo yanjiu 明清小說研究 73 (2004): 122,
and Cheng Guofu 程國賦, “Jiandeng xinhua yu tangren xiaoshuo 剪燈新話與唐人小說,” Mingqing
xiaoshuo yanjiu 51 (1999): 199-202.
Yet the macaque monkey in
this tale is portrayed in a different way. The geographic setting of the tale is also at
Guizhou 桂州, today’s Guilin in Guangxi Province, exactly the same as the residence of
the white ape. A beautiful young girl in a wealthy family was stolen by a macaque
monkey from a locked room, and no one knew where to find her. A man named Li
Defeng 李德逢 happened to run into this macaque monkey and its followers at an ancient
temple. The macaque monkey was wearing a three-pronged crown, red headscarf, light
yellow gown, and a jade belt, all indicating noble or princely birth. It had more than ten
followers carrying weapon. They all had the appearance of monkeys even though they
seemed solemn and disciplined and spoke human language. Li shot the macaque monkey
with an arrow and hurt its arm. Later, Li followed their trail to a cave named Shenyang,
disguised himself as a doctor who could treat the monkey’s injury, and killed it and all its
followers with poison. He was able to find the girl who was missing, along with two
other beautiful girls that the monkey had stolen. A group of mouse spirits suddenly

36

showed up afterwards, thanking him for killing the macaque monkey, who bullied them
and occupied their residence. They then helped Li and the girls find the way back.
62
Unlike the white ape, who was half hero and half monster, the macaque monkey
in “Shenyangdong ji” can hardly arouse any admiration and sympathy from the reader.
Although it dressed like an aristocrat, and assumed the noble title of Marquis Shenyang
申陽侯, the term used in this tale to describe the monkey is always yao 妖(monster) or
yaohou 妖猴(monstrous monkey), and its personality repeatedly characterized as
xiongxie 凶邪 (ferocious and evil). The mouse spirits in this tale also explained the
difference between the monkey and themselves. The macaque monkey was eight hundred
years old, three hundred years older than the mouse spirits, and therefore had more
magical power than them. But the mouse spirits never harmed humans. They engaged in
their own program of self-advancement, and would be able to fly freely between heaven
and earth once they achieved immortality. In contrast, the macaque monkey was “greedy,
lascivious, wanton and violent, bringing harm to both humans and other beings 貪淫肆暴，
害人禍物”. In this tale, the macaque monkey is portrayed as a complete villain. Being
attended by 36 guards and followers, he was the head of the entire group of monkey
monsters.

Scholars have pointed out that the tale is an indirect reflection of the social
conditions of mid to late Yuan dynasty, which is a chaotic time with a lot of dissention
and political instability, bandits ranging the country without any interference from the

62
Qu You, “Shenyangdong ji”, in Jiandeng xinhua (wai erzhong) 剪燈新話 (外二種) (Shanghai: Gudian
wenxue chubanshe, 1957) 69-71.
37

weakening central government.
63
At the beginning of the tale, the author tells us that the
story happened during the Tianli 天歷 period (1328-1329) of the Yuan dynasty. In the
second half of the Yuan dynasty, the central government was gradually loosing its control,
and provinces of China fell into the hands of various warlords and local leaders. Bandits
became prevalent throughout China, taking this opportunity to expand their operations,
some even arrogating to themselves noble titles and claims.
64
From the discussion above, we can see that the monkey/ape monster as a sexual
predator embodies the unrestricted sexual desire often displayed by outsiders who have
little stake in traditional family order and exist on the margin of the family-based society.
Considering the political
and social conditions of that time, it is not hard to discern the macaque monkey’s
similarities to looters and bandits that plagued Yuan China. Just like the bandits and
looters, the macaque monkey and his followers were a well-organized group, taking
residence amid deep mountains and molesting people nearby. And like a typical bandit
leader, he even assumed the noble title Marquis Shenyang. As in previous narrative
tradition about monkeys that steal human women, in this tale the image of the macaque
monkey also belies the society’s anxiety over the sexual assault from outsiders. This male
outsider resembles the image of bandits that were a prevalent and threatening existence at
that time.

63
See, for example, Gao Yuhou 皋于厚, “Jiandeng erhua yu mingdai chuanqi xiaoshuo de fazhan qushi 剪
燈二話與明代傳奇小說的發展趨勢,” Mingqing xiaoshuo yanjiu 明清小說研究 62 (2001): 18-19, and
Qiao Guanghui 喬光輝, Mingdai jiandeng xilie xiaoshuo yanjiu 明代剪燈繫列小說研究 (Beijing:
Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2006) 233-245.

64
See Denise Twichett and John K. Fairbank eds., The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7, the Ming
Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 18, 33-37.

38

It is a product of human imagination, yet as a cultural construct it is never “free”. The
image of the monkey/ape monster is determined by its historical, social, and cultural
context, and changes over time. It reveals the society’s anxiety and fear of the sexual
assault on women from outsiders, and takes different shapes in different historical
moments, as reflections of the groups of outsiders on which the society’s sexual anxiety
focused.
Besides the monkey, dogs, when assuming human shape, are also often portrayed
as sexual predators. The following tale from Soushenji 搜神記 (Records of an Inquest
into the Spirit-Realm) by Gan Bao 干寶 (d. 336) is an interesting example where male
sexual desire is both manifested and expelled.
Tian Yan of Beiping Commandery was mourning his mother’s death and
stayed constantly in the hut he had built by her tomb. Nearly a year had
gone by when, during the night, he entered his wife’s chamber. She found
this very strange and said, “My lord is deeply engaged in mourning, but
will not such behavior cause distress?” Yan did not listen to her and joined
her in bed. A while later Yan entered again but did not talk to his wife.
She resented it and questioned him about his previous visit. He knew that
it must have been a demon. That night he did not sleep and hang his
mourning clothes in the tomb hut. After a short while he saw a white dog
took his clothes in its mouth and transformed into a man. He put on Yan’s
clothes and entered the bedchamber. Yan followed behind, and slew the
dog spirit when it was about to climb into his wife’s bed. His wife was so
mortified that she killed herself.
65

In this tale, the sexual predator is a dog spirit who is an outsider of the human
society, yet the dog spirit can also be seen as an expression of the sexual desire of Tian
Yan and his wife repressed by requirements of the mourning rituals. During the Jin
dynasty, burial and mourning rituals were greatly emphasized by the imperial family and

65
Soushenji 226, translation based on In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record, 224.

39

all levels of society. Sima Yan 司馬炎 (236-290), Emperor Wu of Jin dynasty, mourned
the death of his parents for three years, wearing mourning clothes and abstaining from
wine, meat, entertainment and sex. The example was soon emulated by the entire
society.
66
Fox spirits are also commonly portrayed as sexual predators. The male fox spirits
are unique among monsters that assault human women, in that they not only sexually
molest the women, but also possess them psychologically, resulting in loss of
consciousness or even madness. The term most frequently used to describe a male fox’s
sexual molestation and possession of women is sui 祟, a commonly used medical term
Tian Yan in this tale apparently was following the same rule, and the dog spirit
seized this opportunity to have illicit sex with his wife. The fact that the dog spirit took
the shape of Tian Yan himself and his wife’s lack of strong resistance after her initial
remonstrate seem to indicate that the monster is really an indirect reflection of the
repressed sexual desire of the husband and wife. Considering the social conditions of that
time, this desire was a disturbing element that violated the moral and cultural norm of the
society, and therefore must be expelled. It is worth noting that when Tian Yan slew the
dog spirit, it was wearing his clothes and in his own image. He was not only killing the
dog, but also his own self, the id in the Freudian sense, and the unspeakable repressed
sexual desire with it.

66
See Ding Linghua 丁凌華, Zhongguo sangfu zhidu shi 中國喪服製度史 (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin
chubanshe, 2000) 164-69.

40

that denotes the physical and psychological illness that a person may contract when
possessed by demons or spirits.
67
The tale “Yang Bocheng 楊伯成” from the Tang text Guangyiji 廣异記 is a story
where a fox spirit sexually possessed a young girl. A male fox spirit assuming human
shape approached the family of a prefecture governor and proposed to marry his daughter.
The governor was impressed by the fox spirit’s handsome appearance, fine speech and
extraordinary talent, but turned down the proposal because he did not request the
marriage through a proper matchmaker, and his family background remained unknown.
Infuriated, the fox spirit broke into the inner chamber by force, and came out after a while
together with the girl, who claimed that they were now husband and wife. The girl’s
obvious loss of mind convinced the governor that the man must have been a fox spirit,
but there was nothing that he could do to prevent the fox spirit from taking his daughter
away. He finally met a Daoist priest, who made a charm of three ancient characters, and
forced the fox spirit to return to its original form with the charm. The daughter woke up
after a while, totally unaware of what had happened since the fox spirit entered her bed
chamber.

68

67
Li Jianmin 李建民, “Suibing yu changsuo: chuantong yixue dui suibing de yizhong jieshi 祟病與場所：
傳統醫學對祟病的一種解釋,” in Hanxue Yanjiu 漢學研究 12:1 (1994):115-16.
In this tale, the fox spirit is portrayed as a dangerous outsider who must be
destroyed. He not only sexually molested the girl, but possessed her through magical
powers, making her declare to her parents that she was already married to the fox spirit
and went away with him. Her total loss of control continued until the fox spirit was

68
In Taiping guangji 446:3664-65.

41

exposed and banished by the Daoist priest. The whole time her psychological status was
as if she were asleep 精神如睡中.
During the late imperial period, the sexual possession of male fox spirits came to
be seen as a medical affliction and described in medical terms. Pu Songling 蒲松齡
(1640-1715)’s tale “Gu er 賈兒” (The Son of a Merchant) is also a description of a
woman’s gradual slip into madness when sexually possessed by a fox spirit. A
merchant’s wife lived alone while her husband was away doing business. One day she
had an erotic dream of having sex with someone. When she woke up, she found out that
it was a young man whose manner was different from that of a human, and she realized
that it was a fox spirit. She made arrangements for her son and an old cook to keep her
company at night, but the fox came again when they both fell asleep. From then on, the
woman became confused, as if she had lost something. During the night, the fox spirit
came when the son and the old cook were nodding off, taking the woman to another room
and had sex with her. Her son went to look for her after he woke up, only to find that his
mother was lying naked in another room. When he came close to help her up, she did not
feel any shame over her naked body. She became completely mad from then on, “singing,
crying, yelling, and cursing in a thousand different ways within each day.” The clever son
attempted to kill the fox spirit but only succeeded in hurting him. During the days the fox
did not appear, the woman lied in bed as if dead. When the merchant came back, his wife
cursed him and treated him as if he were her enemy. They consulted a doctor and gave
her medicine, and she was better for a few days. One night the fox came back to have sex
with the woman, and her madness returned. She would not sleep with her husband, and
42

ran to other rooms every night. When her husband tried to stop her, she cursed him even
more vehemently. No doctor or exorcist could put an end to the condition. Eventually it
was the clever son who destroyed the fox spirit through a series of tricks, killing him with
poisoned wine. After the fox was defeated, the woman’s illness persisted. “She became
extremely emaciated, but her mind slowly grew clearer. Her coughing got worse, as she
spit up several liters of phlegm. She died soon afterwards.”
69
In this tale, the sexual possession of a male fox is manifested as madness that
recurred whenever she had sexual contact with the fox. Only her initial encounter with
the fox spirit is narrated from her perspective. Afterwards her perspective is completely
lost in madness. Her affliction was viewed as an illness by her husband and son, who
sought medical help from doctors, and medicine did help her condition, but not strong
enough to ward off the influence of the fox. In this tale and the Tang tale “Yang
Bocheng”, both women lost their will and grasp of reality under the spell of the male fox.
They are not only sexually assaulted, but mentally possessed. Their condition resonates
with the tale of houjue monkey that was discussed above, where the minds of the women
abducted by the monkeys become so confused that they do not even think of going home.
It bespeaks the society’s fear and anxiety over the outsider’s corrupting influence on
human women, on top of the threat of sexual assault. It is interesting to note that the
victims of such corrupting influence are almost always women. Rania Huntington has
noted the gender difference in depictions of a female fox’s affair with a man and a male

69
Pu Songling, Liaozhai zhiyi, huijiao huizhu huiping ben 聊齋誌異會注會校會評本 (Shanghai: Shanghai
guji chubanshe, 1986) 1:125-29.

43

fox’s affair with a woman. A woman’s affliction was always seen as madness, whereas a
man’s was considered a failure of self-control.
70

Women, being the weaker sex, were not
expected to have the moral responsibilities and self-control to resist the corrupting
influence from the fox spirits, and therefore their afflictions were portrayed in clinical
terms as madness, not as moral failure.
II. The Femme Fatale

In Chinese classical tales, female monsters outnumber their male counterpart by a
large margin. Various animals, plants, or even objects would disguise themselves as
beautiful women to seduce men. Desire and fear of female sexuality intertwined in the
image of monsters as femme fatale: they are sexually alluring, yet extremely dangerous.
Tales of female monster as femme fatale often follow a basic structure, which
Patrick Hanan summarizes as follows:
The actors, in the order of their appearance, are a young man, unmarried; a
demon, that is, an animal spirit or the ghost of a dead person, in the guise
of a young girl; and an exorcist, usually a Taoist master. The four actions
may be labeled Meeting, Lovemaking, Intimation of Danger and
Intercession by the Exorcist. The young man goes out on a spring day to a
resort on the outskirts of the city, meets a beautiful girl, and they make
love. At length he realizes she is a threat to his life and calls in the help of
a Taoist master who makes the girl return to her real form as ghost or
animal spirit and punishes her.
71

70
Rania Huntington, 204-11.

71
Patrick Hanan, The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Authorship and Composition (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973) 188.

44

Sexual deception plays a central role in this type of narrative: a monster must be able to
change into a beautiful woman in order to seduce men. The narrative reaches its climax
when the monster’s true identity is discerned and exposed. The beginning and the end of
the relationship, seduction and disillusion, receive the most narrative attention, but sexual
intimacy, the middle of story, is often elided.
The danger that female monsters pose varies in degree. It seems to be steadily
increasing from the Six Dynasties to late imperial period. The following tale “Xie Zong
謝宗” from the 4
th
century collection Zhiguai 志怪 (Records of the Strange) by Kong
Yue 孔約 is a very mile case:
Xie Zong, an official from Huiji went to his post at Wuzhong. One day
when he was alone on his boat, a woman, beautiful in appearance and
gentle in nature, came to the boat, and asked him: “Do you have any good
silk? I would like to buy some.” Zong flirted with her, and the woman
gradually accepted him. She spent the night on the boat, and their banquet
lasted till the next morning. She then asked Zong to let her stay with him,
and he immediately agreed. From then on, the boat crew started to hear
their conversation and laughter every night, and they could also smell the
woman’s perfume. She lived with Zong for a more than a year. One day
when the boat workers were trying to secretly watch her, they could not
find any trace of human. Realizing that she must have been a monster,
they tried to catch her. After a long while, they caught something as big as
a pillow, and shortly after two things as small as a fist. They shone a light
on them, and found out that they were three turtles. Zong was
overwhelmed by sadness, and it took him several days to become
disillusioned. He said that the woman gave birth to two children in one
year. The older one was named Daomin, younger one Daoxing. Since they
were turtles, Zong returned them to the river.
72

The turtle spirit assumed the shape of a beautiful woman. It was she who initiated the
relationship when she asked to buy some silk from Xie Zong. Silk, si 絲 in Chinese, is a

72
Li Jianguo, Tangqian zhiguai xiaoshui jishi 380-81.

45

homophone of si 思, yearning. The pun is commonly used in Chinese poetic tradition to
imply the longing for love. Xie Zong was soon bewitched by the turtle spirit and their
relationship lasted for more than one year, during which time she had two children. She
was invisible to anyone but Xie Zong, and this was also how she was discerned as a
monster. The turtle spirit did not seem to pose any concrete danger to Xie Zong besides
deceiving and seducing him. When her original form was revealed, humans did not even
take revenge against or harm her, simply returning her and her children to the river, their
proper habitat.
The crane monster in the tale “Xu Shi 徐奭” in Yiyuan 異苑 (A Garden of
Marvels) by Liu Jingshu 劉敬叔 (fl. 417-426) also did not pose a life-threatening danger:
During the Yongjia period of Emperor Huai of the Jin dynasty, Xu Shi
saw a fair and pretty woman when he was walking in the field. The
woman came to Shi and flirted with him. She recited:
I once heard the exquisite music that you played,
And it has been lingering on my mind for months.
How could I meet you again?
I do not have the slightest clue.
Shi was moved by the song, and the woman invited him to a house. She
set up the dinner table and there were many fish dishes. Shi spent quite a
few days there without going home. His brothers were looking for him and
eventually found him sitting face to face with the woman beside a lake.
His older brother struck the woman with a wood stick, and the woman
turned into a white crane and flew to the sky. Shi seemed very distracted
since then, and did not recover until more than a year later.
73

In this tale again, the crane spirit did not appear to be particularly vicious. What she
managed to do is seduce Liu Shi away from his family. The role of family and family
members in this tale is significant as it bespeaks the social tension surrounding women in

73
Li Jianguo, Tangqian zhiguai xiaoshuo jishi 518-19.

46

the Confucian family order. As a beautiful solitary woman without any apparent family
ties, the crane spirit in this tale is placed on the opposite side of Liu Shi’s family. Liu
Shi’s person becomes the site of the contention between the sexual allure from a single
woman who existed outside of the proper domestic sphere, and the social and moral
requirements to fulfill one’s family duties and uphold family order. It is only fitting that
Liu Shi’s brothers won the battle by banishing the crane spirit. Jennifer Fyler points out
that in classical tales the female monster is always portrayed as a woman who walks
alone, and this woman is a constant and potent threat to the stability of the family and
family-based community:
Any beautiful woman is potentially dangerous. Whenever it is because of
attraction that a man approaches a woman, he risks disruption of his
family line. Such women are especially dangerous if they walk freely on
the road. A patrilineal society depends partly on circumscribing women’s
freedom of movement, to eliminate any ambiguity in the parenting of male
descendants. Women who walk alone are potentially outside the
supervision of the community, and are an image of social chaos.
74

Although the generally mild female monsters such as the turtle spirit and the crane spirit
do not pose any immediate, physical danger, they are always seen as a destructive force
that threatens to pull family apart and create disorder in society.
The fox spirit in the Tang tale “Shangguan Yi 上官翼” becomes more vicious and
evil. It tells the story of a young man’s encounter with a female fox spirit and the
subsequent molestation that he suffered. Shangguan Yi’s son was a young man in his
twenties. One morning he was standing alone by the front gate of his house. A pretty girl
about 14 years old walked by. Immediately enchanted by her beauty, the young man a

74
Jennifer Fyler, 258-59.

47

accosted her and expressed his wish to form an intimate relationship. The girl told him
that she was the daughter of a local official, and that it would not be appropriate for him
to visit her because she wanted to keep their relationship a secret. But she agreed to visit
him when the time was right. She did come back on that evening, and every night from
then on. An old nanny of the young man’s family peered at them through the window and
found out that the girl was a monster. She informed Shangguan Yi, who then made every
effort to separate them, but with no avail. The fox spirit visited even more frequently, and
stayed at their house day and night. Whenever the young man was about to eat, she would
snatch the food from him and eat it, leaving him constantly hungry. Being a cunning
person, Shangguan Yi hid poison in his son’s food, and after the fox spirit grabbed it
from his son’s hand and ate a few mouthfuls, she turned into an old fox. They caught the
fox and burned it. From them on, many fox spirits wearing mourning clothes came
wailing in front of their house each morning and evening. A fox spirit in the shape of an
old man always cried, “You broke my heart! Why did you bring destruction on your body
for the sake of your throat 何乃為喉嚨枉殺腔幢?” Shangguan Yi was worried but they
did not do any harm and after many days, they left on their own.
75
In early classical tales about female monsters as femme fatale, the motive of the
female monster is seldom specified. Men approach them because of their extraordinary
beauty, but we never know what the female monster has to gain from the sexual liaison.
This tale is a rare exception and does attribute a clear motive to the fox spirit. Yet the
motive seems preposterous: she went into all the trouble just for the food. As the old fox,

75
Taiping Guangji 447:3659.

48

presumably her father, said in the tale, she was incurring danger for the sake of her throat.
Throat in this context indicates her appetite for food. Foxes are traditionally considered to
be a lustful animal, but seldom can we see any explicit portrayal of their sexual desires,
even when they are engaging in a sexual relationship with men. While male desire is
directly addressed in this type of tales, the issue of female sexual desire is almost always
carefully avoided.
The fox spirit in “Shangguan Yi” is mischievous, but not lethal. In Tang tales,
wolf spirits are much more deadly than fox spirits, and live up to the name of femme
fatale in every respect. The story “Jizhou cishi zi 冀州刺史子” (The Son of the Prefect of
Jizhou) is about a young man’s fatal encounter with a wolf spirit.
The Prefect of Jizhou had a son, whose name the biographer could not
remember. At the beginning, his father sent him to the capital to seek
official post. On his way to the capital, before he left Jizhou prefecture, he
saw a noble family attended by many servants. Among them was a
beautiful lady. He was enchanted by her beauty and inquired about her.
Her servants seemed very alarmed at his inquiry. An old nanny scolded
the young man, “Who are you to ask such impudent questions? Our lady is
the widow of the Administrator Lu of Youzhou. Her husband just passed
away, and we are returning to the capital. You are not a local official, how
dare you to ask such questions!” The young man told her that his father
was the Prefect of Jizhou, and expressed his wish to marry the lady. The
lady was appalled at first, but gradually accepted his proposal. They lived
together for a few days, and then returned to the man’s home. His parents
had missed him, so they welcomed them home without asking questions.
And the bride spoke in a polite and reasonable way, and they did not have
any doubt. She brought many servants and horses, and the entire family
was very pleased with her. More than a month later, the horses that the
bride had brought suddenly started to trample on each other. The bride
sent her maid to take a look, and locked her door from within. The next
morning, a servant came to the son’s residence but did not see the maid.
He went to the stable, and the horses were also nowhere to be seen. The
servant grew suspicious and told the Prefect about it. The Prefect and his
wife came to the bedchamber of their son and called out for him. Not
hearing a reply, they made the servant break in through the window. A
49

huge white wolf ran into his face and fled, and inside the room, their son’s
body was almost completely devoured by the wolf.
76

The wolf spirit in this tale is one of the most deceptive and vicious monsters. She
took the shape of a beautiful widow from a good family, and played the role perfectly
until the very end of the story. She was not bold and flirtatious like the turtle spirit and
the crane spirit in earlier tales. Rather, she acted in a dignified and reserved manner
appropriate for a widow of an official. Even the young man’s parents were deceived.
Being a beautiful, wealthy, and well-bred lady, she was not only sexually desirable, but
socially acceptable to be a bride to the son of an official. The centrality of deception in
the tale is evident. The solitary woman, in this tale a widow who was not bound to a
husband or a family, becomes more dangerous. She is not only capable of disrupting
family order, but brings physical destruction by hiding her vicious interior beneath pretty,
harmless exterior. Male sexual desire also played a role. In this tale, it is the man who
initiated the relationship. Being attracted by the wolf spirit’s beauty, he accosted her and
proposed marriage. The tale does not make any moral judgment, but at least in part, his
sexual desire brought the tragedy on himself. The motive of the wolf spirit is, again,
unclear. She may have seduced the man to satisfy an appetite, or just out of sheer
viciousness. Yet it is apparent that she did not do it for her own sexual desire or sexual
pleasure. Her act of devouring the man highlights the potentially destructive capabilities
of women. The literary image of the wolf spirit reveals the society’s anxiety and fear of
women like her: beautiful, seductive, deluding, and possessing the destructive power to
disrupt family order and bring catastrophe and death.

76
Taiping Guangji 442: 3608-09.
50

In Tang tales, snake spirits are even more dangerous. Instead of devouring a man
like the wolf spirit, they can kill him through sexual contact. The tale “Li Huang 李黃” is
one such story. A young man named Li Huang was strolling in the East Market of
Chang’an, where beautiful woman in white caught his eyes. He learned from her maid
that the woman was a widow, whose mourning period was about to end. She was buying
new clothes to replace her mourning garments. Li bought a lot of fine clothes for her, and
the woman invited Li to her house so she could get the money to pay him back. Li
followed her to her house, and was received by her aunt, who told Li that he could have
the woman if he was willing to pay off their debt of 30,000 cash. Li brought the money
promptly, and spent three days at their house. He left for home on the fourth day,
intending to come back again later. His servant, who was waiting for him outside of the
house, noticed a horrible stench from him. As soon as he got home, his head felt
extremely heavy and dizzy, and he had to lie down in bed immediately. When asked
about his whereabouts, he was ashamed and averted the question. Soon he started telling
his wife that he was about to die, and as he was saying the words, his body dissolved
under the blanket. His wife lifted the blanket, only to see that his entire body had turned
into a pool of water. All that was left was Li’s head. Li’s family later found out that the
house he visited was a deserted garden. The only resident there was a huge white snake.
77
It is no coincidence that the snake spirit, like the wolf spirit in the previous tale,
also disguised herself as a widow. Women without male partners, as opposed to the
“good” woman bound to a family and husband, are both evocative and dangerous. Her

77
Taiping Guangji 458:3750-52.

51

motives are unclear, and it seemed that she seduced Li Huang out of sheer viciousness. Li,
of course, had to take part of the blame, because he was blinded by his sexual desires and
subsequently lost judgment and control. Li was aware of this and felt ashamed of it. This
tale shares the same narrative structure as the previous tale of the wolf spirit. Yet the way
the snake spirit killed Li Huang is much more mysterious. The wolf spirit kills by
devouring the man, whereas the snake spirit in this tale kills through sexual intercourse. It
highlights the central role of female sexuality in the image of monster as femme fatale: it
is the deadly weapon to both seduce and destroy men.
How a female monster could kill men through sexual intimacy is explained in the
tale “Sun Ke 孫恪”, where a man took a female ape spirit as his wife. The ape spirit in
this tale does not belong to the femme fatale type, and we will return to her in the next
chapter. But the man’s cousin, a practitioner of Religious Daoism, did believe that she
meant to harm her husband and tried to convince the husband to banish the ape spirit
through Daoist exorcism. He explained the dangerous effect of consorting with a female
monster as follows:
Men are endowed with yang essence, whereas monsters receive yin energy.
If one’s hun flares up and po drains off
78

78
According to traditional Chinese belief, hun and po are the two parts that make up one’s soul. Hun is the
heavenly part which ascends to heaven, and po is the earthly part that descends to earth after one’s death.
In the yin/yang binary, hun belongs to yang and po belongs to yin.
, he can achieve immortality.
Conversely, if one’s po flares up and hun disappears, he will die
immediately. Therefore, ghosts and monsters do not have fixed physical
forms, so they are made of pure yin, while immortals do not have shadows,
so they embody pure yang. The growth and decline of yin and yang, as
well as the war between hun and po, is constantly in operation within
human body. The slightest imbalance will manifest itself in the color of
one’s face. I have been observing your overall vitality for a while. In your

52

body, yin is occupying the space that belongs to yang, and the evil is
threatening the position of the orthodox. Your true essence is spent, and
you are losing control over your mind and actions. Your vital fluid is
pouring out, and your root becomes unstable. Your bones are about to turn
into dust, and your face has lost its ruddiness. The monster must have been
destroying you.

夫人稟陽精，妖受陰氣。魂掩魄盡，人則長生；魄掩魂消，人則立死。
故鬼怪無形而全陰也，仙人無影而全陽也。陰陽之盛衰，魂魄之交戰，
在體而微有失位，莫不表白于氣色。向觀弟神釆，陰侵陽位，邪干正
腑，真精已耗，識用漸隳，津液傾輸，根蒂浮動，骨將化土，顏非渥
丹，必為怪異所鑠。
79

According to his theory, the danger of sexual intercourse with female monsters
lies primarily in the imbalance of yin and yang that it creates. Because monsters are
creature of pure yin, sexual intercourse with them could bring an excessive amount of yin
into a man’s body, and thus break the balance of yin and yang. It also affects one’s soul,
which is made up of two parts: hun, the yang part and po, the yin part. When a man has
too much yin in his body, his po will overcome hun, which leads to premature death.
When the excess of yin occupies the space that should belong to yang, it will cause a
gradual dissipation of one’s vital energy and essence, which an experienced Daoist can
observe from the loss of ruddiness in one’s face. This is a theoretical explication of how a
female monster destroys a man. The word in the original text is shuo 鑠, whose literal
meaning is to melt, turning metal or stone into liquid through the application of high heat.
And the image easily reminds us of Li Huang’s dissolving body that eventually turned
into a pool of water after spending three days with the snake spirit. Monsters are not the
only being whose nature is defined by yin. The configuration of yin and yang in female

79
Taiping guangji 445:3638.

53

body, according the theories of Chinese medicine, also tends to tilt toward yin.
80
By
inference, indulgence in sexual intercourse with human women may have the same
detrimental effect on a man. As Rania Huntington has pointed out, the sexual dangers of
monsters “differed in degree rather than in kind from the sexual dangers of human
women”.
81
This paradigm of explaining the sexual dangers of female monsters underwent a
significant change with the rise of female fox spirits who practice what appears to be a
reversal of the Daoist caibu: they harvest the yang essence from men through sexual
intercourse in order to replenish their yin. And this practice is almost exclusively
attributed to fox spirits. According to Li Shouju, this type of fox spirits started to emerge
during the Song and Ming dynasty.
Beneath this theorization about the harm of consorting with female monsters
is the society’s anxiety over female sexuality as a destructive power.
82

80
See Charlotte Furth, A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665 (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 1999) 48-50.
Fox spirits are portrayed to engage in Daoist self-
cultivation in order to attain immortality. In the Ming text Wu zazu 五雜俎, Xie Zhaozhi
谢肇淛 (1567-1624) summarizes the fox spirits’ act: “When they enchant humans, they
often take human essence and energy in order to complete their Internal Elixir.” Internal
Elixir (neidan 内丹) is the fruit of Daoist Inner Alchemy, the equivalent of External
Elixir that brings longevity or even immortality. Ji Yun 紀昀 (1724-1805) in his Yuewei

81
Huntington, 182.

82
Li Shouju 李瘦菊, Huxian xinyang yu hulijing gushi 狐仙信仰與狐貍精故事 (Taibei: Xuesheng shushe,
1995) 159-60.

54

caotang biji 閱微草堂筆記offers the clearest explanation about their two possible paths
toward immortality:
Fox spirits follow two paths to attain immortality. One way is to gather
essence and energy, worship stars and constellations, until they are
capable of magic transformation. From then on they can start
accumulating good karma. This is the way to achieve immortality as a
monster. However, they may go astray and violate the laws of Heaven.
This is the quick and dangerous path. The other way is to refine their
forms to become humans first. Then they can start practicing Inner
Alchemy. This is the way to achieve immortality as a human. Yet
controlling one’s breath and guiding one’s vital energy is not one day’s
work. It can only be perfected through persistent work. This is the slow
and safe path.

凡狐之脩仙有二途：其一采精氣，拜星鬥，漸至通靈變化，然后積修
正果，是為由妖而求仙。然或入邪僻，則干天律。其途捷而危。其一
先煉形為人，既得為人，然后講習內丹，是為由人而求仙。雖吐納導
引，非旦夕之功，而久久堅持，自然圓滿。其途紆而安。
83

Those who ascend to immortality are another matter, just as among
thousands of people, there will be one or two who seek political office.
Those who refine their forms and control their breath are like men
studying to make a name for themselves. Those who seduce people to
drain their essence and energy are like men taking devious shortcuts in
order to pass the exams. To travel to the fairy islands and ascend to
heavenly office is possible only for those who refine their forms and
control their breath; the ones who seduce and drain energy harm may harm
a lot of people, and violate the laws of Heaven.

若夫飛升霞舉，又自一事。此如千百人中，有一二人求仕宦。其煉形
服氣者，如積學以成名；其媚惑採補者，如捷徑以求售。然游仙島，
登天曹者，必煉形服氣乃能；氣媚惑採補，傷害或多，往往干天律
也。
84

According to Ji’s explanation, there are different types of fox spirits. The good
ones follow the normal path to attain immortality through meditation and breathing

83
Yuewei caotang biji 3:51-52.

84
Yuewei caotang biji 10:216-17. Translation based on Huntington, 79.
55

exercises. But this is a slow and difficult way that requires perseverance and a lot of work.
The evil fox spirits would choose the faster and easier way to achieve this goal: seducing
men and draining their essence and energy. It is practiced by both male and female fox
spirits, but according to the study of Li Jianguo, there had been a progressive
feminization of the fox spirit in literary history, and by the late imperial period, female
fox spirits greatly outnumbered their male counterpart, and the seductive female fox
spirits becomes the primary topic of classic tales about fox spirits.
85
They obviously
attempt to achieve immortality through the devious way of gleaning the yang essence
(jing 精) and energy (qi 氣) from men to replenish their yin. Jing in Chinese culture is
understood as both sperm and life essence, which exists in male body in limited quantity
and therefore must be conserved for longevity and health. Contrary to the yang essence in
men, the female sexual energy, the yin essence in women, is considered inexhaustible.
That explains why ideas of conserving sexual energy to preserve life always focus on the
male. As well as preserving their own essence and energy, men could accumulate more
vigor by practicing caibu, harvesting the inexhaustible yin sexual energy of women
through Daoist bedchamber arts.
86

85
Li Jianguo, Zhongguo hu wenhua 106-13.
What the female fox spirits practice is the direct
opposite. They seduce men with their beauty, and then drain their limited store of yang
essence and sexual energy to achieve immortality, a process that leads to emaciation and
eventual death of these men.

86
Furth, 200-01.
56

Different from female monsters that we have discussed so far, whose motives of
seducing men are impossible to fathom, these fox spirits do have a clear purpose when
they approach a man and attempts to seduce him: he is the prey from which she needs to
glean yang essence to aid her self-advancement. As theorized by Ji Yun, there are other
more acceptable ways to achieve immortality such as breathing exercise and refinement
of the body, yet these fox spirits consciously choose to go the faster, easier, and immoral
route. This clear motivation makes them seem ambitious, cold, and calculating, more
wicked than previous female monsters. Sexual intercourse, for them, is purely a means of
self-advancement, and again, has nothing to do with sexual desire and sensual pleasure.
The word mei 媚 (to bewitch, to seduce) came to be associated with female fox
spirits since the Tang dynasty. They possess the irresistible charm to seduce any mortal
man. In the Tang tale “Liu Zhong’ai 劉眾愛), this seductive power is materialized into a
“bewitching pearl” (meizhu 媚珠) that fox spirits hide in their mouth. A man named Liu
Zhong’ai once caught a fox spirit that was capable of changing into a beautiful woman in
red. He hurt the fox spirit with an axe, so she returned to her original form. Before he
killed the fox, an old monk told him, “In fox spirits’ mouths there is usually a bewitching
pearl. If you can get it, you will be loved by the entire world.” With the help of the monk,
Liu made the fox spit out the pearl, which was “in the shape of a chess stone, smooth,
round and clean.” He gave the pearl to his mother, who then became cherished by her
57

husband.
87
The tale “Dong sheng 董生” (Scholar Dong) in Liaozhaozhiyi is a story about
such a deadly female fox spirit. Before the fox spirit made her first appearance, Dong met
a skilled doctor/fortune teller, who took Dong’s pulse and found it very unusual. He
advised Dong to use extra caution. When Dong came home after the conversation with
the doctor, and put a hand under the blankets to test for warmth, he found a young
woman lying there. Startled, he lighted up a lamp and saw a young girl as beautiful as a
fairy. He was delighted at first, but when he groped her lower body, his hands touched on
a bristly tale. Dong was scared and about to flee, but the woman grabbed his shoulder and
asked where he was going. He shivered and asked her to forgive him. She asked why he
was afraid, and he replied, “I am not afraid of your head, but your tail.” The woman
laughed and challenged him to find the tail again. He groped again but only found human
flesh and bones. She told him that she was the girl who lived next door to him ten years
ago. She had been married for a few years before her husband and in-laws all passed
away. Now she was completely alone, with no one to go to except him. He was
convinced that he was mistaken about the tail, and the relationship consummated. He was
extremely pleased at first, but after a month or so, he became emaciated and went back to
the doctor. The doctor told him that he had the pulse of a man afflicted by a monster, and
that there was no cure for it. Dong begged the doctor to save him, and he prescribed some
medicine and advised him to make every effort to avoid the fox spirit. He returned home
This irresistible charm gives them the opportunity to approach their prey and
ensure a successful seduction.

87
Taiping guangji 541:3686-87.

58

and rejected the fox, telling her that he knew that she was trying to kill him. The fox was
also angry, saying, “And you still think you can live?” At night, Dong took the medicine
and slept alone, yet he dreamt of having sex with her and woke up to find the sheet wet
and cold even when he slept surrounded by his family to ward off the fox spirit. After ten
days, he coughed up blood and died. The fox spirit then came to the house of one of
Dong’s friend, and succeeded in seducing him. When the friend started to become
emaciated, Dong’s ghost came in his dream, warned him about the fox spirit, and told
him the way to subjugate her is to burn incense during the night. The friend followed
Dong’s advice and the fox spirit returned to her original form and died. They destroyed
its body and hang the skin up. In the underworld the fox spirit confronted Dong in front
of the judge there. The judge noted that it was Dong’s own self-indulgence that brought
his doom. He also decided to take the fox spirit’s golden elixir away as punishment,
because she should not have seduced men in the first place.
88
The fox spirit in this tale is a typical femme fatale. She was so beautiful and
charming that she never failed in her attempt to seduce men. This time again, the female
monster chose to impersonate a widow, with no husband and no family. Yet she is also
lethal with her specific goal of gaining yang essence and energy from men in order to
cultivate her “golden elixir” and achieve immortality. The effect of having sex with her is
highlighted in this tale as a wasting illness: weight loss, enervation, involuntary
ejaculation, coughing blood, and eventually death. In this process Dong’s yang essence
and sexual energy were gradually depleted, and the fox spirit was able to harvest it and

88
Liaozhai zhiyi 2:133-36.
59

profit from it. In the Tang tale “Sun Ke”, the detrimental effect of consorting with
monsters is limited to an imbalance of yin and yang, and the possibility that yang can be
overcome by yin. With fox spirits it is even more dangerous. The fox spirit evokes the
alarming image of a sexually triumphant female who is able to drain the finite store of
yang essence from men and benefit from it. Unlike previous tales about monsters as fatal
female where sexual deception plays a central role, in this tale the pathological depletion
of yang is really the focus. With the rise of female fox spirits who practice a reverse
version of caibu, the anxiety over the danger of female sexuality seems to shift from
sexual deception to male depletion and female gain. In this tale, the male victim Dong is
also held responsible for his own death. The judge in the underworld decided that he had
been “wavered by the appearance (of the fox spirit), and his death was an appropriate
punishment for his own sin 見色而動，死當其罪.” Male sexual desire, especially the
loss of judgment and self-control in the face of the seduction of beautiful women is
considered a sin. This is the typical moral judgment reserved for the male victim of
female monsters in late imperial tales. They are blamed for their self-indulgence and lack
of moral responsibilities.
The story “Fu hu 伏狐” (Subjugating the Fox) provides an extraordinary way to
subdue these fatal fox spirits. An official was bewitched by a female fox spirit, and
became greatly emaciated. He tried every method to exorcise the fox spirit but with no
avail. Then he took a leave from his office and went home, hoping to escape from the
grip of the fox spirit, yet the fox spirit followed him. Finally he met a doctor who claimed
to be able to banish the fox, and prescribed some medicine to aid the bedchamber art.
60

After taking the medicine, he had sex with the fox. He was so vehement that the fox
begged him to stop. He would not listen and eventually overcame her and forced her to
reveal her original form. The fox spirit died soon afterwards. The tale then moves on to
another man who was extremely sexually potent, and claimed that he had found no match
among human women in his lifetime. A fox spirit visited him one night when he was
staying at alone at a hostel. Knowing it must have been a fox spirit, he nonetheless had
violent sex with her. The fox spirit was hurt, fleeing the hostel, and refusing to come back
even if he begged her. At the end of the story, Pu Songling jokingly commented, “He is
really a valiant general in the battle against fox spirit! He should post an advertisement on
his door offering to banish fox spirits for others, and make a living out of it.”
89
From the discussion above we can see that the danger of consorting with female
monsters is steadily increasing from Six Dynasties to late imperial period. In early tales
This tale
is a rare case of an absolute reversal of roles between human and fox spirit. Sex becomes
a battle between two partners, in which the one who brings the other to orgasm first
emerges victorious. Either with the aid of medicine or making use of his extraordinary
natural endowment, the man became the winner of this battle and was able to claim the
loser’s life. It is interesting to note that in the previous tale “Dong sheng”, sexual
intercourse with a fox spirit is considered a moral weakness and a sin, yet in this tale,
when violent sex is used to drive away fox spirits, it is considered an admirable
accomplishment. The reassertion of male dominance in sexual intercourse reveals the
anxiety over the possibility that women might actually win the battle and profit from it.

89
Liaozhai zhiyi 3:308.
61

they are only able to seduce a man through sexual deception, pulling him away from his
family. During Tang dynasty, some of the more vicious female monsters can take a man’s
life by hiding their ferocious nature beneath the beautiful appearances. During the late
imperial period, the fox spirit was portrayed as possessing an irresistible charm to seduce
men, and glean their yang essence through sexual intercourse. Underlying this
development is the society’s intensifying anxiety over female sexuality. The female
monster is always portrayed as a solitary woman that does not have a male partner or a
family. She is either a girl walking alone or a widow, as opposed to the good women who
are bound to a family. As an outsider of the traditional family structure and family-based
society, she poses great threat to family and social order. Moreover, in later tales, as
embodiment of pure yin, she is capable of breaking the balance of yin and yang within a
man’s body and thus killing him. In late imperial tales, this solitary woman even has the
abilities to sexually dominate a man: she usually emerges as the winner of the sex battle
between men and women. The possibility of the sexually triumphant female is too
alarming to contain within the human world, and therefore displaced onto the image of
female monsters.

III. The Poltergeist

Monsters usually come from the outside, yet in classical tales there is a class of
monsters that dwell inside people’s household, the most sensitive center of human space,
throw it into disorder and render it strange. I have adopted the word “poltergeist” in
62

Western tradition to describe these monsters as mischief-maker, but in Chinese classical
tales, loud noises and rapping do not necessarily have a central role as in Western
poltergeists.
The earliest poltergeists in Chinese classical tales are monsters of man-made
object. The boundaries between animate and inanimate beings are more fluid in Chinese
than in traditional Western thought, since according to the Chinese belief, all things are
made of the same substratum of qi, differing only in degree of refinement.
90
During the Jingchu period of Wei dynasty, strange things happened at the
household of a clerk of Yangcheng County. He heard people clapping
their hands and calling out for each other, but nobody could be seen when
he went close to watch. One night, his mother got tired from her work and
rested on a pillow. After a while, she heard someone under the stove was
calling out, “Wenyue, why did you not come?” A voice below her head
replied, “I was being used as a pillow, and unable to go. You can come
over to me.” The next morning, they found that it was the rice spatula and
the pillow that had been talking. They gathered the objects and put them to
fire. From then on, no more strange voices were heard.
In classical
tales various household items could come to life and cause disturbance and disorder. The
following tale “Fancha guai 飯臿怪” (Rice Spatula Monster) in Soushenji is an early
example:
91

In Chinese belief, inanimate objects acquire human qualities in the same way as
animal and plants. When an object becomes aged, its qi becomes refined, and spirit
evolves. With the newly developed spirit, the object starts to acquire human qualities, and
some objects can even assume human form. In this tale, the object monsters are a pillow
and a rice spatula. They seemed to have formed a friendship and met regularly at night,

90
Robert Campany 246.
91
Soushenji 215.
63

and they talk to each other in human language and human voices. Yet it is unclear
whether they could assume human shape. As monsters they were at best a nuisance,
without any real harm besides making noises and startling the owner of the house.
More potent object monsters are able to bring ill luck to the family and cause its
downfall. The tale “Xiyao 细腰” (Narrow Waist) in Soushenji is about a house cursed by
object monsters:
Zhang Fen was a native of the Commandery of Wei. His family had
originally been extremely wealthy, but it suddenly suffered reverses, its
wealth became dissipated, and so he sold his house to Cheng Ying. When
Cheng Yin occupied it, his entire family fell ill, and so he in his turn sold
it to a neighbor, He Wen. Wen first went alone carrying a large sword, and
at sunset he entered the northern hall and climbed up onto the central roof
beam. During the third watch a person suddenly appeared, more than ten
feet tall, wearing a high cap and yellow clothes. He ascended the hall and
cried out: “Xiyao!” Xiyao replied, and the person continued, “How is it
that in the house there is the stench of a living man?” Xiyao answered,
“There is no living man.” He then disappeared. After a while, another
person wearing a high cap and green clothes appeared, followed by a
second one wearing a high cap and white clothes. The questions and
responses between these two were like those that had preceded. When the
day was about to break, Wen climbed down into the hall, and in the same
manner he called Xiyao out and asked, “Who is the one wearing the
yellow clothes?” “Gold,” was the reply, “below the western wall of the
house.” Wen went on to ask, “And who is the one wearing green clothes?”
“Copper coins,” was the reply, “five paces to the side of the well in front
of the hall.” “And who is the one wearing white clothes?” “Silver,” was
the reply, “below the pillar in the north-east corner of the wall.” “And who
may you be?” “Oh, as for me,” was the reply, “I am the rice pestle. At
present I am underneath the stove.” When it became light, Wen
accordingly dug for these things. He found five hundred pounds of gold
and silver and ten million strings of copper coins. He furthermore took the
rice pestle and burned it up. From this time onward he enjoyed great
wealth, while the house was henceforth peaceful and undisturbed.
92

92
Soushenji 215-16, translation based on Derk Bodde, “Some Chinese Tales of the Supernatural,” Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies, 6:3 (Feb., 1942): 345-46.

64

The house in this tale is a cursed house. The monsters that took residence in this
house created a lot of domestic disorder and turned it from home to a strange place that
was no longer habitable. The first owner, who had been extremely wealthy, lost the
money that he had accumulated and had to sell the house. And the second owner and his
family suffered unexplainable illness since they moved in. It appears that the culprit was
a rice pestle that became a monster. The name xiyao (narrow waist) is clearly an allusion
to the shape of the rice pestle. Besides the rice pestle, gold, silver and copper coins in this
tale all assumed human shape. The rice pestle monster did not seem to be very cunning,
as he came out whenever he was summoned and answered any question asked of him.
Wen took advantage of his habit and found out the true identities and locations of the
gold, silver, and copper coin monster, as well as the rice pestle himself. The rice pestle
monster, just like the pillow and rice spatula in the previous tale, was relatively easy to
conquer. All it required to destroy them is to find the responsible objects and put them to
the fire. The reason, as Ji Yun succinctly put it, is that “the essence and energy that they
have accumulated dissipate when they are burned, incapable of conglomerating again.”
93
The connection between object monsters and domestic disturbance was firmly
established during the Tang dynasty. The theme of houses haunted by monsters became
more prevalent in classical tales. There are six volumes of tales about object monsters in
Taiping Guangji. The narrative structure of these tales is very similar to “Xiyao”, as they
often open with the inauspicious reputation of the house, and later monsters are
discovered and rooted out as the cause. The Tang tale “Wei xielü xiong 韋協律兄”

93
Yuewei caotang biji 15:371.

65

(Brother of Chief Musician Wei) tells a direct confrontation between human and the
monster who haunted the house.
Chief Musician Wei’s brother was a ferocious man, claiming that he was
never afraid of anything in his entire life. Whenever he heard of an
inauspicious house, he went there and spent the night all by himself. Chief
Musician Wei told his colleagues about him, and some of them wanted to
test if it was true. They heard that Ma Zhanxi’s house at the northeast
corner of Yankang was often haunted by monsters, and send Wei there.
They prepared wine and meat for him and left at nightfall, leaving him
sleeping alone at the pavilion west to the big pond. Wei felt hot after
drinking and slept without clothes. He woke up in the middle of the night,
and saw a little boy with a short body and long legs emerging from the
pond and approaching him slowly. The boy climbed up the stairs and
came before Wei. Wei did not appear alarmed at all. The boy said, “That
despicable thing that is lying in bed, why are you looking at me?” He then
started to circle the bed. Wei went back to his pillow and closed his eyes
again. He soon felt the boy climbing up the bed, but did not move. Shortly,
two little feet touched his own feet, cold as iron and water. The coldness
reached as far as his heart. The little feet walked very slowly up Wei’s
body. He waited without moving. When they were upon his belly, he
swiftly caught the little boy with both hands. It turned out to be an ancient
tripod cauldron, with one leg missing. He then tied the cauldron to the leg
of his bed. The next morning, Wei told others about what happened during
the night. They pounded on the cauldron with a pestle until it broke into
pieces, and saw traces of blood on the pestle. From then on no one had any
doubt about his valiant nature and his ability to expel house-haunting
monsters.
94

As the object monsters in previous tales, the cauldron monster took the shape of a
small boy that bore a lot of physical resemblances to its original form. Yet he seemed to
be more obnoxious. While the monsters in previous tales were mostly engaging in their
own business and avoiding humans, the cauldron monster voluntarily approached Wei
and challenged him. In the face to face confrontation with the cauldron monster, Wei was
able to caught him and force him to reveal his original shape. The method to conquer the

94
Taiping Guangji 370:2942-43.

66

monster, again, is to identify the responsible object and destroy it. Since it would be
useless to burn an iron cauldron, they broke it into pieces with a pestle. The traces of
blood on the pestle seem to suggest that the cauldron monster not only acquired refined
energy and spirit, but also developed more concrete human qualities such as blood.
The domestic disturbance caused by object monsters became much more drastic
and alarming in late imperial tales. The tale “Zhai yao 宅妖” (Monsters within Household)
in Liaozhai zhiyi is a horror story about uncontained object monsters. It opens with the
statement that the household of Li was often haunted by monsters. Li once saw a stool in
the color of smooth human flesh. Knowing that they did not have such a stool at home, he
walked toward it and touched it. The surface of the stool sank in where he applied
pressure with his hands, the same way as human flesh. Li was startled and fled the scene.
Looking back, he saw the stool disappearing into the wall, with its four legs moving by
themselves. He then saw a white stick leaning on the wall. When he touched it, it felt
plump and smooth. The stick then entered the wall slowly, and it took hours for it to
completely disappear. Li was not the only one who saw strange things at his home. A
private tutor named Wang later came to his house. One day just after the nightfall, when
Wang was resting on the bed, he saw tiny people about three inches long brought a coffin
to the hall. A tiny woman with several maids later came in, wearing mourning clothes
and started crying. “Wang watched transfixed for a long time, his hair standing up,
feeling cold as if his entire body was covered by frost. He cried out loudly and tried to
flee. But he fell off the bed and shuddered so vehemently that he could not even stand up.
67

When others heard the noise and came in, all the tiny people in the hall had disappeared
without a trace.”
95
And the tale ends here quite abruptly. No one was coming to subdue the monsters,
and there is no way for us to know what objects were responsible for these disturbances.
The focus of this tale is on the alarming disturbances monsters could cause in one’s home.
Pu Songling carefully described the horror felt by humans when faced with monsters that
were found inside of their home. The monsters were not causing any concrete, life-
threatening danger, yet their mere presence was able to arouse enormous fear in Wang.
The location is significant in all poltergeist tales. The monster is not encountered at some
unfamiliar, deserted place far away from home, nor does it enter one’s home from the
outside. It takes residence at people’s home, the most intimate of domestic space that are
normally considered the safest. The safety of home is manifested in domestic order, the
expected pattern of everyday life: the inanimate should remain inanimate, and household
items should remain in their categories and places. The poltergeist not only probes and
intrudes into the boundaries of home, but disturbs the normal pattern of domestic life,
causing chaos and disorder. It renders the safest and most familiar human space strange,
or to use Freud’s terms, it makes the heimlich (homely) becomes unheimlich (unhomely).

95
Pu Songling, 1:25.
68

IV. Conclusion

From the discussion above, we can see that desires and anxieties intertwined in
the representation of monsters as the other. Monsters as male sexual predator manifest
both the primitive male desire for unlimited sex, and the society’s anxiety over such
unrestrained sexual desire. Female monster as femme fatale represents both the
destructive threat of female sexuality and male desire. The society’s anxiety and fear is
directed toward both the potentially deadly female sexuality, and the excessive male
desire that renders a man vulnerable in front of the allure of female sexuality. Object
monsters reveal the human anxiety over domestic space and domestic order.
Moreover, the desires and anxieties revealed through the images of monsters do
change over time. Monsters as male sexual predator resemble different groups of
outsiders in different historical moments, and monsters as femme fatale becomes
increasingly obnoxious as they change from a solitary woman that simply pulls a man
away from his family, to a deadly woman that takes a man’s life through deception, and
eventually to a woman who sexually dominates men and sucks away their essence and
energy to benefit herself.
It is interesting to note the absence of female sexual desires in classical tales
where monsters are represented as the other. Male sexual desire is addressed directly,
while female sexual desire is almost always carefully avoided. Monsters as male sexual
predator is a representation of male sexual desires, but the same can hardly be said about
monsters as femme fatale. These female monsters seldom seduce a man for sexual desires
69

or sensual pleasures. They do it to satisfy an appetite, to glean yang essence to replenish
their yin on the path toward immortality, or out of sheer viciousness. When a man
becomes the victim of the seduction of a female monster, he is often blamed for his
excessive sexual desire and his self-indulgence in it. Yet when a woman becomes the
victim of a male sexual predator, her afflictions are portrayed in medical terms as an
illness, to avoid addressing issues of female sexual desire.

70

Chapter 2
Ideals and fantasies: Monsters Humanized
Monsters in Chinese classical tales do not have to be evil and frightening. Many
of them are good-hearted and beneficial to human beings. Judith Zeitlin in her study of
ghost stories in Chinese literature has noted that “the literary ghost tradition is, on the
whole, singularly uninterested in horror or suspense”, because ghosts are often feminized
and eroticized.
96
Literary fantasy often serves the function of wish-fulfillment. It is a compensation
man provides for himself at the level of imagination. It aims at transcending the mundane
world and constructing the purest ideals that exist above human condition. On the other
hand, it betrays a dissatisfaction with what “is”, and a desire for what cannot be.
There is a similar trend in the representation of monsters since the Tang
dynasty. Monsters, especially female monsters, are being humanized, domesticated, and
idealized.
97
Many scholars noticed the gender asymmetry in the monsters found in classical
tales. There seem to be significantly more female monsters than male ones. And this
The
literary representation of monsters as humanized and idealized beings in Chinese
classical tales belongs to this category of literary fantasy, and monsters, being like
humans but not humans, are one of the most fitting media to bear the image of an
idealized being that embodies the purest human virtues and is thus elevated above their
more commonplace, imperfect human counterparts.

96
Judith Zeitlin, The Phantom Heroine 3.

97
Rosemary Jackson, 17-18.

71

asymmetry is especially salient in tales of humanized monsters: the majority of them are
female monsters. It is not difficult to explain considering the primarily male authorship of
classical tales. They are idealized image of femininity to fulfill the wish and satisfy the
desire of male authors about what they cannot find in human world and human women.
In this chapter, I will focus on the representation of female monsters. Different
from the monsters in previous chapter, female sexuality represented by the humanized
monsters is generally not considered dangerous and disruptive. They have not only
become everything a man could ask from a human woman, but also come to play roles
that human women cannot play. They are portrayed as ideal lovers, perfect wives, moral
paragons, and even saviors and providers. And one versatile female monster often
assumes multiple roles. Yet being an alien kind, few of them can be completely
humanized and assimilated into human society. In these female monsters there always
remain some strange, nonhuman streaks, often pertinent to their original forms, which
stubbornly resist humanization and domestication, and even the most powerful of male
fantasy and imagination in literary representation is unable to overcome. The result is
often the abrupt exit of the female monster from the human world that she has attempted
to enter. In this chapter I will discuss both the ways female monsters are humanized and
idealized, and the ways that they resist humanization and domestication.

72

I. Miss Ren and the Origins of Humanized Monsters

Many scholars agree that the Tang tale “Renshi zhuan 任氏傳” (Biography of
Miss Ren) by Shen Jiji 沈既濟 (ca. 750-800) is a revolutionary text that invented the
brand new image of a humanized monster.
98
Miss Ren’s identity is made clear in the first sentence of the tale: “Miss Ren was a
female monster.” It is a direct reversal of the literary convention that portrays a female
monster as disguised in human form and only forced to reveal its true identity at the very
end of the story. The opening sentence already marks her as different from other female
monsters, and places her at the center of the tale.
Among all the female monsters in Taiping
Guangji, Miss Ren is one of the scarce few who have a story that bears their own name,
rather than the name of their human lover. The centrality of her image in this tale is
evident. Although Miss Ren is an early example of humanized monster, her image is no
less, if not more, complex and sophisticated than the representations of female monsters
developed in later generations. In a sense, she actually presages many characteristics of
the humanized female monsters that appear in various later texts.
She is portrayed, first of all, as the ideal lover. A poor man named Zheng met her
on the streets of Chang’an. Enchanted by her extraordinary beauty, he followed her,
wanting to accost her but not daring to. She encouraged him by eyeing him as if she was
interested in him, too. Zheng finally mustered up enough courage to flirt with her. After a

98
See, for example, Li Jianguo, Zhongguo hu wenhua 110-11, and Hou Zhongyi 侯忠義, Suitang wudai
xiaoshuo shi 隋唐五代小說史 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1997) 55-57.

73

few exchanges of witty words, they spent a delightful night together in her home on the
outskirt of the city. On his way back home the next morning, a foreign bread-seller told
him that she was a fox spirit that often beguiled man into spending the night with her.
Zheng could not forget her beauty even though he was now aware of her true identity.
When they met again, Miss Ren seemed to be ashamed of her lowly origin. Even when
Zheng declared that her species did not matter to him, she insisted that the whole affair
was shameful and worried that Zheng might find her repugnant. Zheng vowed his love
with utmost sincerity. She explained, “People dread us because of the harm we do. But I
am not like that.” It was her voluntary choice not to harm human, and moved by Zheng’s
sincerity she declared that she would reciprocate his love: “I’ll wait on you hand and foot
forever. Should I ever incur your displeasure for one reason or another, I’d pack and go
without your telling me to.”
99
At this point her desirability as an ideal lover is already established. First of all,
she was extremely beautiful and charming. The first night Miss Ren spent with Zheng
was described in this tale with great enthusiasm: “Her lovely appearance and beautiful
body, each song or smile, her manners and movements, all were captivating, almost
otherworldly!” Her otherworldly beauty is reinforced later in the tale when Wei Yin,
Zheng’s cousin, a wealthy aristocrat who had seen many beauties, asked a servant to
compare her with several beautiful women that he knew. The servant’s answer indicates
that her uncanny beauty surpassed all other human women. She is further eroticized when

99
Shen Jiji, “Renshi zhuan” in Wang Pijiang, 44-49, all translations quoted from William Neihauser, “Miss
Ren” in Y. W. Ma and Joseph S. M. Lau eds., Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (Boston:
Cheng & Tsui, 1986) 339-45.

74

she became the object of desire of Wei. When he saw her in person for the first time, he
“nearly went out of his mind with passion.” He immediately took her in his arm and
attempted to ravage her on the spot. Superlative beauty in a woman is, of course, highly
desirable, yet as Judith Zeitlin points out, this type of perfect beauty “represents a rupture
in the natural order and is almost inevitably interpreted as a mark of otherworldly
status.”
100
It embodies a fantasy of or a desire for the lofty ideal of beauty that does not
belong to human world. Besides her beauty, she truly loved Zheng and remained loyal to
him in all circumstances. At the beginning of the tale, it was Miss Ren who encouraged
Zheng, who was too timid to speak to her, to make the first move to court her. After he
declared that he loved her despite of her fox origin, she reciprocated with an equal share
of love: she swore to serve him and try her best to please him. The tale highlights her
loyalty again later when Wei was overwhelmed by her charm and tried to rape her. She
defended her chastity and remained faithful to Zheng. Last but not least, she was
available. She is similar to a courtesan in a number of ways. Miss Ren said herself that
she was from a family of entertainers and had formed intimate relationships with several
men before she met Zheng. And all of her relatives and acquaintances seemed to be in the
entertainment quarters.
101

100
Zeitlin, Phantom Heroine 24.
Yet unlike a courtesan, she was available without a high
financial price that Zheng, as a poor man, would not have afforded. Moreover, Zheng was
really a nondescript man, without noble birth, wealth, particular talents or virtues. His
cousin Wei would not even believe it when Zheng told him that he had acquired a beauty.

101
For studies on the connection between fox spirits and prostitutes, see Huntington, 187-94, Kang Xiaofei,
44-46.

75

Yet Miss Ren still thought of him as someone superior to herself, because of her lowly
origin as a fox. The fact that Zheng loved her despite of her species was enough to win
her heart. As an extremely beautiful, highly desirable woman, she was also easily
approachable. No social status or wealth was required, and the man did not even have to
be particularly deserving. Persistent and intense love and desire were all that was asked.
In traditional Chinese society, this is a role that no human woman could play. The fantasy
and desire for such a woman is therefore displaced onto the image of a female monster
who offers sex and attention entirely unconstrained by issues of propriety and economics.
After Miss Ren and Zheng set up housekeeping together with the financial help of
Wei, she came to embody the image of the perfect wife, although Zheng did have a
principle wife at home. She helped Zheng financially through her power of predicting
future, when she advised him to buy a horse with six thousand cash. Later Zheng was
able to sell it for thirty thousand. Yet she was unable to provide the material resource for
their household. They had to rely on Wei for financial support. In return, she used her
magical powers to procure women for Wei to be his bedfellows. She was also quite
obedient to her lover. When Zheng was assigned to a new post elsewhere, he wanted to
take Miss Ren along. She knew that it would be unlucky for her to travel west and asked
him to let her stay at Chang’an and wait for his return. Neither Zheng nor Wei took it
seriously. They laughed at her for being superstitious, and insisted that she should go
with Zheng. She finally agreed to go, despite the knowledge of the danger that awaited
her. The ill-omened journey cost her life. On their way they encountered a party of
76

hunters and the dogs attacked her, forcing her to revert to her original form and
eventually killing her.
Her act of resisting Wei’s sexual advances is what makes her a moral paragon. In
this tale her resistance is emphasized with graphical details: Wei first took her into his
arms and she refused to submit. He restrained her physically and she told him that she
would give in. As soon as he loosened his grip she struggled as hard as the beginning.
After several rounds of struggle, “Wei held her tight with all his strength. Ren was
exhausted, and she was sweating as if drenched in rain. Since she knew there was no way
to avoid him, she relaxed and resisted no longer, but her expression became very
sorrowful.” Surprised by her sorrowful expression, Wei stopped for a moment to ask her
the reason. She argued that as he was rich and had his choice of women; it would be
ignoble for him to take the only thing a poor man like Zheng had. Wei was so impressed
by her loyalty that he let her go and later became her platonic admirer and friend. This is
where Ren was applauded the most by the author and all later commentators. The author
commented at the end of the story, “Ah, the principles of man can be found in the
emotions of supernatural beings! To be accosted and not lose one’s purity, to follow one
man until death – even among the women today there are those who could not measure
up to this.” He noted that being a monster, Miss Ren was able to adhere to the principles
of human world. Comparing her to the women of his day, he concluded that in her
faithfulness she was superior to most human women. It is worth noting that in the face of
sexual assault, despite her magical powers, she acted exactly the same way as a chaste
human woman would. She resisted Wei’s sexual advances as the best she could, and
77

when he was about to overcome her physically, she resorted to moral remonstrate. This is
the moment that she ascended to humanity. If she had made use of her supernatural
power, she would still be faithful, but the act of loyalty would not be as dramatic as when
she resisted Wei as a human woman. Her virtue was manifested not in her magical
abilities as a female monster, but in her physical weakness and moral power as a human
woman.
Despite her human qualities and her differences from other fox spirits that harm
people, Miss Ren, as the first sentence of the tale states, is a female monster after all, and
therefore could not be assimilated into the human world entirely. At one point, she was
strange beyond understanding even for her lover Zheng and her closest friend Wei. When
her clothes got old and shabby, Wei wanted to buy a roll of silk for her so she could make
her own. Yet Ren insisted that she only wore ready-made clothes. Zheng and Wei had no
way to find out the reasons. And Zheng never really understood her magical power.
When she asked him to purchase a horse and resell it for profit, he listened to her because
it suited his need. When she went against his wish and refused to go along with him to his
post, he brushed it aside as superstition, completely forgetting that she was a female
monster rather than a human woman. At the end of the tale, the author lamented Ren’s
death and blamed Zheng for his lack of understanding for her character: “He only
enjoyed Ren’s beauty, and never fathomed her character 徒悅其色而不徵其情性. Had
he been a man of truly deep understanding, he might have twisted the strands of fate,
investigated the limits between spirits and humans, and written it all up beautifully to
transmit his more abstruse feelings, rather than just surfeiting himself with her manners
78

and appearance.” In all fairness he might be asking too much of Zheng. The author
himself admits that only a man of “truly deep understanding” can investigate the limits
between spirits and humans. For the rest of the world, although Ren is very much
humanized and domesticated, being an alien kind, there are things in her that are
unfathomable and beyond human understanding. It is also these strange, mysterious
things about her alien characters and nature (qingxing 情性) that caused her eventual
departure from the human world.

II. The Ideal Lover

A lot of elements in Miss Ren are picked up in the later literary tradition of
representing female monsters. The ideal lover is the most important role that a female
monster can play to its perfection and find no match among human women. They are all
extraordinarily beautiful, loving, playful, and talented. As ideal lovers, the female
monsters become the objects of male desire.
Some female monsters are portrayed in the image of high-class courtesans. The
bee spirit in the tale “Lüyi nü 綠衣女” (A Girl in Green) is one of them. She visited a
young scholar who was studying at a temple in the mountains late at night, and admired
his diligence. The young scholar was startled by her sudden entrance, and then impressed
by her graceful and dainty beauty. Suspecting that she might be a monster, he questioned
her about where she had come from. She playfully shunned the question, stating only that
she did not intend to harm him. Enchanted, the scholar shared his bed with her knowing
79

that she was not human. The tale describes her beauty in great detail: she was wearing a
green blouse and a long gown, and her waist was so slender that the scholar can enclose it
with two hands. In Chinese literary tradition, the term “fengyao 蜂腰”, literally meaning
a bee’s waist, is customarily used to describe the narrow waist of a woman with willowy
figure. And the female monster in this tale is a green bee spirit. The aesthetic ideal
expressed in metaphor is now realized literally in the person into whom the bee spirit
transformed.
What she had to offer was more than sex and beauty. She came visiting the
scholar every evening, and they had pleasant conversations over dinner. He soon
discovered that she had a fairly good understanding of music and asked her to compose a
song and sing it. She declined at first, fearing someone else might hear, but upon his
insistence, she did sing in a very low voice while tapping her tiny foot. Her singing
turned out to be very touching: “Her voice was a fine hum, the words barely audible. But
to the absorbed listener the movement of the melody was lissome and ardent, affecting
the heart as it touched the ear.”
102
What the bee spirit delivered was a refined
entertainment that fed the soul. As her song touched the young scholar’s heart, a spiritual
communion formed between them. Her sexual availability and dainty beauty, her talent in
music and singing, and the sensual pleasure and spiritual comfort that she offered make
her a close parallel to the high-class courtesans of the late imperial era.
103

102
Liaozhai zhiyi 5:678-79, all translations quoted from Moss Roberts, Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1979) 17-18.
Besides

103
For a description of the courtesan culture of late imperial period, see Susan Mann, Precious Records:
Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1997) 125-
135.
80

bringing all these qualities to perfection, the bee spirit did not require the high financial
price a courtesan would. She came uninvited, and she was the one who took the active
role in the relationship. All that was asked of the scholar was the bravery not to forsake
her even though he knew that she must have been a monster.
Contrary to the bee spirit in “Lüyi nü” who was easily accessible, the peony spirit
in the tale “Gejin 葛巾” (Linen Scarf) did require a long, tortuous pursuit from her lover
Chang Dayong 常大用. Male desire plays an important role in this tale. The tale opens
with Chang’s passion for peonies. Upon hearing that Caozhou was famous for its peonies,
he went there and rented a house with a garden. It was too early for the peonies to bloom,
and all he could do was to “loiter in the garden, gazing at the budding shoots and
yearning for their blossoming.” He also wrote one hundred quatrains on peonies.
Unfortunately, he ran out of money before the flowers started to bloom, yet did not go
home, pawning his spring clothes so he could linger on. The peony spirit, Gejin, appeared
at this moment, as if summoned by his obsession. Gejin later admitted that she was
“moved by his yearnings, and then assumed human form to reciprocate ( 感君見思，遂
呈身相報).” And the author also comments at the end of the story: “The singleness of
purpose can move ghosts and spirits ( 懷之專一，鬼神可通).”
104

It is clear that there is a
connection between his deep appreciation and obsession with peonies and his eventual
union with Gejin. After a long series of misunderstanding, unexpected accidents, and
tantalizing postponements, their relationship finally consummated. A hint of
104
Liaozhai zhiyi 10:1436-43.

81

inaccessibility and the delayed satisfaction of desire only make the ideal lover more
desirable.
Like the green bee spirit in the previous tale, the image of Gejin also represents an
aesthetic ideal deeply rooted in literary convention. Pu Songling alludes to it in his
comments at the end of the tale: “When the District Defender felt lonely, he considered
flowers as his wife. If a flower really can communicate with human, why did he insist on
unraveling her origin 少府寂寞，以花當夫人，況真能解語，何必力窮其原哉?”
Flowers and women are frequently used as metaphors for each other in Chinese literary
convention. The District Defender in Pu Songling’s comment refers to the Tang poet Bai
Juyi 白居易 and the following lines of his poem:
Without a wife the District Defender felt lonely in spring,
When the flowers bloom he would take them as his wife.

少府無妻春寂寞，
花開將爾當夫人。
105

The phrase “the flower that communicates with human” (jieyu hua 解語花) is a very
common way to refer to a beautiful woman. It comes from an anecdote where Emperor
Xuanzong of the Tang dynasty told his attendants that the lotus flowers in the imperial
garden cannot compare to his flower that communicated with human, referring to his
favorite consort Yang Guifei 楊貴妃. The Tang poet Luo Yin 羅隱 uses this phrase in
specific connection with peonies in the following lines:

105
Bai Juyi, “xiti xinzai qiangwei 戲題新栽薔薇 (Poem written on the Newly Planted Roses)”, in Quan
Tangshi 全唐詩 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979) 436: 4830.

82

If the peony communicates with human, she could topple the entire state,
As she is already enchanting even without any passion.

若教解語應傾國，
任是無情也動人。
106

As if to make Bai Juyi and Luo Yin’s wish come true, Pu Songling takes the metaphor of
women as flowers that communicate with human from the poetic tradition and makes it
literal in the image of Gejin, a peony flower that turned into a beautiful woman who
communicated with human and became Chang’s wife. In her human shape, Gejin still
retained a few traits of peonies. Her uncanny beauty made Chang suspect that she might
actually be an immortal. And the fragrance of peony flowers is eroticized as the fragrance
of female body. It is emphasized throughout the tale as Gejin’s most attractive trait. Her
breath was as fragrant as orchid flowers, and she left a lovely scent on anything she had
touched. When Chang finally undressed her, “her jade-like skin was suddenly exposed,
and a warm fragrance flowed in all directions, and when they embraced, he felt that her
breath and even her sweat are fragrant ( 玉肌乍露，熱香四流，偎抱之間，覺鼻息汗薰，
無氣不馥).” The aesthetic ideal and erotic passions have become one in the image of
Gejin as the ideal lover.
The fox spirit in the tale “Qingfeng 青鳳” is an uncommon one. While most
female monsters are portrayed as a solitary woman with no apparent family ties, she had
a big, well-managed family headed by a patriarch, a mirror image of an elite family in
human society. A brave young man, Geng Qubing 耿去病, went to a deserted house the

106
Luo Yin, “Mudan hua 牡丹花 (Peony Flower)”, in Quan Tangshi 655:7532.

83

belonged to his family but was haunted by fox spirits. There he found the Hu family
sitting around their dinner table, talking and drinking: an old man and his wife, both in
their forties, their son, and their beautiful niece Qingfeng who was about fifteen years old.
The old man received Geng politely after learning that the house was the property of the
Geng family. He inquired about a book written by one of Geng’s ancestors on Lady
Tushan, and told Geng that she was their ancestress, revealing their true identity as foxes.
According to the record found in Taiping Yulan 太平禦覽, the sage ruler Yu the Great
married Lady Tushan, who was a white fox with nine tails.
107
Geng’s sudden visit and bold proposal made the old man, the patriarch of the Hu
family, uneasy. He attempted to scare Geng away by appearing as a terrifying ghost in
front of him. Undeterred, Geng stayed in the house hoping to see Qingfeng again. She did
appear the next night, and when he begged to hold her hand, she said to him, “How can I
As Geng was getting drunk,
he noticed the otherworldly beauty of Qingfeng: “There is no one as beautiful as she is in
the human world ( 人間無其麗也).” Geng stared at her without moving his eyes. Feeling
his gaze, she lowered her head coyly. He then touched her bound feet with his own
beneath the table. Startled, she moved her feet way, but did not get angry. Encouraged by
this, Geng boldly proposed to Qingfeng and her family, and the family retreated, ignoring
his proposal. Different from other female monsters that appeared more flirtatious,
Qingfeng behaved in a gentle, submissive way that was appropriate for a young lady
brought up in a good family. Yet her acquiescence shows that Geng’s passion was not
entirely one-sided.

107
Taiping yulan (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959) 135:656.

84

not know your gentle and deep passion? Yet I dare not let you, because my uncle is very
strict with rules of propriety.” She also told him that although there was a karmic
connection (suyin 夙因) between them, they would have to separate soon, because her
entire family would be moving the next day to avoid him. It is now clear that she did
reciprocate his passion, yet she was also very much aware that it was against the rules of
propriety and the wish of her uncle. She was raised up by her uncle as a guixiu 閨秀 (an
elite woman cultivated in the inner chambers), who needed to have a number of womanly
virtues such as a soft voice, gentle submissive demeanor, charm, wit, and grace. Besides,
a respectable young lady also needed to suppress or deny their sexual passions at all
times.
108
Torn between her love for Geng and her moral duty to her family, Qingfeng
resisted Geng’s sexual advancements only half-heartedly. Disregarding her protests, he
embraced her nonetheless, but just then her uncle came back and scolded her for
dishonoring the entire family. He then dragged her to another room, and all Geng could
hear were her uncle’s yells and her sobs. After that, the Hu family moved out of the
house. The family context sets Qingfeng apart from most female monsters that are
completely unattached to family and society. She had a family name to dishonor, and a
male patriarch to guard her chastity. Her dilemma is the same as that which faces any
elite girl in human world who harbors a secret passion for an illicit lover.
109

108
For a discussion of the social and moral expectations for elite girls, see Susan Mann, 59-62.

109
In Chinese literary tradition, Cui Yingying 崔鶯鶯 in the Tang tale “Yingying zhuan 鶯鶯傳”
(Biography of Cui Yingying) and Qianniang 倩娘 in “Lihun ji 離魂記” (Record of the Detached Soul) are
two examples of human women who are faced with the same dilemma.

85

More than a year later, when Geng was sweeping the tomb of his ancestors, he
saw two small foxes hunted down by a hound. One of them looked at him and whimpered
as if asking for help, and he covered it with his clothes and carried it home. When he put
the fox on his bed, it became Qingfeng. Now that her true form had been revealed, she
told him, “I hope you will not despise me for being an alien ( 望無以非類見憎).” He was
overjoyed and swore that he would not. The conversation harks back to Miss Ren’s
apology for her lowly origin and Zheng’s declaration that her species did not matter. The
female monster, no matter how beautiful and desirable she is, always believes that she is
inferior to her human lover. And interestingly, this tale seems to be a deliberate revision
of the ending of Miss Ren: Geng was able to save Qingfeng from the hounds and ensure a
happy ending. They then settled down as husband and wife, and she was free from her
family obligations since her uncle assumed her dead. Their happy ending is brought to
perfection when Geng was given the opportunity to save Qingfeng’s uncle, in his fox
form, from the hands of a hunter. This act seemed to have erased any shame in getting
married without the patriarch’s consent, and the old fox reconciled with the couple and
moved to live with them as a family. Qingfeng’s dilemma is finally resolved.
The image of Qingfeng is modeled on the guixiu type of elite women, rather than
high-class courtesans. Yet being a fox spirit, she was able to express her feelings and
reciprocate Geng’s love in a subtle, restrained manner. Her identity as a fox spirit also
allowed her to break free from her family obligations temporarily and be together with
Geng. Probably due to her character and the perfect domestic happiness that she was able
to find, Qingfeng became a canonical model of an ideal lover. This tale was among the
86

most well-known and well-received ones even during Pu Songling’s own time, and the
image of Qingfeng continued to charm readers and authors of classical tales. Pu Songling
himself wrote a story about a young man who dreamed of enjoying a riotous and erotic
banquet with a few fox spirits after reading the tale of Qingfeng.
110
A few decades later,
Ji Yin wrote several tales about male readers’ obsession with Qingfeng, criticizing their
over-indulgence in fantasies.
111
Zhu Yiqing 朱翊清 also included in his Maiyou ji 埋憂
集 (Collection of Buried Woes) a tale where a young scholar insisted on staying in a
house haunted by fox spirits in the hopes of meeting someone like Qingfeng.
112
Contrary to Qingfeng’s adherence to the rules of propriety and moral obligations,
the fox spirit Yingning 嬰寧 in the tale that bears her name is characterized by her
innocence, spontaneity and a charming childlike silliness. Yingning was the hybrid
daughter of a human father and a fox mother. Besides her extraordinary beauty that
bespoke her otherworldly status as a fox spirit, she was given two other eccentricities:
uncontrollable giggles and an obsessive love of flowers. A young man, Wang Zifu 王子
服 fell in love with her at the first sight, and his persistent pursuit was always met with
her failure to understand his intentions. At each stage, from his first smitten stares to his
treasuring of a flower branch that she had been holding, she responded with apparently
uncomprehending laughter, as if she did not have the slightest idea about the conventions

110
Pu Songling, “Hu meng 狐夢 (A Fox Dream)”, in Liaozhai zhiyi 5: 618-22.

111
See, for instance, Yuewei caotang biji 13:303 and 17:424-25.

112
Zhu Yiqing, Maiyou ji 1:12, in Biji xiaoshuo daguan 筆記小說大觀 (Yangzhou: Jiangsu guangling guji
keyin she, 1983) 21:271.

87

of romance. And the tale makes a particular point about her sexual innocence. When
Wang professed his love for her, she took it for granted as the love between distant
relatives (jiafu zhiqing 葭莩之情), and he had to explain to her the difference between
conjugal and familial love, “Husband and wife share the same bed at night.” Again she
completely missed the point, replying, “I am not used to sleep with strangers.”
113
After her marriage, Yingning did make an effort to defend her chastity. When a
neighbor caught a glimpse of her climbing up a tree to admire flowers, he took her
laughter as flirtation and became immediately infatuated. She pointed to the bottom of the
wall, apparently suggesting a rendezvous. But when the neighbor came there that evening,
trying to embrace and penetrate her, he felt an excruciating pain. It turned out that he had
embraced a hollow tree conjured up by Yingying. He was stung by a scorpion hiding in
the tree, and soon died from the wound. His father took the matter to the local magistrate
and accused the Wang family of consorting with a monster. Fortunately the local
magistrate knew Wang very well, and did not pursue that matter. Yet the law suit became
the turning point of the tale. Yingning’s mother-in-law scolded her for putting their
family name in a perilous condition, and she henceforth would not laugh any more, even
when deliberately teased. One night she cried in front of her husband, begging him to

However naïve she might be, it never reached the point of indecency. After Wang wed
Yingning, he secretly worried that she might openly discuss sexual matters in their
bedchamber, but she did not. Her bouts of irrepressible laughter continued after their
wedding, and by all accounts her childlike folly did not diminish her charm.

113
Liaozhai zhiyi, 2:147-59.

88

help her rebury her foster mother. Filial piety transformed her twice: she stopped
laughing for her mother-in-law, and cried for her foster mother. By the end of the story
she was completely assimilated to the human society. Wai-yee Li argues that the
principal dynamic of the monster tales in Liaozhai zhiyi is to “tame the strange”, creating
realms of fantasy and then reincorporating them into human world.
114
However, what is appreciated most in the image of Yingning is not her filial piety,
but the innocence and spontaneous joy expressed through her laughter. At the end of the
story, Pu Songling compared her to a legendary plant named “have-you-laughed” (xiao yi
hu 笑矣乎), the smell of which can make everyone laugh uncontrollably. He then
invokes the image of jieyu hua 解語花 (flowers that communicate with people) again, but
this time saying that it does not have the spontaneity and unaffectedness of Yingning.
The tale of
Yingning is a particularly dramatic example of this tension: as the object of desire,
Yingning and her innocent, uncontrollable laughter are greatly appreciated, but when the
laughter threatens to bring disorder, it has to be subdued and contained within the moral
constraints of human society.
From the examples discussed above, we can see that there is not a single, unified
approach to represent monsters as the ideal lover, because human desire and fantasy take
many different forms. The ideal lover can be a parallel to high-class courtesans in her
beauty, talent, and relative availability, but does not require the same financial price. She
can also be a well-bred young lady among the elite class, but more forthcoming with her

114
Wai-yee Li, Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993) 92-94.

89

passions. Or in the unusual example of Yingning, she is really a mischievous and
innocent soul full of spontaneous mirth. But she is never purely the gratification of sexual
desires and the materialization of sexual fantasy. The bee spirit in “Lüyi nü” and the
peony spirit in “Gejin” are both conventional literary metaphors for female charm that
become literalized. They represent aesthetic ideals as well as erotic passions. Qingfeng
and Yingning are both assimilated into the social and moral order of human society. As
the objects of male desire, they represent the balance of extravagant fantasy and moral
constraints.

III. The Perfect Wife

Perfect wife is anther role often played by female monsters. Compared to the ideal
lovers discussed in the previous section, they are further incorporated into human society,
many of them spending years as wives or concubines of their human husbands within the
domestic sphere. They are often portrayed as exemplifying wifely virtues such as
faithfulness, filial piety, obedience, diligence, frugality, and selflessness. Moreover, they
can offer wise counsels and financial support for their human husbands through magical
powers, which mortal women could hardly afford.
The fox spirit Lady Li in the Tang tale “Ji Zhen 計真” is one of the early
examples of female monsters portrayed as the perfect wife. Unlike most fox spirit, she
was properly married to Ji Zhen, her husband, with her father’s consent and through a
proper matchmaker. As Ji’s wife, Li is described as beautiful, smart and gentle. She
90

followed her husband to various posts in different places, fulfilling the role of an obedient
and diligent wife, and giving her husband seven sons and two daughters. She was also
able to offer wise counsel for her husband, persuading him to stop his fruitless Daoist
pursuit:
Can your love for the Dao compare to the First Emperor of the Qin
dynasty or Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty? Are you able to make the
same amount of efforts as they could? The two of them were emperors
who possessed all the resources of the four seas, and they squandered all
the wealth from the entire world in their search for immortality. Yet one of
them died at Shaqiu, the other was buried at Maoling. You are no more
than a commoner. How can you be so deluded as to engage in such a
fruitless pursuit?
115

Her arguments seem like a frugal wife’s protests against her husband’s expensive
and pointless hobby out of economic concerns. Yet considering her identity as a fox spirit,
it is very possible that she truly understood the futility of her husband’s pursuit. Ji Zhen
was angry at first, but soon came around, realizing that she might truly understand the
Dao. During the twenty years of their happy marriage, she had always been the perfect
wife. The only unusual thing was that her beauty never faded with age. But Ji Zhen never
for a moment suspected that she might be an alien. Her true identity was only revealed
when she fell seriously ill and was about to die. Her last words make explicit her
profound love for her husband and children as a devoted wife and mother:
I know that you will resent me for what I am about to tell you. But for the
sake of the nine children who would now be your burden, I dare to open
my mouth. I am not human. It was Heaven who made me your wife, so
that I can serve you for twenty years despite of my lowly origin as a fox. I
have not offended you in the smallest thing, nor have I cause any trouble
because of my alien origin. I think I have done all that I could to show my

115
Taiping Guangji 454:3707.

91

sincere devotion to you. Now I am about to die, and it is not my original
intention to burden you with my dead body in its disgusting animal form.
But please think of the young children, who are all human and your
offspring. After I breathe my last, please consider their feelings and do not
destroy my corpse. If you could keep my body whole and bury it, I will be
grateful for a hundred lifetimes.
116

As an early example of female monsters portrayed as the perfect wife, Lady Li is
actually more human than many of her successors. She did not possess any magical
powers, except for her understanding of the Daoist practice of pursuing immortality. She
was married in proper procedure, had nine children, raised a family, fell ill in her old age,
and finally died of that illness. In all these aspects she was no different from any mortal
woman. Even her last wish was to be buried like a human. And her husband did bury her
according to proper burial rituals in the human world. In a sense, she truly ascended to
humanity from her “lowly origin” upon her death and burial.
The female ape spirit in the Tang tale “Sun Ke” is another image of perfect wife
who stayed with her human husband and family despite the interference of a Daoist
practitioner. She has accumulated considerable wealth by the time she met Sun Ke, a
poor scholar who would become her husband. Enchanted by her beauty, Sun Ke proposed
to her through a matchmaker, and she accepted the proposal gladly. After their marriage,
she was the one who provided the financial resources for their family, and her husband
was able to live a luxury and carefree life. After a few years, Sun’s cousin, who was a
Daoist practitioner, discerned that she was a monster, and gave Sun a magic sword so he
could banish her. Sun reluctantly accepted the sword and brought it home, but she

116
Taiping Guangji 454: 3708-3709.

92

immediately noticed it. When scolding Sun, she drew upon the Confucian moral value of
reciprocity: “When you were stuck in poverty it was me who gave you a comfortable and
prosperous life. Now you are going to do this wrong to me out of ungrounded speculation,
without any sense of gratitude and duty. Someone with a heart like this, even pigs or dogs
would not eat the food he left. How can he establish himself in the world as a man with
moral principles?”
117

117
Taiping Guangji 445: 3640.
She then took the sword and broke it into pieces with bare hands.
When Sun appear scared, she told him that there was really no need to worry about her
alien origin, since nothing went wrong in the several years that they had been married.
And she proved herself in the ten years that followed. She had two children, managed
their household in a very orderly manner, followed him to many different posts and
continued to support him financially. However, she was never completely domesticated.
There is a deep yearning for the mountains and forests in the poems that she composed.
She was constantly torn between her longing for the wilderness and her love for her
husband and children. When she passed the place where she had lived as an ape, and saw
other wild apes among the forest, she was finally overcome by the call of nature. She
broke in tears and said farewell to her husband and sons, and then turned into an old ape
and disappeared into the forest, without ever looking back. Sun Ke was so devastated by
her sudden departure that he no longer had the heart to go to his post, and returned home
with his children. Although the ape spirit eventually returned to her original form, she
was still more human than monster. When Sun Ke tried to exorcize her she reproached
him in terms of human morality. Her years of struggle between the urge to go back to the
93

mountains and her love for her husband and children bespeak her human side. And Sun
Ke’s grief after her departure further attests to the profound conjugal love that they had
developed for each other.
The fox spirit Yatou 鴉頭 in the tale that bears her name was raised up to be a
prostitute. Her transformation to the perfect wife is twice as difficult, because of her
lowly origin and profession. As a prostitute, she managed to stay chaste until she met
Wang Wen, a young scholar whom she immediately liked. She arranged to offer her first
night to Wang, and ran away with him afterwards. They settled down hundreds of miles
away and set up household. Wang was a poor scholar without any means to make a living,
and it was Yatou who started their own business of a small wine shop. After a year’s hard
work, they were able to hire servants. However, their domestic bliss did not last long.
Yatou’s “mother” and “sister” eventually found her and took her away. They tried to
force her to take other clients but she resisted fervently. She gave birth to a son during
that time, and they sent him to the orphanage. Wang eventually met his son, and together
they managed to save Yatou from her evil mother and sister. Her hybrid son was violent
in nature, and killed both Yatou’s mother and sister against her will. When she ordered
him to bury them properly, he skinned them instead and kept the skin. When Yatou found
out she was devastated. Instead of punishing him, she cried and beat herself up, not
stopping until her son finally agreed to bury the skin. As a mother she was concerned
about the brutal nature of her son, and cured his cruelty by breaking his tendons at his
ankles, elbows and neck. After the treatment her son was transformed into a mild and
virtuous man. This is the only place that she utilized her magical power. Except that she
94

acted like a human woman throughout the tale. She was a diligent and faithful wife, as
well as a dutiful mother who loved her son and made every effort to eliminate his wild
nature and morally transform him. At the end of the tale, Pu Songling praises her
faithfulness and compares her to humans: “Even though she has undergone numerous
brutal tortures, she would rather die than taking another man. Faithfulness to this extent is
difficult to achieve even for humans, and now it is found in a fox spirit.”
118
In the tale “Qingmei 青梅”, the fox spirit Qingmei is portrayed as an exemplary
wife who works hard to achieve perfect domestic harmony between family members in a
polygamy context. The tale begins with the story of Qingmei’s parents. Her mother was a
fox spirit who married a mortal man. Eager to have a male heir, the man took another
wife. Qingmei’s mother was so enraged that she left her husband and daughter. When
Qingmei grew up, her uncle sold her to the Wang family to be a maid. As a maid she got
on very well with her mistress. When she saw a talented and virtuous young scholar, she
tried to match him with her mistress. The Wang family rejected the young man because
of his poverty, and Qingmei decided to marry him herself. She made proper arrangements
with the help of her mistress, and finally became the bride of the young man.

After her marriage, she was extremely filial to her in-laws. Her husband was
already a filial son. When he and Qingmei first met, he was eating coarse gruel while
serving his parent with meat dishes. He helped his sick father to bathroom, and hid his
soiled clothes afterwards for fear that his father would feel ashamed of it. Qingmei
surpassed her husband in serving her in-laws, and never complained about their poverty.

118
Liaozhai zhiyi 5:600-06.

95

To support her family, she embroidered and sold her embroidery to make money, so her
husband could focus on his study. Her filial piety and hard work won the love and respect
from the entire family.
Moreover, Qingmei also exemplifies magnanimity in the context of a polygamous
family. Qingmei’s husband passed the exam and became an official, while her former
mistress became homeless after a series of hardships. When they met again, Qingmei
resumed her attempt to unite her husband and her mistress in marriage. After their
marriage, although Qingmei was the senior wife, she served her former mistress
diligently as a concubine. Qingmei’s magnanimity is set in stark contrast with her
mother’s jealousy. While her mother left the entire family behind out of jealousy,
Qingmei married her former mistress to her husband, and served her as the principle wife.
Throughout the whole time Qingmei did not use magical powers, if she had any. The
harmonious relationships between daughter and parent-in-laws and between principle
wife and concubine were achieved entirely through her selflessness and magnanimity.
119
A wife’s faithfulness to her husband can acquire a political significance in the
context of dynastic change. The confluence of political loyalty and female chastity is
captured in the image of the fox spirit as an exemplary wife in the tale “Liehu zhuan 烈狐
傳” (Biography of a Fox Martyr) by Chen Ding 陳鼎 (fl. 1698). The historical setting of
the story is the end of the Ming dynasty. A fox who assumed the form of an old man
called the Ge family, asking to rent their deserted garden. When Ge declined, the old fox
revealed his true identity and explained that there was a preordained karmic connection

119
Liaozhai zhiyi 4:444-53.
96

between the Ge family and himself. Ge was persuaded and allowed the fox family to
move in. Ge’s son caught sight of one of the daughters of the old fox and fell seriously ill
because of his longing for her. Ge found out the reason and attempted to arrange the
marriage. The fox patriarch declined at first, saying that she might not be a worthy match
for Ge’s son because of her alien origin. Upon Ge’s insistence, the old fox finally agreed
to marry his daughter to Ge’s son. After their marriage she became the exemplary wife
and daughter-in-law. She truly loved her husband and served her in-laws with filial piety.
The domestic bliss soon came to an end with the change of dynasties. Looting
soldiers entered their house. Seeing her beauty they tried to rape her. She cursed them,
took a knife and cut her own throat. Her body turned into a nine-tailed fox after her death.
When faced with sexual assault, her reaction is different from both Miss Ren and
Yingning. Yingning revenged the neighbor who attempted to have sex with her through
her magical powers, while Miss Ren resorted to moral remonstrate with her lover’s
cousin Wei. The fox spirit in this tale faced a worse situation with many soldiers looting
their house. She reacted in exactly same way as a virtuous human woman would without
resorting to magical powers, probably because no magical power was enough to stop a
group of soldiers under that situation. By committing suicide, she was able to stay chaste
as a faithful wife to her husband. Moreover, it had the political significance of dynastic
loyalty. At the end of the Ming dynasty, suicide by Han Chinese women in the face of
Manchu invaders was considered a heroic act of self-sacrifice and a dramatic display of
loyalism and patriotism.
120

120
Susan Mann, 25.
Chen Ding comments at the end of the story, “Fox is a lewd
97

animal, bewitching human through its lewdness. There are countless men who died
because of foxes. Yet this fox sacrificed her life for her chastity! Her virtues can be
compared to chaste human women.”
121
He places the fox spirit in the context of her
fellows in virtue and historical situation rather than species. The fox spirit is allowed to
prove her virtue by the same means as human women, and the only difference her species
makes to such a story is that such virtues seem even more unlikely, and henceforth more
admirable, in an alien kind of lowly origin. Zhang Chao 張潮, the editor of Yuchu xinzhi
虞初新志, also adds a comment at the end of the story: “I have once read a small book of
fox stories at a friend’s place. There were no lack of passionate foxes, but I have never
heard of fox martyrs like this. This tale can bring glory to a lewd species of beasts. It is
also unusual that Ge sought a marriage with her, and so she repaid him with her
martyrdom.”
122
Female monsters portrayed as the perfect wife are generally more domesticated
than those portrayed as the ideal lover. As wives of mortal men, they have already
He exalts the fox spirit as a martyr who sacrificed her life for her nation.
If the body of a Chinese woman becomes a symbol of the nation in the historical context
of dynastic change and foreign invasion, to replace it with a fox body signifies the fox’s
transition from being the “other” to one of “us” in comparison to the foreign invaders.
The nameless fox spirit in this tale not only ascends to humanity, but also becomes a
moral paragon of the most valued womanly virtues.

121
Chen Ding, “Liehu zhuan”, in Yuchu xinzhi 虞初新志 (Shijiazhuang: Heibei renmin chubanshe, 1985)
10:193.

122
Zhang Chao, Yuchu xinzhi, 10:193.

98

become an integral part of the domestic sphere in the human world, completely
incorporated into its family structure and social and moral order. Their magical powers
are seldom mentioned in these tales, and when faced with hardship and difficulties, they
deal with them in the same way as human women. In many respects, there is very little
difference between these female monsters and the ideal human housewife: she was
faithful to her husband, serves her in-laws with utmost respect and obedience, maintains a
harmonious relationship with her husband’s other wives or concubines, educates her
children, brings in an important influx of wealth through her dowry, and increases the
household’s prosperity through her hard work and prudent management.
123

But few
human wives could perform all these duties to their perfection.
IV. The Savior and Mentor

Monsters can also be portrayed as figures that fix everything, cure every illness,
and help men realize their fullest potential. This role is almost exclusively reserved for
fox spirits. The image of fox spirits as saviors and mentors probably originates from the
fox worship that became a popular folk religion since the Tang dynasty, and reached its
height during the Qing dynasty, when many families had a small fox shrine at home and
worshiped the beneficent fox fairies.
124

123
Susan Mann, 65.

124
For a discussions of fox cult and fox worship, see Kang Xiaofei, The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender
and Popular Religion in Late Imperial and Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005)
and Rania Huntington, 127-70.

99

The tradition of portraying a female fox spirit as a healer goes back at least to the
Song dynasty. An early example is the fox spirit Xiaolian 小蓮 in the tale “Xiaolian ji 小
蓮記” (Biography of Xiaolian). Xiaolian was the concubine of a wealthy official Li, and
when Li fell sick, she immediately saw the underlying causes for his sickness and
prescribed an herbal formula that healed him. From then on, whenever someone in the
household contracted an illness, they would consult Xiaolian, and she cured them all
without exception.
125
Instead of common herbal formulae, later fox spirits can cure diseases through
magical powers. The fox spirit Xiaocui 小翠was married to an idiot man. When they
were forced to sleep in the same bed, the idiot husband did not know how to consummate
their marriage, and only complained that Xiaocui kicked and squashed him with her feet.
Xiaocui cured his idiocy through an extraordinary means. She filled a bathtub with hot
water, brought her husband inside, and then covered the bathtub with blankets to smother
him. When he woke up from his unconsciousness, he was no longer an idiot and their
marriage was finally consummated.

126
Qiaoniang 巧娘 is another fox spirit that made her impotent lover whole. She met
a young man that she liked, and invited him to share her bed. Then she realized that his
manhood is as tiny as a silkworm. Frustrated and mortified, Qiaoniang wept bitterly. Her
mother came in at this moment, and offered to cure the young man. She took a black pill

125
Liu Fu 劉斧, Qingsuo gaoyi 青瑣高議 (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983) houji 3:129.

126
Liaozhai zhiyi 7:1004-1005.

100

and made the man swallow it, and secretly told him not to say a word. The young man
went to sleep again, and woke up in early morning. He felt a gush of warm air flew from
beneath his navel to his private part, and suddenly his stunted manhood was cured.
127
The tale “Lianxiang 蓮香” is a tale about a love triangle between a mortal man
Sang, his ghost lover Li and fox lover Lianxiang. Li was the ghost of a young lady from a
good family, who came visiting Sang at one night and professed her love and admiration
for him. She left a shoe behind after spending a night with Sang. Whenever Sang touched
the shoe she would reappear to share his bed. Lianxiang is a fox spirit who claimed that
she was a prostitute. Unlike Li who came every night without fail, Lianxiang did not
come as frequently and rationed sex prudently. After some time Lianxiang noticed the
change in Sang. Like an expert doctor, after examining his face and feeling his pulse, she
diagnosed that he had a ghostly disease (guizheng 鬼症), characterized by a haggard face
and erratic pulse. Judith Zeitlin pointed out that real doctors might indeed diagnose
sudden fluctuations in pulse as a symptom of ghost attack or haunting.
In
both tales the fox spirit is given the task of making an inadequate man whole again.
128
Someone of your age can restore your essence and vital energy in three
days after having had sex. Even if your partner is a fox, what harm could
there be? But if you go at it day and night, a human lover can do more
damage than a fox. How could all the diseased corpses dead from
pestilence and ghosts of those who perished from wasting diseases of the
world have been poisoned by foxes?
Lianxiang went
on to lecture Sang about sexual moderation and self-regulation:
129

127
Liaozhai zhiyi 2:256.

128
Zeitlin, Phantom Heroine 18.

129
Liaozhai zhiyi 2:222.
101

Sang did not follow her advice and continued to consort with Li, which resulted in
an almost fatal illness. It was at this moment the Lianxiang and Li met and reconciled
with each other. Lianxiang explained the difference between having sex with a ghost and
a fox spirit: “The harmful fox spirits practice caibu, and I am not their kind. So there are
harmless fox spirits, but no harmless ghosts, because they have too much yin energy.”
130

Lianxiang had prepared the necessary herbal ingredients to make an elixir to save Sang’s
life, but it required Li’s assistant. The process of curing Sang is erotic in nature. To be
effective the elixir required an activating agent connected to the initial cause of the
disease. For this reason, Lianxiang asked that Li must press her “cherry lips” against
Sang’s mouth and spit drops of her “fragrant saliva” to wash the pill down. The rationale
behind this approach is probably the traditional belief in “attacking poison with poison 以
毒攻毒” where the deadly yin energy becomes its own antidote. The first step produced
immediate results, as Sang’s belly started to rumble, preparing to purge any impurities
from his body. The second dose of the elixir was administered by Lianxiang herself, by
pressing her lips on his mouth and transferring her vital energy to him through her mouth.
Sang was then resurrected from near death, feeling a burning sensation in his “elixir field
丹田”, and soon regained his energy and spirit. The two step procedure hinges on the
ghost’s yin association with the bodily fluid saliva and the fox spirit’s yang association
with the vital energy. Note that both ghosts and monsters are believed to belong to the yin
130
Liaozhai zhiyi 2:225.
102

category, but between the two of them, Li was leaning toward the pure yin, and Lianxiang
was the relative yang compared to Li.
In this tale, the ghost Li is portrayed as the jealous, childish and melancholy lover,
while Lianxiang is the knowledgeable healer. Wai-yee Li describes Lianxiang as being
used to control the desires represented by the ghost Li, as she cures Sang’s illness brought
on by his overindulgence with Li.
131
In the tale “Jiaona 嬌娜”, the fox spirit Jiaona rescued the male protagonist Kong
Xueli 孔雪笠 twice, utilizing her Internal Elixir. On a summer day, Kong was suddenly
inflicted with a painful growth on his chest as large as a peach. Jiaona, his fox friend’s
younger sister who was a competent healer, was called in to treat his disease. She was a
beautiful, flirtatious child who was no more than fourteen years old, and this situation
facilitates an intimacy between Kong and Jiaona that would otherwise be impossible
because of her young age. Pu Songling offers in this tale a graphic description of the
entire process of the medical procedures that Jiaona took. She took Kong’s pulse, and
decided to do a surgery. She encircled the tumor with her golden bracelet, pressed it
down, and cut it off with a thin knife. The procedure was gruesome, but Kong was so
enchanted with Jiaona’s beauty that he did not even feel the pain and even hoped that the
treatment could be prolonged. She then spit out a red pill, pressed it onto the wound left
by the surgery, and he soon felt better. This is her Inner Elixir, the physical essence of her
self-cultivation that suggests her magical power and her progress in her pursuit of
immortality. After treating his wound, she swallowed it again.

131
Wai-yee Li, 127.
103

Kong was extremely enchanted by Jiaona, but because of her young age, he
marrie3d her older sister Songniang 松娘 instead. A close friendship developed between
Kong and his wife’s entire clan. When Kong was trying to save the fox family from
thunder and lightning, he was able to rescue Jiaona but was hit by the lightning and
dropped dead. Jiaona saved him for the second time. She forced the red pill, her Inner
Elixir, from her throat, took his face in her own hands, passed the red pill into his mouth
with her tongue, and then covered his mouth with her own to transfer her vital energy to
him. Kong came back to life after the red pill entered his throat with the vital energy.
This time Jiaona was unable to take her Inner Elixir back. She voluntarily sacrificed the
fruit of her self-cultivation to save Kong’s life. The sexual undertone of this healing
scene is unmistakable, as she literally brought him back with a kiss. Pu Songling seems to
be particularly interested in the platonic relationship between Kong and Jiaona, which is a
subtle blend of intimacy and restraint. In his final comments he says:
When it comes to Kong, I do not envy him for marrying a beautiful wife,
but I do envy him for having an intimate friend. Looking at her face makes
one forget his hunger, and listening to her voice makes one smile. To have
such a good friend for occasional chatting and feasting is to enjoy the bliss
of a spiritual communion, surpassing the greatest sensual pleasures.
132

Besides being a competent healer, Jiaona is exalted as an ideal of platonic
friendship, superior to a romantic relationship. This ideal is even more difficult to achieve
in human world than romantic liaisons, and in this tale, the fox spirit Jiaona plays a role
that a mortal woman can hardly fill.

132
Liaozhai zhiyi 1:65.
104

The tales above all have a sexual undertone, yet female monsters are also
portrayed as the agent to fulfill non-erotic wish. The fox spirit in the tale “Baishu 拜書”
(Worshipping books) taught her husband to read and offered invaluable help in his
official career. An illiterate woodcutter named Duan Yunyan 段云岩 admired the
officials who lived in the city. When he happened to get a few damaged books, he put
them on the table, burnt incense and worshipped them every time he left home and came
back. One day a beautiful woman came to his home, prepared meal for him and waited
for him to come back. She claimed that she was a fairy descending from Heaven to serve
him and teach him. They became husband and wife and she taught him how to read and
encouraged him to try to grasp the underlying meanings of the texts. When he was stuck
with his study, her beautiful eyes and gentle words coming from her cherry lips always
gave him inspiration. With her help, Duan soon became excelled at his learning. She then
encouraged him to take the civil service exam, and he passed with flying colors on each
level, eventually getting an official post. She continued to offer invaluable counsel on
political affairs and helped him earn a very good reputation. In the end, she revealed to
him her original form as a white fox, telling him that she was not a fairy and that their
karmic connection had come to an end. Duan tried to persuade her to stay, but she
explained that she had to retire after fulfilling her preordained obligations of helping him
to establish himself. Duan grieved over her departure “as if he had lost a mentor” ( 若失
師保).
133

133
Zeng Yandong 曾衍東, Xiao doupeng 小豆棚 (Jinan: Qilu shushe, 2004) 9:212.
In this tale the fox spirit is the mentor who transformed Duan from an illiterate
105

woodcutter to a successful official. They were husband and wife, but in their relationship
sensual pleasure was subsumed in intellectual enlightening.
The book spirit Yan Ruyu 顏如玉 in the tale “Shuchi 書癡” (The Book Lover)
also transformed a poor young scholar, but this time by curing his obsession with books.
The protagonist Lang Yuzhu 郎玉柱 was obsessed with books and book learning, and he
truly believed that one could find in books a thousand bushels of grain, a house of gold,
and a wife beautiful as jade, which are metaphors used to promote learning in the well-
known essay “Exhortation to Learning” by Emperor Zhenzong of the Song dynasty.
These metaphors materialized for him in a disappointing manner at first: The thousand
bushels of grain become rotten grain he found in a forgotten barn, the house of gold
appeared as a gold plated piece in one of his books, and the beautiful face like jade turned
out to be the figure of a beautiful woman cut out from gauze pressed between the pages
of a history book. Yet he became even more convinced of his faith in books and book
learning. He had never had any real success with his study by the age of 30.
One day, the gauze beauty suddenly came to life in front of him, and introduced
herself as Yan Ruyu, literally meaning “face beautiful as jade”. She told Lang that they
had known each other for a long time. He had been staring at her day after day, and she
feared that if she did not come to him, no one would have faith in the words of ancient
people. At this point Lang’s belief did come true: there was really a Yan Ruyu coming
from his books. Yet her objective was to cure him of his obsession with books by
instilling in him some appreciation of the joy of living beyond books and book learning.
She diverted him with sexual pleasures, but his passion for books always got the better of
106

him. She then tried to engage him in chess games and teach him to play music. When he
grasped both skills, she encouraged him to socialize and make friends. He soon gained a
reputation of having refined artistic taste. It was only then that she told Lang that he was
ready to take the civil service exams. By this time he had lost his interest in pursuing
officialdom, so he stayed home to enjoy the domestic bliss with Yan. They lived happily
together for two years, and had a son.
But when Yan suggested to him that he had to give away all his books in order to
keep her, he was horrified: “It is your hometown, and my very life. How could you say
such a thing?”
134
In this tale Yan Ruyu also serves as a mentor to Lang, but not in his academic
study. What she taught him is how to give up his obsessive pursuit of wealth, fame, and
prestige through book learning, and how to appreciate the joy of life in a happy marriage
and refined entertainments. Lang did become a better and happier person under her
She did not persist although she had foreseen the dire future. The local
magistrate heard of Yan’s beauty and ordered to arrest the couple. Yan disappeared upon
hearing this, and the magistrate took Lang in prison and ransacked their house. Unable to
find Yan, he set Lang’s entire collection of books on fire. When Lang was finally
released, he went to take the civil service exam, and passed it at the highest level. He
prayed to Yan’s tablet that he might be sent to a post in Fujian, which was the
magistrate’s hometown, so he could take revenge. His wish was granted, and finally
punished the magistrate. After that he immediately retired from his official post and
returned home.

134
Liaozhai zhiyi 11:1456.

107

tutelage. He started to enjoy life and lost all interest in taking the civil service exam
although she told him that he would succeed in it. When he did take the exam and
become an official, it was for the sole purpose of taking revenge, and he retired after the
completion of this mission. It is interesting to note that as a book spirit, Yan is both the
object of Lang’s obsession and its cure. The rationale of “attacking poison with poison”
seems to be at work here again.
When monsters are portrayed as savior or mentor, they would have to resort to
their magical powers to cure illness or transform a person. Yet these abilities differ in
degree rather than in kind from what might be wished from their human counterparts.
Although they all have a lowly origin as alien kinds, in their beneficence and their
willingness to go out of their way to help humans, they are closer to fairies than monsters.
It further attests to the connection between this type of image and the cult of fox in
popular religion.

V. That Which Cannot Be Tamed

Looking back to the tales discussed above, we can see that although the monsters
are greatly humanized, few of them actually stayed in the human world for the rest of
their lives. The imperative that a man who wins a supernatural wife will lose her is
suggested by folklore studies in many cultures.
135

135
See Barbara Fass Leavey, In Pursuit of the Swan Maiden (New York: New York University Press,
1994).
It reveals a lingering doubt about

108

whether an alien can be entirely claimed by humans and incorporated into the cultural
and moral framework of human society. But why do they have to leave the human world
of which they have tried so hard and sacrificed so much to be a part? Is there anything in
their nature that resists any domestication and taming? When evaluating the literary
achievements of Liaozhai zhiyi, Lu Xun notices that Pu Songling’s tales “contain such
detailed and realistic descriptions that even flower-spirits and fox-fairies appear human
and approachable; but just as we forget that they are not human, the author introduces
some strange happenings to remind us that they are supernatural after all 獨于詳盡之外，
示以平常，使花妖狐媚，多具人情，和易可親，忘為異類，而又偶見鶻突，知復非
人.”
136
These strange streaks are sometimes determined by their original animal forms. In
the tale “Sun Ke”, the ape spirit was constantly torn between her original nature as an ape
and her acquired nature as a woman. Her constant struggle between the desire to return to
the mountains and forests, her original habitat, and the responsibilities as a wife and a
mother is captured in the last poem that she left behind to state her final decision:
It is exactly these “strange happenings 偶見鶻突” that prevent them from being
entirely assimilated into the human world.
My original heart was just about to be tamed by love and gratitude;
With the transformation that was unaccounted for, it has almost gone
without a trace.
Now I would rather return to the mountains with my own kinds,
Disappearing in the heavy mist with a long whistle.

136
Lu Xun, 147. Translation quoted from Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang trans., A Brief History of
Chinese Fiction (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1982) 256.

109

剛被恩情役此心，
無端變化几淹沉。
不如逐伴歸山去，
長嘯一聲煙霧深。
137

The “original heart” is her original nature as an ape and her natural affinity to the
mountains and forests. It was almost tamed by the years that she had spent in the human
world as a wife and a mother. Her transformation into a human being, however unwilling
it might be, was almost complete and she was about to shed the last of her animal traits.
Yet the revisit to her old habitat and the encounter with other apes that might be her old
acquaintances filled her with longing to return to her original form and go back to nature.
She described her transformation into a human being as unaccounted-for ( 無端),
implying that she had no control over it. During the time that she was trapped in the
human world, she dutifully fulfilled her responsibilities as a wife and mother. Yet it was
not enough to tame her original nature. When the time came, she had to depart despite the
love and gratitude that had been developed between her family members and herself.
Sometimes the female monster assumes human form only to repay a karmic debt,
and after the debt is clear, she would want to go back to her own world and resume her
own pursuit of immortality. The fox spirit Xiaocui is a good example. Wang’s father once
saved her mother from being struck by lightning, and she came to the Wang family and
cured Wang’s idiocy to pay off the karmic debt that she owed. She never intended to stay
in that marriage for long. After the predestined five years, she broke an expensive vase,
was scolded for it, and used it as an excuse to depart. When Wang found her again, she

137
Taiping Guangji 445: 3640.

110

was already with her own kinds. Moved by his sincerity, she agreed to temporarily stay
with him, and soon found a human woman to be Wang’s concubine and transferred her
own beauty to the new bride. She was finally able to leave after finding a replacement for
herself. If not for the karmic debt, she did not want to stay in the mortal world, and
during her unwilling stay, she had always longed for her own departure, because she was
a fox spirit after all, and had a totally different path to follow.
However, in most cases the female monster is forced to depart because of her
lover or husband’s failure to understand their alien nature. Miss Ren is one such example,
and the author Shen Jiji criticizes her lover Zheng for his ignorance of her nature and
character, and his lack of investigation of the “limits between human and spirits”. The
bee spirit in the tale “Lüyi nü” suffered a similar fate. When her lover asked her to sing,
she declined for fear that others might hear. Completely ignorant of her true identity, he
insisted and she complied submissively. And she was overheard by a spider, who
captured her in her original form and almost killed her. Although her lover was able to
save her from the spider, she never came back after expressing her gratitude. The fox
spirit Yan Ruyu in the tale “Shu Chi” is another example. She asked to leave him because
she had already foreseen the impending trouble. When he did not agree, she then asked
him to give away all his books to avoid trouble, and he refused again. By this time she
knew that there was no way to revert the situation. When the local magistrate ordered to
arrest them, she had no other choice but to escape. In all three tales the fault lies in the
human lover’s failure to heed the female monster’s admonitions. Shen Jiji’s criticism for
111

Zheng applies to all of them: they failed to understand the difference between human and
spirits, and therefore did not realize the full significance of their lovers’ protests.
In the tale “Gejin” the peony spirit Gejin left the human world because of her
lover’s suspicion and insufficient faith. After Gejin married Chang and gave birth to a
child, Chang started to become suspicious about her origins. He did his own investigation
and found out that she was a peony spirit. He was scared and revealed his suspicion to her.
Gejin was immediately antagonized: “Three years ago, moved by your longing I assumed
human form to pay you back. Now that you have become suspicious, how can we still
stay together?”
138
To achieve humanity, the monster will have to forego her alien identity first. The
fox spirit Lianxiang had to die during childbirth, to be reborn as a human being. This is
Her final departure was quite violent. She threw her child on the
ground and disappeared. The infant died as he hit the ground. After a few days, a peony
shrub grew at the spot where her son had fallen. It seems that the human lovers can do
nothing that is right. When they failed to understand their lovers’ alien nature, it would
result in their departure. Yet when they did try to investigate the difference between
human and spirit as Chang did, the result is an even more violent departure of their alien
lover. It seems that the cause of their departure simply does not lie in the humans. It is
predetermined by the female monster’s alien nature, which is an otherness that cannot be
fully grasped by humans and is therefore impossible to incorporate into the human world.
No matter how much humanized they can become, deep down there remains an otherness
in their alien nature that makes them incompatible with the human world.

138
Liaozhai zhiyi, 10:1442.

112

the only way that she could join her lover after another fourteen years. Yingning did not
have to die, but there was a drastic transformation of her character. Her innocent, carefree
laughter was completely gone, her charming, childlike folly disappearing along with it.
She never laughed again, almost turning into a different person.

VI. Conclusion

In this chapter, we have discussed the different ways in which monsters are
romanticized and idealized. They are portrayed as the ideal lover who offers a full range
of female attention, with sex being only one kind of it among many. Some of the
monsters are sexually available without the elaborate rituals and exchange of gifts
necessary to gain access to elite women, and without the high price demanded for
concubines or courtesans. They do not even require that their lovers to be particularly
talented and virtuous. There inferior status as an alien makes them even more
approachable, as they are never entirely the equal of their lovers, and often ashamed of
their lowly origin. What they have to offer is always more than pure sexual gratification.
As we have seen in “Lüyi nü” and “Gejin”, the literary image of monsters is the
combination of aesthetic ideal and erotic pleasure. Qingfeng offers spiritual communion
and domestic happiness aside from sensual pleasures, and Yingning offers a charming,
childlike innocence and spontaneous joy that are hard to find among human women.
Erotic indulgence is balanced with orthodox achievements in the tales that portray
female monsters as the perfect wife. Aside from being extremely beautiful and sexually
113

desirable, these female monsters possess all wifely virtues and performed the role of a
dutiful wife to its perfection. Their faithfulness, filial piety, magnanimity, diligence and
wise counsel make them moral paragons that human women can hardly surpass. By
loving a moral man and becoming his wife or concubine, the female monsters also
become domesticated and ascend to humanity.
Fantasies about monsters can extend to non-erotic wish-fulfillment. Under the
influence of the cult of fox in popular religion, monsters are portrayed as the savior that
heals any illness or the mentor that transforms men into a better person. Erotic desire is
overshadowed by practical need, and sometimes a platonic friendship between a mortal
man and a female monster is even more highly valued than a romantic affair.
Monsters discussed in this chapter do not harbor any ill will toward humans.
Despite their nature as an alien kind, they have made the conscious choice not to harm
human. As Lianxiang has explained, even sexual intercourse with these monsters is not
necessarily and inherently harmful. They are portrayed as romantic ideals, moral
paragons, and salvation figure that can solve every problem. Their supernatural power is
downplayed, and their differences from human beings and their strangeness almost erased.
Yet it is impossible to completely domesticate a monster. No matter how deep a
monster is trapped in domesticity, there might still be some strange streaks that bespeak
her otherness as an alien kind and predicate her eventual departure from the human world.
As an alien, the only way to achieve humanity is to shed their identity as a monster in its
entirety.

114

Chapter 3
Problems of the Human Interior: Monsters Internalized
During the late imperial period, there was a perennial desire among authors of
classical tales to comprehend strange phenomena and render them intelligible in terms of
the more rational spirit of the age. Many of them attempted to rationalize or demystify the
strange and to find a systematic explanation that reveals the underlying principles that
govern the ordinary and the strange alike. The Qing writer He Bang’e 和邦額 writes in
the preface to his own work Yetan suilu 夜譚隨錄:
The Master would not speak of the strange, but here nothing that is not
strange will be recorded. Outlandish indeed, though this is not meant to be
so. For Heaven and Earth are broad indeed, the myriad of things most
varied. There are principles behind everything that happens. If principles
exist, how can anything be strange? The sages have exhausted the
principles of Heaven and Earth and of myriad of things. What is strange to
man is but the normal order of things for the sages.
139

As Leo Chan has aptly pointed out, this urge of theorizing and rationalizing the strange
is inevitably influenced by the dominant mode of Qing intellectual discourse: the
“kaozheng 考證” (searching for evidence) approach. The evidential approach is founded
on a belief that things are understandable and that the discovery of underlying principles
from miscellaneous phenomena is possible. Chan goes on to argue that while earlier
tradition placed emphasis on the strangeness of the account, authors of classical tales

139
He Bang’e, “Preface to Yetan suilu”, in Biji xiaoshuo daguan, 22:258. Translation quoted form Leo
Chan, 24.

115

during the Qing dynasty “took pains to show the way in which such events followed rules
and principles of their own that were within the reaches of human understanding.”
140
In their attempts to rationalize and demystify the strange, many of them tend to
portray monsters as originating from human beings. By affirming the human origin of
monsters, they are able to contain them within the same principles that operate in the
human world. The phrase “yao you ren xing 妖由人興” (monsters arise from the human)
became the last words of many classical tales written during this time, and
representations of monsters gradually shifted toward demystification and internalization.
Monsters are portrayed as human fabrications granted reality only by human mind,
involuntary responses to human moral weakness, or simply the result of human
machination for the purpose of trickery and fraud. Ironically, by making human beings
responsible for the rise of monsters, they do not so much negate or exorcize the
strangeness or otherness in monsters as displace them into the realm of the human interior.

I. Cultural Background

One origin of the discourse that monsters arise from humans can be traced back to
the theory of portents (yao 妖) based on the holistic view of the cosmos where activities
in the human realm can stimulate phenomena in other realms. Heaven and humanity are
connected through this cosmic resonance, and Heaven responds to human activities by
sending messages to the human world through omens and portents which are usually

140
Chan, 113-29.

116

anomalous natural occurrences. The phrase yao you ren xing first appeared in Zuozhuan,
where a battle of two snakes, one from within and one from outside of the capital city of
the state of Zheng, was interpreted as an inauspicious portent for the decline of the state.
Shen Xu 申繻, an official of Zheng, comments: “When people have something they are
deeply distressed about, their vital energy flames up and takes such shapes. Portents arise
because of people. If people have no dissension, they will not arise of themselves. When
men abandon their constant ways, then portents arise ( 人之所忌，其氣炎以取之。妖由
人興也。人無釁，妖不自作。人棄常，則妖興，故有妖).”
141
Along the same vein, since portents are dependent upon human activities, there is
no need to fear them as long as people can correct their ways and cultivate their virtues.
According to the records in Shiji 史記, during the reign of King Tai Wu of the Shang
dynasty, a mulberry and a paper mulberry tree grew from the same root. It was
interpreted as an inauspicious portent. The king was alarmed, and his minister Yi Zhi 伊
陟used the phrase yao bu sheng de 妖不勝德, “portents cannot overcome virtues” to
reassure him, advising him to correct any mistakes in his government and cultivate his
The term yao in this
context connotes omens and portents. Portents are never independent from human
activities. Rather, they are the involuntary response of the natural world to the chaos in
human world. The battle of the two snakes is a reflection of the political unrest and
human disturbances that happened at that time.

141
Zuozhuan, 14
th
year of Duke Zhuang. In Chunqiu Zuozhuan zhu 197. Translation from Burton Watson,
The Tso Chuan: Selections from China’s Oldest Narrative History ( New York: Columbia University Press,
1980), 207-08.

117

virtues. The king followed his advice and the trees soon withered and disappeared on
their own.
142
During the Six Dynasties period, the word yao takes on the more specific meaning
of non-human creatures or objects acquiring human qualities or assuming human forms.
As the meaning of yao shifts from portents to monsters, the term “yao you ren xing”
comes to mean “monsters arise from the human”. The word ren can be either social
groups that have political significances, or individuals whose minds and actions are the
major concern. Monsters that will be discussed in this chapter are no longer external
beings that intrude the human world from the outside. Rather, they become dependent on
human society or human interior.
Portents are real, but the human world and human activities remain central.
A virtuous ruler has nothing to fear from inauspicious portents.
An early example of its usage can be found in the biography of Dugu Tuo 獨孤陀
in Sui shu 隋書. Dugu Tuo was Empress Dugu’s half brother, and his wife was the high
official Yang Su’s 楊素 half sister. He had a female servant named Xu A’ni who
worshipped cat spirit. She could conjure the cat spirit to kill people, and upon the death of
the victims, all their wealth and property would be mysteriously moved into the house of
the cat spirit worshipper. When Empress Dugu and Yang Su’s wife both caught a sudden
illness, the doctor diagnosed their ailment as caused by a cat spirit. Emperor Wen
immediately realized that the culprit was Dugu Tuo because if his close relationship with
both women. A careful investigation showed that Dugu Tuo had commanded Xu A’ni to
set the cat spirit upon Yang Su’s wife and the Empress in order to procure funds to

142
Shi ji 3:100.

118

purchase wine. When the situation was reported to the officials in charge, one official
suggested that Dutu Tuo and his wife and servant should be killed immediately, citing the
phrase “monsters arise from the human”.
143
Besides official histories, the idiom “monsters arise from the human” is also
widely used in vernacular fictions during the Ming dynasty. The Ming novel Sansui
pingyao zhuan 三遂平妖傳 was compiled by Feng Menglong 馮夢龍 (1574-1646) from
an earlier edition attributed to Luo Guanzhong 羅貫中 (1330-1400).
Although the illness was caused by the cat
spirit, through the term “yao you ren xing” humans were placed at the center of this event.
The humans summoning and serving the cat spirit must be killed in order to destroy the
monster itself.
144

143
Wei Zheng 魏徴, Sui shu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973) 79: 1790-1791.
It tells the story of
the Wang Ze 王則rebellion (1047-1048) during the Song dynasty, the main leaders of
which are all portrayed as fox spirits. The novel blamed the political failures of the Song
government as the cause of the emergence of these monsters: “Monsters do not arise by
themselves. They all originate from humans ( 妖不自作，皆由人興). The Zhenzong
Emperor of the Song dynasty had been deluded by the treacherous official Wang Qinruo
王欽若 into accepting three forged ‘Books from Heaven’, falsely attributed them to
Heaven and deceived the people. Thus did these monsters and witches gain support

144
For a discussion of the textual history of this novel, see Lin Song 林嵩, “Cong yaoshu dao lingguai: lun
‘pingyao zhuan’ xingzhi zhi yanbian 從妖術到靈怪：論《平妖傳》性質之演變,” Mingqing xiaoshuo
yanjiu 明清小說研究 85 (2007): 185-241.

119

among the people, brewing into a monster uprising.”
145
In the Ming novel Dongdu ji 東渡記, the idiom “monsters arise from the human”
is employed on a personal, rather than political, level. It interprets monsters as
manufactured by human failings. A fisherman’s cruelty in killing hundreds of shrimps
creates an avenging shrimp monster; a corrupt clerk in the official granary gives rise to a
mouse spirit to take revenge for the harm he had done; a jealous, shrewish wife curses in
front of dog, turning it into a vicious dog spirit. Domestic conflicts are all portrayed as
monsters who attempt to find lodgings in human hosts. People with moral weakness
allow these monsters to take residence inside of their chests, but once the monsters settle
down there, their moral failures become even worse. In this novel human faults literally
create monsters.
The passage in Zuozhuan is
almost quoted verbatim here, but the term yao in this novel refers to specific fox spirits,
rather than omens and portents. And as in Zuozhuan, the emergence of monsters is
interpreted as a direct result of political failures.
146
Buddhist discourse also contributes to the tendency of affirming the human origin
of monsters. The Buddhist concept of mo 魔 means Mara, the evil one, lord of the realm
of sense desire. In Chinese Buddhism there exist four kinds of Maras: the deity Mara, the
Mara of the five components, the Mara of afflictions, and the Mara of death. Besides the
deity Mara, the other three Maras are all considered products of our individual

145
Feng Menglong comp., Sishi hui Sansui pingyao zhuan 四十回三遂平妖傳 (Beijing: Zhongua shuju,
2004), 256.

146
Fang Ruhao 方汝浩, Dongdu ji (Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1995).

120

physiology and psychology. Buddhist demons are creations of the mind. Ji Yun records a
tale in his Yuewei caotang biji where an old monk explained the origin of monsters and
demons from the perspective of Buddhist belief. A scholar formed a homosexual
relationship with a young boy, and they had been intimate like husband and wife until the
boy died of illness. From then on, the scholar started to see his specter day and night, and
it became an ailment that no charms or amulets could cure. An old monk offered a
diagnosis of his disease from the Buddhist perspective: “Demons all originate from the
mind. Is it really the boy? Or is it not the boy, but what has been summoned by your own
mind? It is an illusion created by your mind, and will disappear as soon as you empty
your mind ( 種種魔障，皆起于心。果此童耶？是心所招非此童耶？是心所幻，但空
爾心，一切俱滅矣).”
147
Medical discourse also offers an important range of interpretations of monsters’
human origins. During the Han dynasty, Wang Chong explained demons as a by-product
of human illness.
According to Buddhist discourse, demons and monsters are but
projections created by our mind.
148

147
Yuewei caotang biji 3:44.
By the Ming dynasty, demonology had been incorporated into the
rest of the medical tradition and included in the same correspondences as the human mind
and body. Ghosts and demons can be explained as by-product of illness, causes of illness,
or simply opportunistic attacks drawn by the patient’s physical or psychological

148
Wang Chong, Lunheng jiaoshi 22:931.

121

weakness.
149
Built on these various discourses that contribute to the understanding “monsters
arise from human”, classical tales in late imperial period go on to examine the link
between monsters and human interior.
Either way they are intimately weaved into individual humans through these
medical concepts.

II. Monsters Summoned by Desire and Imagination

One of the most common uses of the idiom “monsters arise from the human” in
classical tales is to reflect on the power and danger of human imagination and desires.
Monsters are often conjured up and summoned by the human’s intense desires.
Pu Songling’s tale “Huabi 畫壁” (Painted Wall) is a story in which a man’s
desire apparently animated an entire world within a mural. The protagonist, a young
scholar named Zhu, visited an old temple with his friend Meng Longtan. As an old monk
led them in, Zhu’s attention was immediately drawn to the paintings on the walls:
The two walls were covered with fine paintings of such precise and
wondrous skills that the people seemed alive. On the eastern wall were
painted the Celestial Maidens scattering flowers. Among them was one
who wore her hair in two childish tufts; she was holding flowers with her
fingers and smiling. Her cherry lips seemed about to move, her liquid eyes
about to flow. Zhu stared at it for a long time, and without realizing it he
was robbed of his will and shaken in spirit, lost in deep, dazed
contemplation. Suddenly his body was floating, as if he were riding on
clouds, and he found himself transported onto the wall.
150

149
Paul Unschuld, Chinese Medicine: A History of Ideas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985)
213-215.

150
Liaozhai zhiyi 1:14.

122

It is Zhu’s intense desire that brought him into the painting. As a commentator
explains, “as his longing leads to deep contemplation, illusion turns into reality 因思結想，
因幻成真.” At this point, the illusory world in the painting was about to become real.
Once inside of the mural, Zhe saw a large complex of halls and pavilions and
realized that he was no longer in the human world. When he was listening to an old monk
preaching a Buddhist sermon, the smiling girl with two tufts came and gently tugged his
robe. The girl waved the flower in her hand and beckoned him to follow her. They went
inside a deserted chamber and consummated their passion. After two days the girl’s
companions found out about her lover, chided her for her childish hair style, and put her
hair up in a coiffure as befitting a married woman. As he was enjoying her heightened
beauty, their bliss was abruptly put to an end.
All of a sudden he heard the heavy thud of leather boots and the clanging
of chains and then the sound of uproar and heated discussion. The girl
leapt up, stealthily peeped with Zhu. They saw an emissary in gold armor,
with a face black as lacquer. He was gripping chains in one hand and
raising a hammer in the other. The Celestial Maidens surrounded him. …
The emissary turned around and surveyed the room with a hawk-like gaze,
as if he were about to undertake a search. The girl was terrified, her face
turning into the color of dead ash. In panic she told Zhu, “Quickly hide
beneath the bed!” Then she opened a small door on the wall and quickly
fled. Zhu sprawled under the bed, not even daring to breathe. Moments
passed, he heard the sound of boots come into the room and then go out
again. Before long, the clamor gradually receded into the distance, and he
calmed down a little, but there were still people coming and going and
talking outside the door. Having been constrained for so long, he felt his
ears ringing and his eyes on fire. The situation was almost unbearable, yet
all he could do was quietly listen for the sound of the girl’s return, no
longer remembering where he had come from.
151

151
Liaozhai zhiy, 1:15-16.

123

Their joyful lovemaking suddenly turned to a nightmare. After the girl left
through the small door, Zhu was stranded in the dark space beneath the bed, unable to see
anything at all. It is at this moment that Zhu started to lose contact with the world outside
of the mural, as he forgot where he had come from. Zhu now completely identified with
the world inside of the painting, and all he could hope for was the return of the girl,
totally unaware that it was an illusory world animated only by his intense desires. Up to
this point, the tale is narrated from the perspective of Zhu, about his subjective and
private experience inside of the painting. It can be construed as merely a daydream or
reverie that exists only in his mind. Yet the tale negates this interpretation immediately as
the narrative perspective shifts onto his friend Meng Longtan.
All this time, Meng Longtan was in the temple, and when Zhu suddenly
disappeared, he wondered about it and asked the old monk. The monk
smiled, saying, “He has gone to listen to a Buddhist sermon.” Meng asked,
“Where?” And the old monk replied, “Not far away.” After a short while,
the monk knocked at the wall with his finger and called out: “Mr. Zhu!
Why are you taking so long to come back?” Just then Meng suddenly saw
a portrait of Zhu in the painting, standing still as if he were intently
listening for something. The monk called again, “Your friend has been
waiting for a long time!” Suddenly Zhu floated down from the wall and
stood there completely dazed, his eyes bulging and his legs trembling.
Meng was terrified and asked him about it. In fact, Zhu had been
sprawling under the bed when he heard a loud knock like thunder, and so
he had gone out of the room to listen. They all looked up at the girl
holding flowers and found that her hair was coiled up on top of her head,
no longer hanging down in two tufts. Alarmed, Zhu asked the monk for
the reason, and the monk said, “Illusions arise from your mind. How could
I explain it?”
152

The moment when Meng spotted Zhu’s portrait in the painting is crucial. Once
Zhu’s subjective and private experience was witnessed by his friend Meng, his journey

152
Liaozhai zhiyi 1:16.
124

inside of the painting is granted reality and can no longer be interpreted as mere fantasy.
The change in the girl’s hairstyle offers tangible evidence for the reality of the journey:
their sexual consummation was inscribed on the painting, changing it irreversibly. The
monk called it an illusion created by the human mind, implying that it was Zhu’s intense
desire and longing for the girl that brought all these changes. His journey inside of the
painting is an illusion, and so is the change in the girl’s hairstyle.
The Buddhist undertone in this tale is unmistakable. The old monk obviously
knew Zhu’s journey inside of the painting, but he told Meng that Zhu went to listen to a
Buddhist sermon. Is the journey meant to be a Buddhist sermon that leads one to
enlightenment? Is this old monk one and same with the old monk delivering a Buddhist
sermon in the painting? If the answer to both questions is yes, the Buddhist sermon, then,
is about the conventional Buddhist wisdom that the phenomenological world is but an
illusion created by human desires.
Yet Zhu did not reach enlightenment. He did not even seem to accept the old
Monk’s rationalization. In the end, he was depressed with melancholy, got to his feet and
left the temple. At least for Zhu, what he had experienced was not merely an illusion.
They were indisputably there; one saw them, crystallized in the girl’s new hairstyle, as
clearly as any other object of sense. It is a real entity, existing outside the boundaries of
human mind. So the illusion is not entirely an illusion. Human mind and human desire
are capable of more than conjuring up illusions; they can grant physical presence to these
illusions.
125

Pu Songling comments at the end of the tale, “‘Illusions arise from oneself’: this
saying seems to be the truth. If a man has a licentious mind, then a promiscuous world
will arise; if a man has a promiscuous mind, then a terrifying world will arise. When a
bodhisattva tries to teach the ignorant, a thousand illusions were created at once, but all
are produced by the human mind itself. The monk was a bit too keen to see result. It is a
pity that upon hearing his words, Zhu did not reach enlightenment, unfasten his hair, and
withdraw to the mountains.”
153
In “Painted Wall”, human desires animated a painting, and brought figures in the
painting to life. In “Hu meng 狐夢” (A Fox Dream), another tale by Pu Songling,
monsters are conjured up by human desire and longing. The tale opens with the
protagonist, Bi Yi’an’s 畢怡庵 desire to meet Qingfeng, a fox spirit in Liaozhai zhiyi that
we have discussed in the previous chapter: “My friend Bi Yi’an once paid a visit to his
uncle’s villa, and went upstairs to take a rest. It was said that the building had long been
haunted by fox spirits. Whenever Bi read my ‘Biography of Qingfeng’, his heart went out
to her and he hated that he could not meet her even once. So he sat upstairs, lost in deep
contemplation and longing for her. By the time he returned to his room, it was growing
dark.”
So it was an imperfect Buddhist sermon after all. Zhu did
not achieve enlightenment. His mind was too entangled with the illusions granted reality
by his desires, illusions powerful enough to withstand the rationalization the Buddhist
monk put forward.
154

153
Liaozhai zhiyi 1:17.
His desire, deep contemplation and longing are fore-grounded from the start.

154
Liaozhai zhiyi 5:618.
126

Then someone shook him out of his sleep, he woke up to see a middle-aged
woman who still retained her charm. She immediately introduced herself: “I am a fox
spirit. I am greatly honored by your attention and thoughts, and truly appreciated them
( 我狐也。蒙君注念，心竊感納).”
155
The narrative is further complicated by the introduction of a dream. On the third
night, Bi waited for his fox lover for quite some time and started to grow sleepy. As soon
as he laid his head upon the table, the fox spirit came in and apologized for having him
wait so long. She then took him to meet her three sisters, who were throwing a party in
his honor. The mischievous and charming fox sisters competed with each other to trick Bi
into drinking more wine from the magical cups they had conjured up, as they played
various drinking games. After Bi left the banquet, he suddenly woke up to find out that it
was a dream, yet he was still intoxicated, reeking of wine. He was quite confused. When
his fox lover came back again, she told him that it was not a dream: “My sisters took
cover in dream because they feared you would be a wild carouser. Actually, it was not a
By acknowledging that her appearance was a
result of Bi’s inner thoughts, she indicated that Bi’s ardent desire to meet a fox-spirit had
caused her to materialize. Bi was delighted and started to flirt with her. She repelled his
advances, saying that she was too old for him. But she did agree to bring in her daughter
the following night. True to her words, she appeared again with her beautiful daughter,
explaining that there was a karmic connection between Bi and her daughter that must be
fulfilled. Bi’s desire for fox-spirit was finally gratified.

155
Liaozhai zhiyi 5:618.

127

dream.”
156
It all came about from Bi’s contemplation after reading “Qingfeng” and
his longing for her. Therefore, his encounter with the fox girl is already a
dream. The banquet and congratulations took the cover of another dream,
but later it was considered not a dream. When he was not dreaming, it was
actually a dream. Yet when he was dreaming, it turned out not to be a
dream. Then, what isn’t a dream? What isn’t not a dream? And what isn’t
not not a dream? When Bi talked about his dream, he knew that he had
been dreaming, but it was not a dream. Liaozhai recorded Bi’s dream, but
said that it was not a dream, then it must be not not not a dream.
Her explanation is even more confusing: what Bi had experienced was both a
dream and not a dream. A commentator of Liaozhai zhiyi explains the structure of the
tale as follows:

為讀青鳳傳凝想而成，則遇女即夢也。設筵作賀，而更託之夢，復以
為非夢。非夢而夢，夢而非夢。何者非夢，何者非非夢，何者非非非
夢？畢子述夢，自知其夢而非夢；聊齋志夢，則謂其非夢，而非非非
夢。
157

According to his reading, Bi’s fox lover and her mother are already illusions
conjured up by his desire and longing. So his dream about the banquet is a dream within a
dream. All kinds of logical confusions ensue when the dream within a dream was said to
be not a dream. The effect is that nobody, including the protagonist and the author of the
tale, can be sure whether it was a dream or not. As another commentator puts it, “A fox
spirit is already illusory, and a fox dream is even more illusory. To say that the fox dream
was not a dream, is the most illusory of all. There is a saying ‘If there is a dream within a
dream, then it was never a dream.’ Was it a dream or not? I cannot decide.”
158

156
Liaozhai zhiyi 5:618.
If the
previous tale “Painted Wall” is about an illusion that is not quite an illusion, then this tale

157
Liaozhai zhiyi 5:622.

158
Liaozhai zhiyi 5:622.
128

is about a dream that is not quite a dream. Yet one thing is certain in both tales: the
animated painting and the fox spirits are all dependent on the human mind and its intense
desire and longing. Whether they are real entities with physical form or just illusory
images is subject to different interpretations, yet they all arise from the the human mind.
Pu Songling’s interest in the relationship between monsters and human mind is
shared by many authors of classical tales during the Qing dynasty. Ji Yun also uses the
principle of the human origins of monsters in a variety of his tales. While Pu Songling
takes delight in the powerful illusions the human mind can create, Ji Yun concentrates on
the disastrous consequences of arousing monsters through one’s excessive desire and
imagination. The victims are often young scholars who are avid readers of romance
between humans and monsters like the tales in Liaozhai zhiyi 聊斋志异. Literature and
reading play an important role in prompting imagination and desires.
Ji Yun’s tale about a young scholar named Luo 罗生 makes direct reference to
fiction and miscellaneous tales on fox romance. The opening of the tale tells us that Luo
was an avid reader of fox romance, and enchanted by the beautiful fox spirits in these
literary works, he regretted that he had never met even one fox spirit. Craving for a
romantic encounter with a female fox, he wrote a letter begging for a fox concubine and
placed it at an old tomb that was said to be haunted by fox spirits. One day, when he was
sitting alone in his room, lost in deep contemplation, a fox spirit suddenly appeared in
front of his eyes. She introduced herself: “My master was moved by your kind invitation.
Today is an auspicious day, and he sent me, Sanxiu, to be your concubine. I will be
129

greatly honored if you would accept me.”
159
The fox spirit was a beauty who could make herself invisible so that she could
satisfy his every desire at every moment. Unfortunately she was also a glutton, and when
Luo’s household ran out of food, she stole clothing and household utensils to sell for cash.
Moreover, she was equally insatiable in sex, and drove Luo to the brink of exhaustion.
After they became estranged, she and her fox friends haunted him mercilessly. When Luo
finally asked a Daoist priest to exorcise her, she defended herself and pointed out not
only that she was eagerly invited by Luo, but also that she had acted according to the
inherent nature of her species. Since Luo preferred a fox spirit to a woman, he had no
ground to judge her by human standards. Unable to provide a counter argument, the
Daoist priest gave up and told Luo that it was Luo himself who courted the trouble, and
that nobody but himself should be held responsible. In the end, Luo was impoverished
and died of exhaustion.
The fox spirit did not come on her own will.
It was Luo’s desire and obsession that had summoned her.
In placing the blame on Luo himself, Ji Yun makes it clear that it was Luo’s
sexual desire for an erotic encounter with a female fox and his idealistic vision of fox
romance that led to his downfall. He moves the responsibility for fox depredations from
foxes and places it in the human mind. The ending of Luo’s story is unexpectedly grim. Ji
Yun seems to feel that the extremely severe punishment is justified by the extreme length
to which Luo actually went to get a fox concubine.

159
Yuewei caotang biji 13:425.

130

In the same collection there is a similar story about a young scholar who went to
the capital to take the civil service examination. At the inn where he lodged, there was a
portrait of a beautiful woman, painted with such exquisite skills that she seemed to be
alive. The young man was fascinated. He often sat alone in front of the painting,
indulging in his reverie, until one day the beautiful woman suddenly stepped out of the
painting. The scholar knew it must have been a monster, yet since he had been longing
for her for a long time, he was unable to control himself and immediately had sex with
her. This tale easily recalls Pu Songling’s tale “Painted Wall”, where Zhu was enchanted
by a lifelike portrait of a girl in a painting. Unlike Zhu in “Painted Wall”, whose desire
transported him inside of the painting, this young scholar’s intense desire summoned the
woman from the painting and brought her to life.
When he finished with the examination, the young scholar brought the painting
home, but the woman would not come to life again. He kept on trying to summon her for
several month, calling her name “Zhenzhen” again and again, and she finally stepped out
of the painting once more. She did not seem to remember their first encounter, but the
young scholar was too engrossed in their sexual relationship to question her. The name
Zhenzhen alludes to a widely known Tang tale where a man fell in love with a beautiful
lady named Zhenzhen in a painting, who came to life in response to his summons.
160

160
Taiping guangji 286: 2283.
The
young man in Ji Yun’s story must have known this tale, since he named his lady in the
portrait Zhenzhen, too. It was this tale that made him believe that the portrait would
respond to his sincere call.

131

After some time, the young man started to waste away. His father sent for a
Daoist priest to exorcise whatever monster that possessed him. The Daoist priest found
out that there was nothing wrong with the painting itself. It was a fox spirit who took
advantage of his lust and imagination, took the shape of the beautiful woman in the
painting, and drained his vital essence. At the end of the story Ji Yun comments: “From
this we understand that the young man’s mind must be evil before the evil fox spirit could
avail herself of the opportunity to play the trick of a dopplegänger, because evil can only
be summoned by evil. What he had met in the capital must have been another fox
spirit.”
161
In this story, Ji Yun makes the same move as he does in the story about young
man named Luo. He blames excessive human desires and imagination instead of the fox
and thus displaces the fox’s fault onto the human mind. By making the human
responsible for the vices of the monsters, Ji Yun eliminates our fear of monsters that lurk
around us and arbitrarily prey on innocent people, because one will not become the target
of monsters if they do not have an evil mind full of desire and lustful reveries in the first
place. However, the dread for external monsters is directed inward to the human mind. It
is the excessive lust and imagination that gives rise to the monsters, and what is really
dreadful is not the monsters themselves but the perilous instability of human mind. The
real monster that we have to fight against does not come from the outside with no
apparent reason, but lies deep in our own mind in the shape of desires and imagination.
Again, it is the young man’s excessive desire that summoned the monster, who
took the form of the object of his desire in order to dally with him.

161
Yuewei caotang biji 19:477.

132

When the mind becomes haunted by monsters of desire, thinking and imagination
can become dangerous. In all four tales that have been discussed above, the protagonists
all engage in deep thinking and contemplation. And it is their indulgence in sexual
fantasy that summoned the monsters. It was as if their reverie had come true, as if the
objects of their desires had materialized right in front of their eyes. Yet in each tale, the
object of desire that was conjured up by the mind was not contained within the mind, but
would take on a life of its own, mocking the very desire that made them real.
Accordingly, reading and literature that trigger imagination and reverie also
become dangerous. The young scholar Luo was familiar with all kinds of fictions on fox
romances, and his desire and imagination of an erotic encounter with a fox was ignited by
these fictions. In the story of the young man and the painting, it was the Tang tale about
Zhenzhen that made him believe that a portrait could be brought to life. Needless to say,
in Pu Songling’s tale “A Fox Dream”, it was also Bi Yi’an’s obsession with tales like
Qingfeng that triggered his reverie and aroused the fox spirits.
The Qing authors’ focus on human mind as the breeding ground for monsters and
their concern about imagination and literature resonate strongly with Terry Castle’s
arguments about the “supernaturalization of the human mind” and the anxiety on the
danger of imagination and reading in eighteenth-century European culture. In the
eighteenth century, European people started to rationalize the supernatural. Castle argues
that the European rationalists did not so much negate the supernatural world as displace it
into the realm of psychology. Ghosts were internalized and reinterpreted as hallucinatory
thoughts, and the mind became subject to spectral presences. By relocating the world of
133

ghosts in the closed space of the imagination, the mind itself was supernaturalized. If
ghosts are hallucinatory thoughts, then the boundaries between ghost-seeing and ordinary
thinking and contemplation would be blurred. The mental image created in ordinary
thinking could easily turn into hallucination. Thinking too much could incur the danger of
hallucination, seeing ghost, and madness. For the eighteenth-century Europeans,
indulging in reveries could lead to the unleashing of spectres. And reading also became
dangerous because it prompted obsessional thoughts.
162
Similarly, in Chinese classical tales, by displacing the faults of the monsters onto
human desires, monsters are internalized into human mind. When the mind becomes a
dangerous place haunted by monsters, thinking and imagination are able to arouse these
monsters and make them real. Reading and literature also become dangerous as they can
prompt imagination.

However, unlike ghosts in Terry Castle’s discussion, what we deal with are
monsters, with a more independent, solid substance than ghosts. While ghosts can be pure
products of the psyche, monsters are more readily accepted as external realities. They are
almost never pure hallucinations. In the tales we have discussed above, they took
advantage of humans’ imagination and reverie and appeared as the exact embodiment of
their desire. Unlike ghosts in eighteenth-century Europe, although monsters are
summoned by the human mind, they exist as real entities that have a physical substance.

162
See Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-century Culture and the Invention of the
Uncanny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) 177-84.

134

And it was the very reality of what the human mind could create and summon that made
the power of desire, imagination and reading even more potent and perilous.

III. Monsters Summoned by Moral Weakness

Monsters can be aroused by desire and imagination, and more commonly, they are
summoned by the human’s moral lapse. The term “monsters arise from the human” is
also frequently used to condemn human moral weakness. Besides excessive sexual
desires, all evil thoughts have the power of arousing monsters. The comment “the evil
summons the evil 以邪召邪” appears at the end of many such tales.
A relatively minor moral lapse is the humans’ going out of their way to disturb
fox spirits when the foxes do not give them trouble. This usually causes revenge from the
fox spirits, and humans are generally blamed for whatever disastrous result it might bring.
In one tale, several rascals in a village heard that in an old tomb there were a few
fox spirits that could transform into human beings. They set up a trap outside of the tomb
and caught two female foxes. Then they threatened the foxes with a knife, forcing them
to change into beautiful women and serve them wine. When they did not agree, they
stabbed one fox to death. The other fox complied, changed into a beautiful naked woman
to serve wine. She eventually managed to flee from the rascals with a ruse. After she got
away, she set fire to the rascals’ houses, and the daughter of the man who stabbed the
other fox was burned to death. At the end of the tale, the author comments: “from this
one understands how foxes take revenge. Although these foxes did not give humans
135

trouble, humans went out of their way to disturb the foxes. For these rascals who do evil
frequently, these consequences are very appropriate.”
163
Aside from sheer maliciousness on the human’s side, excessive self-righteousness
can also provoke monsters. In another tale, upon hearing about fox spirits haunting a
temple, an old pedantic scholar went to the temple hall himself to reproach the foxes. The
temple was quiet for a few nights, and just as the scholar was congratulating himself, the
foxes took revenge. One day his landlord came to visit, and while they were saluting one
another, a scroll of erotic picture fell from the scholar’s sleeve. Upon seeing the erotic
picture, the landlord left without a word. The next day none of the students came to take
classes with the old scholar. Ji Yun offers the following comment at the end of the tale:
“the foxes never harass humans, but humans go out of their way to harass the foxes, and
get hit by the foxes right on the spot. The noble person should be wary of petty persons.
To touch their sharp edges without good reasons will certainly court defeat.”
This is a case of humans
deliberately pursuing foxes. As can be seen from the author’s comment, his sympathy lies
with the foxes, and he sees the fox’s revenge as fitting. What is implied in the tale is the
notion that when left alone, monsters will naturally be in a truce with humans. Monsters
will not attack humans for no apparent reason, and humans should be held responsible for
the harm that accrues to them in their relationships with monsters.
164

163
Yuewei caotang biji 12:269-70.
Here Ji
Yun portrays the foxes in a more negative light by comparing them to petty men, and he
is more lenient on the human, but still puts the blame on the human’s side. His moral

164
Yuewei caotang biji 5:87.
136

message focuses on the misbehavior of the old scholar, blaming him for not being wise
enough to keep a safe distance from the fox spirits.
Monsters can also be summoned by indiscreet or stupid words and actions of
humans. In one tale, a family trying to scare children away from their empty storerooms
put up a sign saying that a fox spirit haunted the rooms and should not be disturbed. After
several days a fox spirit really arrived, saying, “I have moved in, having received your
kind invitation. I will guard this compound for you.”
165
From then on, people who went
into the storerooms were always hit with bricks and tiles, and no servant dared to enter. Ji
Yun comments at the end of tale, “This is what is called ‘monsters arise from the human’.”
In another tale in the same collection, before moving into a new house, a paranoiac man
asked Daoists priests to perform various religious ceremonies in order to repel foxes.
Originally there were no fox spirits in that house, but after this fuss he had made, fox
spirits really came to haunt his house, as if summoned by his paranoia.
166
In all these tales humans are blamed for meddling with the fox spirits and held
responsible for whatever consequence this may incur. This attitude seems to resound with
Confucius’ injunction to “respect the spirits but keep them at a distance 敬鬼神而遠
之”.

167

165
Yuewei caotang biji 11:243.
Except for the first tale where the rascals sexually abused the fox, there is no
apparent crime committed by the humans in these tales. What they failed to do is to keep
a proper distance from the foxes. Meddling with the foxes and deliberately provoking

166
Yuewei caotang biji 7: 143.

167
See The Analects 論語, 7:22. Translation quoted from D. C. Lau, trans., The Analects (Hong Kong: The
Chinese University Press, 1983) 61.
137

them will only court disaster for humans. If humans had been wise and discreet enough
when dealing with foxes, all the harm could have been prevented.
More severe moral lapse can summon monsters directly. Monsters can come to
molest human even for one evil thought. In a tale, in the daytime an imperial emissary
from Taiwan saw a female fox in the disguise of a beautiful woman peering at him
through the window of his room. He scolded her, and she disappeared. But when the
night came and he was sleeping and dreaming of taking the wife of one of his clerks as a
concubine, the fox returned to throw tiles on his bed. The fox told him that she had not
dared to come near him during the daytime because he harbored no evil thought, but the
evil thought in his dreams allowed her to return to pester him: “The ghosts and spirits
know the slightest vibration of the human mind. The evil summons the evil, and you
cannot blame me for that ( 人心一動，鬼神知之，以邪召邪，不得而咎我).”
168
Fear also makes one vulnerable to monsters. In a tale a fervent skeptic who
rejected the existence of ghosts and spirits was terrified by a local wit who disguised
himself as a ghost to pester him. He was then convinced that ghosts and spirits did exist
and started to fear them. Just then real fox spirits came haunting his house, throwing
stones and tiles, and shaking his windows and doors. Ji Yun concludes that it was his fear
that had given rise to the monsters: “He was mortified after being terrified, and then his
The
term “yi xie zhao xie 以邪召邪” (the evil summons the evil) is often used to summarize
this type of events. The appearance of monsters is really caused by the evil thoughts
within human mind.

168
Yuewei caotang biji 1:3.

138

energy was already weakened, which allowed the fox spirits to come and take advantage.
Isn’t that what is meant by ‘monsters arise from the human’?”
169
Contrasting to these tales, in another tale a female fox spirit was repelled by a
generous thought of her victim. A merchant was molested by a female fox spirit and
wasting away. He tried many times to exorcise the fox with Daoist charms, and the fox
spirit would be gone for a short while, but always come back to pester him. One night
when the fox spirit was sleeping with the merchant, she suddenly rose up, asking him:
“Do you have any unusual thoughts? Why do I suddenly feel stabbed with a strong
energy? It is pricking at me without stop and making me restless ( 君有異念耶？何忽覺
剛气砭人，刺促不寧也).” The merchant confessed that he had been thinking about
saving his neighbor’s son from being sold as a singing boy. This generous thought alone
managed to repel the fox spirit, and she told the merchant, “When you have such a
thought, you are a virtuous man. Anyone who harms a virtuous man will face severe
punishment. I will be leaving now.”

170

169
Yuewei caotang biji 1:7.
Before she went away, she covered her own
mouth on the merchant’s mouth, and returned all the vital essence she had drained from
him. In this tale, a virtuous thought was able to stab the fox spirit and cause physical pain
like a magic sword a Daoist exorcist might use. It harks back to the old saying “yao bu
sheng de 妖不勝德” (monsters cannot defeat virtues) found in Shiji. Since monsters are
only aroused by moral weakness, a virtuous man should never have to fear the attack
from monsters.

170
Yuewei caotang biji 10: 213.

139

Ji Yun recorded a similar tale about one of his ancestors. Two young scholars
took lodging in a temple that was haunted by a female fox spirit. The scholar who lived in
the southern room was intimate with the fox spirit, but the scholar living in the northern
room had never even seen her. One day, the fox spirit came in late, and the scholar in the
southern room asked her if she had been visiting the other scholar, and the fox spirit said
that she dare not come near him because his heart was as dead as wood and stone. The
scholar in the southern room suggested that she could try seducing the one in the northern
room, and the fox spirit replied, “Magnet can only attract iron needles. He is of a totally
different kind, and even if I try to seduce him, he would not be swayed. Meddling with
him will only bring insult.” Ji Yun’s father told him that the scholar who lived in the
northern room was one of their ancestors. He had no particular talent or merit, but was a
simple and honest person. And that was the reason that no fox spirits dared to come close
to him. Ji Yun comments at the end of the tale, “From this we know that whoever was
seduced by monsters must have harbored evil thoughts in the first place 知為妖魅所惑者，
皆邪念先萌耳.”
171
In these tales, monsters are often the fairest judge of human morality. Ji Yun
recorded a tale about the judgments a fox spirit made on the varied degree of morality of
several people. A scholar’s studio was haunted by fox spirits. They talked to people
during the day time, hit people with stones and tiles, but nobody could see them. An
Monsters pick their targets on account of their moral status. A simple
and honest man who does not harbor any evil thoughts is very unlikely to become the
prey of monsters.

171
Yuewei caotang biji 4:86.

140

official named Dong was reputed to be a virtuous man, and volunteered to banish these
fox spirits when he heard of it. As he was preaching to the fox spirits about how humans
and monsters should follow different paths, a voice said loudly, “As an official, you take
care of your people, and do not take bribes. Therefore I dare not hit you. Yet you take
care of your people only to gain reputation, and you do not take bribes because you worry
about the trouble that they may bring. Therefore, I do not have to flee from you, either.
Please stop and talk no more, or you will be courting trouble.”
172
Dong was mortified and
had to retire. One of the servants at the scholar’s house appeared to be a crude and stupid
woman, yet she was not afraid of the fox spirits, and the foxes had never hit her with tiles.
The scholar asked the fox spirits about it, and one of them explained, “Although she was
merely a lowly servant, she had been serving her in-laws out of sincere filial piety. Even
ghosts and deities have to avoid her, not to mention our kind!”
173
Virtues repel monsters, yet the virtues must be real. Monsters never fail to
recognize hypocrisy, and will take advantage of it. In the tale “Ma Hongmo 馬宏謨” in
Maiyou ji, a scholar who appeared to have perfect virtues was exposed by the trickery of
a fox spirit. Ma was a virgin, and claimed that he was immune to sexual seductions
coming from the opposite sex. His father worked as a private tutor and was terrified by a
Dong’s virtues are not
enough to repel fox spirits because although he did all the right things, it was out of a
selfish purpose. Only virtues in its purest sense are powerful enough to drive monsters
away.

172
Yuewei caotang biji 1:1.

173
Yuewei caotang biji 1:2.

141

portrait of General Guan that came to life at night. Ma volunteered to teach there in his
father’s place: “This must have been a portrait monster. Monsters arise from human, and
when have you heard that a monster could seduce a virtuous man? Since my father was
terrified and dare not to stay, I beg to take his job, and see if this monster has enough guts
to seduce me.”
174
After a while, when he was taking a walk in the garden, a beautiful woman
opened the door of a deserted building and beckoned for him to come in. Enchanted by
her beauty, he climbed up the stairs to hold the woman. She suddenly turned into a
terrifying monster to claw at him. He fled immediately, panicking, tripped on his way and
injured a foot. The owner then told him that the building had long been haunted by fox
spirits. The author comments that Ma was only tough from the outside, but weak from the
inside. He compares Ma’s virtuous façade to the uprightness of Weisheng Gao 微生
高
While he was there, the portrait did not come to life again. People all
praised him for possessing the moral force that can expel ghosts and spirits.
175
and the abstinence of Zhang Junrun 張君瑞
176

174
Maiyou ji 6:15, in Biji xiaoshuo daguan 21:295.
, pointing out that it was nothing but
empty names without substance. And the term “monsters arise from the human” that he
quoted may as well apply to himself. Monsters could not seduce virtuous men, and it was
his own moral weakness that aroused the fox spirit. Monsters can see through the façade
one puts on, spy the moral weakness that is hidden beneath and respond to it.

175
A disciple of Confucius who had the reputation of being upright but actually was not.

176
The protagonist of “Romance of the Western Chamber”, who had the reputation of being abstinent, but
seduced a young lady Cui Yingying and abandoned her eventually.

142

In all the tales discussed above, the innermost thoughts of humans are visible to
the fox spirits. The fox spirits’ awareness of the moral status of the human mind is
dramatized in the tale about a man named Wang Banxian 王半仙. One day Wang came
to visit his fox friend, who laughed and claimed to know Wang’s dream of last night. The
fox told Wang that he had dreamed of visiting a famous courtesan and enjoying himself
greatly. Wang remembered that he had indeed dreamed this and asked how his fox friend
could know this. The fox replied:
Humans live from the yang energy, and the yang always goes up, so its
energy is released through the top of people’s heads. When they sleep, the
spirit gathers in the heart, and the spirit light and yang energy reflect each
other like a mirror. When dreams are born in the heart, their reflections
appear in the yang energy on top of their heads, coming and going,
appearing and vanishing. Little human figures a few inches high appear
there, like a picture or a play, or like squirming insects. All the things that
you would not tell anyone appear in all their hundred forms. Ghosts and
spirits can see them. Enlightened fox spirits can also see them, but cannot
hear what is said. Last night I passed by your house and happened to see
your dream.
177

The fox went on to explain the different appearances of the auras of good and evil
men, in which a single good or evil thought was visible as a thread of a different color. In
the end, Wang was appalled by the fact that ghosts and spirits can even see through
human dreams. The dream the fox spirit spied on was erotic in nature, and thus could also
be a moment of particular vulnerability to fox spirits. It is only because the fox spirit was
his friend that he only laughed at Wang’s weakness without taking advantage of him.
More importantly, in this tale human mind is made visible through the reflections
in the yang energy, although only visible to ghosts and spirits. It is a vision of the human

177
Yuewei caotang biji 3:58. Translation based on Huntington, 317.
143

interior, haunted by tiny human figures coming and going like squirming insects. A
similar vision is described in another tale where human interior is made visible through
the “mirror of karma (ye jing 業鏡)”. An official of the netherworld explained the
mechanism of the “mirror of karma” as follows:
Ordinary mirrors reflect forms while gods’ mirrors reflect what is on our
minds. When someone has done something, he knows it. Since he knows
this, it is on his mind. When something is on your mind, there is an image
of it. When the mirror is illuminated the images appear. If one does
something without intending to, then one does not know of it. When the
mirror is illuminated nothing appears, as this deed was not on one’s mind.
The verdicts in netherworld cases distinguish good from bad solely on the
basis of whether a given act was deliberate or accidental. Make a note of
it!
178

Again, the human interior is laid bare and reflected on the “mirror of karma”. Every
conscious thought has an image that can be observed by the officials in the netherworld,
and not even the deepest secret can escape their eyes.
Sometimes these images of inner thoughts do become external projections. Ji Yun
recorded one such story about his friend Shen Zhaoding 申兆定. After a hunting trip in
the mountains, Shen started to see two round objects like balls spinning in front of his
eyes, and they were still there even if he closed his eyes. After a few days, the two balls
cracked and two maids emerged from them and led Shen to a grand mansion where he
met a fairy who proposed marriage to him. He declined, claiming that he was not used to
living in such a grand mansion. She sent him away angrily, and he woke from his dream.
A month later, the two balls appeared again, and the maids led him to a different house,

178
Yuewei caotang biji 16:410. Translation quoted from David L. Keenan trans., Shadows in a Chinese
Landscape: the Notes of a Confucian Scholar (Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999) 103-04.

144

secluded and lovely. The fairy proposed again, and unable to control himself any more,
he agreed to it. Since then Shen visited the house frequently in his dreams. After a while
the fairy came to him even during the day time, and forbade him to communicate with his
friends. Shen’s illness worsened, and he eventually died of it. Ji Yun uses the term
“monsters arise from human” to account for Shen’s untimely death. The tale does not
specify what kind of monster this fairy is, but Ji Yun calls it “mozhang魔障”, which is
the Buddhist term for mara, an illusory demon king that is an obstacle to enlightenment,
and he also explains that Shen had been fascinated with the fairies and immortals, and Ji
Yun considers this to be an obsession that prompted his hallucinations. At the end of the
tale, Ji Yun says, “Monsters arise from human, and images originate from the heart/mind
妖由人興，象由心起.”
179
These tales about images created by the mind resonate again with Terry Castle’s
discussion of phantasmagoria of the eighteenth century Europe. Phantasmagoria at first
meant illusions created by magic lanterns, and later came to mean hallucinations created
by the human brain and human mind. With this idea, ghosts were rationalized as the
product of the human mind, illusory images of inner thoughts, hallucinations created and
projected outward by the human brain.
According to Ji Yun, Shen’s obsession with immortals and
fairies is the demon within his mind, the images of the house, the maids and the fairy are
all hallucinations created by it, just like the optical images projected outward from a
mirror.
180

179
Yuewei caotang biji 8:169.
Yet in Chinese classical tales, the story of Shen

180
Terry Castle, 140-67.
145

Zhaoding is a rare case where inner thoughts create only images of monsters and pure
hallucination. In most other tales, evil thoughts, the monster within one’s mind, would
arouse external monsters to attack the person harboring them.
From these tales, we can see that monsters are ever-vigilant, omniscient observers
of people’s moral status, and that they will respond to the slightest vibration of the human
mind. The moral message conveyed in these tales is clear: the moral lapse of human
grants monsters the only opportunity to do harm. By making all actions of monsters
dependent on the moral status of humans, the Qing authors of classical tales actually
deprive monsters of any power besides moral judgment. The actions of monsters become
controllable. One should not be afraid of them, because those who are benevolent, honest
and steadfast will not be attacked by them, and only immoral thoughts and actions can
arouse monsters.
Ironically, with the affirmation of the human primacy, monsters seemed closer
and even more real than before. Evil thoughts have become the inner monsters that
occupy the most intimate place of the human mind itself. Monsters are involuntary
responds to the human’s moral lapse, yet one sees them anyway. Indeed, one could
hardly escape them, because they are, in a sense, one’s inner thoughts externalized.
Monsters are not exorcized, only internalized and reinterpreted as moral shortcomings
within the human mind.

146

IV. Fake Monsters

The term “monsters arise from the human” can also be used in a more literal sense
in stories of human machination where human beings pretend to be monsters for the
purpose of trickery and fraud. This is a direct reversal of the image of monsters that
assume human shapes. In these tales humans take the disguise of monsters, and in a sense,
become indistinguishable from monsters.
Ji Yun recorded a story where a woman disguised herself as a fox spirit to defraud
a scholar of his money. The scholar was staying in Beijing to prepare for the civil service
exam. One day he saw a pretty girl standing in front of a house, and was immediately
attracted by her beauty. He found a matchmaker, offered the family 300 cash as betrothal
gift so he could take the girl as his concubine. When he was finished with the exam after
a few weeks and came back to the house, the entire family had gone. Some said that they
are fox spirits, while some believed that they were actually con artists who pretended to
fox spirits so their victim would not pursue the matter. Ji Yun comments at the end of the
tale, “It is cunning for the fox spirits to take the disguise of a human, and even more
cunning for humans to take the disguise of fox spirits! I have lived in Beijing for fifty
years, and witnessed countless similar incidents. This is only one of them.”
181

181
Yuewei caotang biji 10:212.
He
compares the cunningness of human beings with that of fox spirits and concludes that
humans surpass fox spirit in the art of fraud.

147

To take the disguise of a fox spirit, the imposter needs to be very familiar with the
tradition of fox romance. A man took a concubine who was well-versed in literature, and
they enjoyed each other’s company very much. One day he found the concubine gone,
leaving only a very touching letter, stating that she was a fox spirit, and became his
concubine because of a predestined karmic bond between the two of them. Now that the
karmic debt had been paid off, she had to leave him despite her love for him. The man
was greatly moved by it and showed the letter to his friends. None of them ever had any
doubt because what had happened was no different from the classic formula of fox
romance: a fox spirit developed an intimate relationship with a mortal man to pay off a
karmic debt, and was unable to stay beyond the predestined time. Yet suddenly the
concubine appeared somewhere else with a different man, and it turned out that her
mother had sold her to another man for a high price, and that she took the disguise of a
fox spirit to extricate herself without causing any suspicion. A commentator makes the
equation between this concubine and real monster, saying that the concubine is not a fake
fox spirit, but a real one, because in cunningness and deception she is no different from a
real fox spirit.
182
Fox spirit’s omniscience and magical power to predict the future can also be used
by imposters in their fraud. The tale “Wu sheng 吳生” (Scholar Wu) is an elaborate story
made up of a series of tricks played in the name of a fox spirit. Wu was a wealthy but
lewd young man, and one day he saw a beautiful woman sitting under a tree by the road.
The women asked him for help, and explained that she broke her foot on her way to visit

182
Yuewei caotang biji 13:310.
148

her natal home. Wu offered to take this woman to his own home, but she asked him to
rent a carriage. He then grew suspicious about the woman’s identity. The woman then
told him that she was a fox spirit, and that she was waiting for him here because there
was a karmic bond between them. Wu was still in doubt, and the woman mentioned the
name of a courtesan that he admired. Wu started to believe her, and asked her to predict
future. The woman predicted that someone would show up to borrow money from Wu,
and a man soon came to ask for money to bury his mother. Wu was moved by his sorrow,
and lent him the money, but he thought it could be a coincidence. The woman made
another prediction that was immediately fulfilled. By now Wu was fully convinced that
she was a fox spirit, and agreed to rent a carriage for her. The woman asked him to leave
his gold bracelet, fur coat, belt and horse with her, and Wu promptly agreed. When he
came back with the carriage, the woman had gone with all his belongings. Wu believed
that he was cheated by a fox spirit, but it was later revealed that a group of rascals had
been observing his habits for some time, and then they made a singsong boy dress up as a
woman to deceive him in the name of a fox spirit. They took advantage of his lewdness
and his belief in fox spirits to trick him into giving up all his belongings.
183
In another tale, a servant took the disguise of a monster to steal a piece of
valuable ancient jade from his master’s guest. The guest used the piece of jade as a paper
weight, and one night, he saw a hand reaching for the jade from outside of the window.
Suspecting that it might be a thief, he picked up an iron tool, intending to hit on the hand,
but stopped short seeing that it was a delicate and beautiful hand. He peeked from the

183
Qingchengzi 青城子, Zhiyi xubian 志异續編 2:28, in Biji xiaoshuo daguan 27:363-64.

149

window, saw a blue-faced yaksa, and fainted. When he woke up, the jade was gone. He
thought that it must have been a fox spirit and did not investigate further. After a long
time, they finally found out that it was a servant in his host’s family who stole the jade
disguising himself as a monster. Ji Yun comments, “This was carefully planned. These
petty servants are as stupid as a stick of wood in serving their master, but when it comes
to committing crimes, they would come up with many clever tricks, like ghosts and
monsters.”
184
In some rare cases, the imposter could even be a Confucian scholar. A man named
Ma suddenly began to find that his house was haunted by monsters. They threw tiles and
bricks, wailed at night, and set fire in empty rooms. Such disturbance lasted for over a
year, and no exorcist could put it to stop. Ma finally had enough of it, sold his house and
moved. But whoever rented it later was similarly molested by the monsters, and soon had
to move elsewhere also. No one would dare to inquire about the house any more. An old
Confucian scholar would not believe such accounts, bought the house at an extremely
low price and moved in. Strangely enough, all was quiet, and nothing unusual happened.
People all thought that the scholar’s virtues had defeated the monsters. After some time, a
few rascals came and started a brawl with the scholar, and then the truth came out: all
strange events in the house were instigated by the rascals that the old scholar had hired.
Yi Yun’s father says at the end of the tale, “Monsters were no more than adepts at
playing deceitful tricks. In his ability to deceive with his tricks, the old Confucian scholar
Here again, petty servants who devise clever tricks to steal are equated to
ghosts and monsters.

184
Yuewei caotang biji 7:138.

150

should indeed be regarded as a real monster.”
185
Licentious women can also take the disguise of monsters in order to seduce men.
In one of these tales, a beautiful woman seduced a young man, pretending to be a fox
spirit. Enchanted by her beauty, the young man did not have any doubts. Suddenly a real
fox spirit came forth to scold the woman, “I have lived in this garden for a long time. My
little ones may have been throwing stones and bricks and disturbing the neighborhood,
yet I have never seduced any men. How can you damage my reputation like this?” The
author was surprised by the turn of the event, and commented, “Fox spirits always take
the disguise of humans, and now this woman takes the disguise of a fox spirit. Licentious
women are often described as fox spirits, yet this fox spirit is more chaste than
human.”
Monsters are, yet again, compared side
by side with the old Confucian scholar in terms deception. By hiring rascals to
impersonate monsters, the devious mind of the old Confucian scholar has also made
himself a real monster.
186
It is not uncommon for authors of classical tales to make the connection between
fox spirits and seductive women, especially prostitutes. In one tale, two prostitute sisters
were possessed by male fox spirits. When a Daoist priest came to exorcise them, one of
the male fox spirits assumed the form of a scholar and argued:
In this tale a real fox spirit exposed a fake fox spirit. When compared side to
side, the woman turned out to be the more licentious and the less chaste one.
Admittedly, we have practiced caibu and violated the laws of Heaven. But
please consider what kind of people these two women are! The families

185
Yuewei caotang biji 3:40.

186
Yuewei caotang biji 2:25.
151

that they have damaged, the careers that they have ruined, and the couples
that they have alienated, are all beyond counting. Death would be the
appropriate punishment for their crimes. They drain men’s essence, and
we drain their essence; they make men ill, and we make them ill; they take
men’s lives, and we take their lives. This is to make them try what they
have devised for others. Isn’t it just the way of the Heaven? … A human
being is defined by her human heart; since these two had the hearts of
beasts, why should you care if we, as beasts, kill beasts?
187

These two prostitutes were not imposters that attempted to pass themselves as monsters,
yet they were still equated to monsters on the ground of their immoral action and devious
heart. They drained men’s yang essence, caused illness and took men’s lives through
sexual seduction, exactly the same way as fox spirits did.
He Bang’e establishes the connection between monsters and humans as follows:
[Besides foxes,] Hairless creatures, those with scales, and those in shells,
flowers, trees, the idols in temples, and the gold in the storehouse, they all
can be monsters. When other creatures commit monstrosities, they do so
by night; but humans commit monstrosities by day. All those who grovel
and flatter, all those who assume the majesty of tigers and perch on the
city walls to make trouble, young women with dark brows and red skirts,
or young men with crimson clothes and white faces, are monsters without
exception. Why should one exterminate only the fox tribe? The Zuozhuan
says, “Monsters arise from human.” When human affairs are exhausted,
monsters will also cease.
188

By his definition, monsters are those who commit monstrosities. They are defined by
deeds, not by species. With the term “monsters arise from human”, monstrosity is
reversed back onto human beings. Human beings not only commit monstrosities as listed
in this quote, but are the source of all monsters. Only when monsters among humans are
eradicated, can monsters of other kinds cease to exist.

187
Yuewei caotang biji, 13: 309-310.

188
Yetan suilu 4:102, in Biji xiaoshuo daguan 22:312.
152

The majority of the tales discussed in this section share one common structure. A
tale starts off like an ordinary monster tale, with a description of the disturbances
typically attributed to monsters: a haunted house, a disembodied hand, a woman who
walked alone on the country road, a concubine who mysteriously disappeared after a
period of time. During the late imperial period, within the existing literary conventions of
representing monsters, many similar tales could be found on each topic listed above. And
the people in these tales, familiar with the body of monster tales that had been widely
shared, all firmly believed that whatever had happened was caused by a monster. It was
only later, sometimes years later, that the entire event was explained, and the true identity
of the imposters revealed. Real monsters did not play any role in these tales, yet they did
not disappear altogether. Rather, they are diverted or rerouted into the realm of human
behavior. If monsters can turn out to be humans, human beings themselves can take on
the dark, haunting, malicious quality of monsters.

V. Conclusion

In their attempt to rationalize or demystify monsters, the authors of classical tales
during the late imperial period frequently invoked the term “monsters arise from the
human” to reassert the human primacy and the moral order in the interaction between
humans and monsters. Monsters were portrayed as being summoned or conjured by
human desire and imagination, or being aroused by human moral weaknesses. Some
monsters were even the disguise taken by human beings in order to commit all kinds of
153

trickery and fraud. By emphasizing the human origins of monsters, the Qing writers
deprived monsters any power besides their involuntary response to human moral lapse. In
so doing they eliminated the horror of arbitrary monsters preying on the innocent,
monsters were not exorcized, only internalized and reinterpreted as moral shortcomings
within the human mind.
A lot of parallels could be found between this attempt to explain and demystify
monsters and the literary representation of ghosts in eighteen century European literature.
Terry Castle has pointed out that in Europe ghosts were rationalized as products of mind
rather than real, external beings. Yet ghosts were not abolished but transferred, in a
process that she calls the “supernaturalization of everyday life”. The intellectual context
of this shift is vastly different from that of the thriving of the term “monsters arise from
the human”, though. In late imperial China, absolute skepticism about ghosts and
monsters was still an eccentric minority position.
189

Monsters were seldom explained
away as pure illusion or hallucination. Oftentimes they were both psychologically
invoked, and granted a physical substance. Ironically, just as monsters were demystified
as being summoned or aroused by the human mind and human action, the human mind
became the new lair of inner monstrosities, and human actions acquired a dark, malicious,
monster-like quality. It may be that the urge toward exorcism will inevitably create its
own recoil effect, a return of the monster where it was least expected: within the
everyday life itself.

189
See Leo Chan, 79-86.
154

Conclusion:
Locating Otherness, Locating Monstrosity
In this study I have identified three basic modes of representing monsters in
Chinese classical tales: Monsters can be portrayed as the other to humans; they can also
be humanized and domesticated to represent the ideals and fantasies of mortal men; with
an unexpected turn, they can be internalized and rationalized as being summoned or
created by the human mind. The three modes emerged in the literary history in a
chronological order. The first mode to represent monsters as the other is the oldest and
was well in place during the Six Dynasty period. The trend of humanizing and
domesticating monsters did not really become visible until the Tang dynasty. And it was
during the late imperial period, especially the Qing dynasty, that writers of classical tales
started their fervent attempt to demystify and internalize monsters.
It would be tempting to construct a master narrative of the evolution in the
representation of monsters as a history of gradual transition from the marvelous (which
dominates in a climate of belief in supernaturalism and magic, and sees monsters as the
mysterious other external to human beings) through purely fantastic (which erases the
boundaries between monsters and humans) to the uncanny (which explain monsters as
generated by the human interior), like Rosemary Jackson did in her study of the fantastic
in European literature.
190

190
Jackson, 26-36.
But this is really not the case. Instead of replacing one another
in a chronological manner, the three modes of representing monsters exist side by side
with each other, the oldest tradition of representing monsters as the other being the
155

longest one. During the late imperial period, the three modes of representation coexisted
and interplayed with each other, as exemplified by the following tale in Ji Yun’s Yuewei
caotang biji:
Zhou Taiyu related that there was a man named Liu Zhe who became
intimate with a fox and then took her as his second wife. Her behavior was
like that of an ordinary person: she was filial to her parents-in-law,
affectionate with her sister-in-law, and treated the first wife’s children like
her own, things that would be hard for an outstanding human to achieve.
She grew old and died, but her corpse did not revert to fox shape.

Some said, “She was originally a runaway woman who concealed her
story and claimed she was a fox.”

Others said, “She really was a fox, but she cultivated herself and attained
the human way. However, she had not yet attained immortality, so she
grew old and died. Since she had already discarded her fox body, she
could die and her corpse was like that of a person.”

I said, “All of this is false; her heart was enough to maintain her. Any
creature’s form can be transformed following its heart. When Empress Xi
became a python and Feng Shijun became a tiger, their hearts first became
a python’s heart and a tiger’s heart, and therefore their forms turned to
python’s form and tiger’s form. Old stories claim the fox was originally a
transformation of the wanton woman Azi. Since she was a person with a
fox heart, a person could become a fox. This fox had a human heart, and
so a fox could become human. The Buddhists and Daoists can sometimes
die leaving their bodies in meditation without collapsing, and loyal
officials and exemplary women can sometimes leave their bone to endure
unrotting. This is all because their spirit is the same sort of phenomenon!”

Taiyu said, “It is truly so. It is said that when Liu first wed the fox, he
couldn’t help feeling some fear and hesitation. The fox said, ‘A wife
should be good for the family; as long as she is good for the family, what
difference is there between a fox and a person? Moreover people only
know to fear foxes, but they don’t know they are always consorting with
foxes. When a woman’s behavior is uncontrolled, so that she brings her
husband illness and shortens his life span, how is that different from a
fox’s parasitism? When a woman’s loose lips incite quarrels and cause
strife in the family, how is this different from a fox’s bewitchment? If a
woman secretly steals property and gives it to her own relatives and loved
ones, how is that different from a fox’s theft? When a woman insults and
156

slanders others so that all the family are not at peace, how is that different
from a fox’s haunting and disturbance? Why don’t you fear such a woman
but instead fear me?’”

Since this fox’s resolve is superior to a person’s, it is only fitting that she
began as a human and ended as a human. As for all the different kinds of
foxlike people she describes, each one’s reincarnation into one of the six
orders of life is determined by her own heart. One must only fear that
when one dies, one will fall into their midst.
191

This seems to be a typical tale where a fox spirit is idealized as a perfect wife and
elevated to be a moral paragon. Yet the virtue of this fox spirit is so thoroughly
exceptional that it requires thorough justification. The three commentators each justify
the exceptional behavior of the fox spirit in his distinct way:
The first commentator clearly sees monsters as the other to human beings, as he
plainly denies the fox spirit’s identity as a fox spirit, or in other words, a monster. For
him, as a monster the fox spirit must exhibit in her something that is strange, external to
human beings, and unique to the species of fox spirit, such as otherworldly beauty, fatal
sexual attraction, immoral approach of self-cultivation by sexually depleting men, or in
this case, the revelation of a fox body at the time of death. Since the fox spirit was in
every aspect like a human woman, and even at the moment of her death, her corpse did
not turn into the body of a fox, she could not have been a fox to start with. And he
therefore construes her identity as a runaway woman, a human woman who claimed to be
a fox to hide her identity.
The second commentator seems to believe that monsters can be fully humanized
and assimilated into the human society. He postulates that the fox spirit, on her way of

191
Yuewei caotang biji 14:352-53, translation quoted from Huntington 279-80.
157

self-cultivation, has achieved the human way, but not yet immortality. She died of old
age as a human, and her original form was not revealed upon death, because her fox body
was already discarded at the moment when she attained the human way and ascends to
humanity. For him monstrosity can be totally erased in the process of the monster’s self-
cultivation if it is done in a moral way.
Ji Yun himself maintains that otherness or monstrosity is only to be found in
one’s mind. The body can transform with the mind. Since the fox spirit in this tale had a
human heart, the heart alone was able to preserve her human body, preventing it from
changing back to its original form. Conversely, when a human has the heart of a beast,
his or her body will transform and take the form of that beast. In general, in the Chinese
tradition, tales of people changing into animals are far less than animals turning into
human, but Ji Yun cites a few most famous examples. Empress Xi 郗皇后 (467-499) is
the queen of Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty, and it is said that she turned into a
dragon after death because she was extremely jealous.
192
Feng Shao 封邵was an
oppressive official who turned into a tiger and ate the people in his district.
193
And the
wanton woman Azi 阿紫 that became a fox is described as the ancestor of all fox spirits
in Soushen ji.
194

192
Li Yanshou 李延夀, Nan shi 南史 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975) 12:339.
For Ji Yun, the boundaries between humans and monsters are
completely permeable, and monstrosity is defined by the inner heart, not by origin or
inherent physical quality. And his view is confirmed later by the fox spirit’s own words.

193
Taiping guangji 426:3466.

194
Soushen ji 18:223.
158

She provided a catalogue of misdeeds that are commonly attributed to fox spirits, denied
them in her individual case, but displaced them onto immoral human women.
Monstrosities are found in these fox-like humans, rather than the human-like foxes.
Ji Yun writes the tale to prove himself right. Yet he does offer a fairly good view
of the wide range of interpretations that men of his time employed to define and locate
monstrosity. The three views roughly represent the three modes of representing monsters
in Chinese classical tales. Monstrosity can be found outside of human beings, as inherent
qualities of monsters. It can also be erased along the monsters’ path of self-cultivation. Or
alternatively, it only resides in the heart/mind, and the monstrosities in the human interior
can turn a human into a monster.
The effort made by authors in Ji Yun’s generation to internalize monsters and
monstrosity into human mind may mark the end point of the creative phase of classical
tales in general. Yet monsters continue to preoccupy the Chinese literary and artistic
imagination up until this day. To close this study, I will turn to a movie made in the year
2008 based on a monster tale from Liaozhai zhiyi, and examine the interplay of the three
modes of representing monsters in this movie.
The movie Hua Pi 畫皮 (Painted Skin) was adapted from the tale that bears the
same name in Pu Songling’s Liaozhai zhiyi. The original tale is a typical story of a
monster as femme fatale. A scholar named Wang met a beautiful young lady who claimed
to have run away from the family that she had been sold into. Enchanted by her beauty,
Wang took her to his own home and formed an intimate relationship with her. When
Wang’s wife heard about it, fearing the girl might belong to some influential family, she
159

advised Wang to send her away, but Wang did not consent. After some time, a Daoist
priest told Wang that he was surrounded by an evil energy, and Wang started to doubt the
girl’s identity. He took an opportunity to peer into the girl’s room, and saw a hideous
monster with a green face and jagged teeth spreading human skin upon the bed and
painting it with a paint brush. Afterwards the monster shook the skin as one would a
gown, threw it on its shoulder, and turned into the beautiful girl. Wang was terrified and
sought out the Daoist priest for help. He gave Wang a magic duster to exorcise the
monster but it did not work. The monster ripped out Wang’s heart and ate it. The Daoist
priest came back and killed the monster. Unable to bring Wang back to life himself, the
Daoist priest recommended an old beggar in the street. Wang’s wife, being a faithful and
loving woman, put up with all kinds of insults from the old beggar in order to prove her
sincerity. Eventually he helped her to bring Wang back to life.
195
The story is a
cautionary tale that warns men against over-indulgence in sexual desires and the loss of
judgment that comes with it. Many commentators interpret the monster as an allegory for
seductive women that harm men by means of deception: “What appears to be a beautiful
lady turns out to be a monster with a green face and jagged teeth. This monster who
wears the painted skin is by no means the only case. Women in this world who deceive
men with seductive appearances are the same as the monster who spreads human skin and
paints on it with a colored brush every day.”
196

195
Liaozhai zhiyi 1:119-23.
The focal point of this tale is the sexual
196
Liaozhai zhiyi 1:120.

160

deception of the monster as a femme fatale, and the discrepancy between the exterior, the
painted skin, and the interior, the monster’s original form.
The movie Hua pi, with a few interesting twists, turns the cautionary tale into a
story of love, fidelity, and sacrifice that appeals to modern sensibilities.
197
Unlike the monster in the original tale, whose intention remained opaque
throughout the tale, in the movie we know that Xiaowei somehow truly fell in love with
Wang and intended to become the only woman in his life. Yet Wang is married to
Peirong, and they loved each other. Xiaowei caused quite a few misunderstandings
between the couple. While Peirong was starting to suspect Xiaowei for what she really
was, Wang was inadvertently subject to Xiaowei’s charm and secretly fell in love with
The most
crucial change is the identity of the monster. The nameless monster with unknown origin
in the original tale becomes a fox spirit with the title jiuxiao meihu 九霄美狐 (Beautiful
Fox in the Nine Heavens), which implies both the fox spirit’s physical beauty and a
certain degree of self-cultivation. Like the monster in the original tale, she took the
disguise of a lovely girl named Xiaowei when Wang rescued her from a band of
barbarians and brought her home. In the original tale, we do not know the exact reason
why the monster ripped out Wang’s heart, but in the movie, it is clear that Xiaowei had to
feast on human hearts in order to maintain her lovely, youthful appearance. Without the
human heart and the painted skin she had the look of a hideous monster. Her arrival at
Wang’s home caused a series of killings on a daily basis.

197
Hua pi (Painted Skin), dir. Gorden Chan, DVD, Castaway Pictures, 2008.
161

her. He denied it in front of his wife, yet he had several erotic dreams about Xiaowei that
belied his claim that he was able to stay faithful to his wife.
One night, Peirong happened to witness Xiaowei’s body after she peeled off her
painted skin. Horrified by her findings, she tried to tell Wang Xiaowei’s real identity, but
he refused to believe her. Peirong eventually confronted Xiaowei, who told her that she
wanted to be Wang’s wife. Peirong made her promise that she would stop killing people
and never harm Wang, and agreed to drink a potion that Xiaowei prepared to change her
into the monster, in order to protect her husband and put a stop to Xiaowei’s killings. At
this point, the human woman Peirong turned into a monster with the potion, and the fox
spirit Xiaowei was on her way of becoming human.
Upon seeing Peirong as a monster, Wang regained control over his teetering
loyalty. He declared that he would kill Peirong if she really was a monster, but loved her
no matter she was monster or human. Peirong killed herself with his dagger and died in
his arms. Xiaowei’s true identity was also revealed at this moment, because no weapon
could penetrate her body. Realizing the whole truth of it, Wang also killed himself with
the same dagger, telling Xiaowei that he did love her, but was already committed to
Peirong. In the end, Xiaowei willingly gave her Inner Elixir, the fruit of a thousand year’s
self-cultivation, to bring Wang and Peirong back to life, and returned to her original form
as a white fox.
The fox spirit Xiaowei is actually portrayed in all three modes of representing
monsters that I have discussed. First of all, she is portrayed as the other, a fearful femme
fatale just like the monster in the original tale. The monstrosity lies in the grotesque body
162

that she had to conceal with painted skin and the human hearts that she feasted on. She
was also wicked and conniving when she tried to replace Peirong as Wang’s wife while
turning her into a monster. Second, she is also very much humanized: her love for Wang
was mostly sincere, and her sacrifice at the end of the movie immediately recalls the
idealized fox spirit Jiaona 嬌娜 in Liaozhai zhiyi who saved her friend Kong’s life twice
with her Inner Elixir. With this final act of self-sacrifice she corrected the wrongs that she
had done and redeemed herself. The result was the revelation of her fox body, now as
something pure and beautiful, instead of abominable. Her truly abominable body of
monster completely disappeared from the scene. Last but not least, she is also represented
as the reflection of Wang’s internal struggle between his sexual desires for Xiaowei as a
man and moral duties to Peirong as a husband. She is not created or summoned by
Wang’s desire, yet she did appear, multiple times, in Wang’s erotic dreams. In a sense,
she was the monster in his mind that had to be exorcized. In the image of the fox spirit
Xiaowei, we can see that the three modes of representing monsters in classical tales are
still at work and interplay with each other in modern works, which exemplifies the
tradition’s ability to reinvent itself and to become part of the popular culture in our own
time.

163

Bibliography

Barrett, Timothy Hugh. Taoism under the T'ang: Religion and Empire During the Golden
Age of Chinese. Floating World, 2005.

Bian Xiaoxuan 卞孝萱. “ ‘Bu Jiang Zong Baiyuan zhuan’ xintan 《補江總白猿傳》新
探.” Tangdai wenxue yanjiu disanji 唐代文學研究第三輯. Ed. Zhongguo tangdai
wenxue xuehui 中國唐代文學學會. Shanghai: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe,
1992. 577-90.

Bodde, Derk. “Some Chinese Tales of the Supernatural.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic
Studies 6.3 (1942): 338-57.

Campany, Robert F. Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early Medieval China.
Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996.

Castle, Terry. The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention
of the Uncanny. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Chan, Gordon. Hua Pi 畫皮. DVD. Castaway Pictures, 2008.

Chan, Leo Tak-hung. The Discourse on Foxes and Ghosts: Ji Yun and Eighteenth-
Century Literati Storytelling. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998.

Chen Jue 陳玨. “Bu Jiang Zong baiyuan zhuan nianbiao cuoluan kao 《補江總白猿傳》
年錶錯亂考.” Hanxue yanjiu 漢學研究 20.2 (2002): 399-430.

---. “ ‘Bu Jiang Zong baiyuan zhuan’ wenzhong wuo yun daojiao secai kao 《補江總白
猿傳》文中所蘊道教色彩考.” Chutang chuanqi wen gouchen 初唐傳奇文鈎沈.
Ed. Chen Jue 陳玨. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 2006. 245-82.

Chen Zhensun 陳振孫. Zhizhai shulu jieti 直齋書錄解題 Shanghai: Shanghai guji
chubanshe, 1987.

Cheng Guofu 程國賦. “Jiandeng xinhua yu tangren xiaoshuo 剪燈新話與唐人小說.”
Mingqing xiaoshuo yanjiu 明清小說研究 51 (1999): 199-202.

Dewoskin, Kenneth J. “The Six Dynasties Chih-Kuai and the Birth of Fiction.” Chinese
Narraive: Critical and Theoretical Essays. Ed. Andrew H. Plaks. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1977, 21-52.

164

Dikötter, Frank. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. Stanford, California: Stanford
University Press, 1992.

Ding Linghua 丁凌華. Zhongguo Sangfu Zhidu Shi 中國喪服製度史. Shanghai:
Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 2000.

Fairbank, John K., and Denise Twichett eds. The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7,
the Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1998.

Fang Ruhao 方汝浩. Dongdu Ji 東渡記. Beijing: Huaxia chubanshe, 1995.

Feng Menglong 馮夢龍, comp. Sishi Hui Sansui Pingyao Zhuan 四十回三遂平妖傳
Beijing: Zhongua shuju, 2004.

Furth, Charlotte. A Flourishing Yin: Gender in China's Medical History, 960-1665.
Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999.

Fyler, Jennifer. “The Social Context of Belief: Female Demons in Six Dynasties Chih-
Kuai.” Tamkang Review 21.3 (1990/91): 255-67.

Gan Bao 干寶. Soushen Ji 搜神記. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979.

---. In Search of the Supernatural: The Written Record. Trans. Kenneth J. DeWoskin and
J. I. Crump, Jr. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Gao Yuhou 皋于厚. “Jiandeng erhua yu mingdai chuanqi xiaoshuo de fazhan qushi 剪燈
二話與明代傳奇小說的發展趨勢.” Mingqing xiaoshuo yanjiu 明清小說研究 62
(2001): 18-29.

Ge, Hong 葛洪. Baopu Zi Neipian 抱樸子內篇 Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1996.

---. Alchemy, Medicine, Religion in the China of A. D. 320: The Nei P’ien of Ko Hung
(Pao-P’u Tzu). Trans. James R. Ware. Cambridge, Mass: The M. I. T. Press, 1966.

Groot, J. J. M. De. The Religious System of China. 6 vols. Taibei: Chengwen Publising,
1967.

Hanan, Patrick. The Chinese Short Story: Studies in Dating, Authorship and Composition.
Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1973.

165

Harper, Donald. “A Chinese Demonography of the Third Century B.C.” Harvard Journal
of Asiatic Studies 45.2 (1985): 459-98.

He Bang’e 和邦額. Yetan suilu 夜譚隨錄. Biji xiaoshuo daguan 筆記小說大觀. Vol. 22.

Hou Zhongyi 侯忠義. Suitang wudai xiaoshuo shi 隋唐五代小說史. Hangzhou:
Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 1997.

Hu Yinglin 胡應麟. Shaoshi shanfang bicong 少室山房筆叢 Shanghai: Shanghai
shudian, 2001.

Huntington, Rania. Alien Kind: Foxes and Late Imperial Chinese Narrative. Cambridge
and London: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Inglis, Alister David. Hong Mai’s Record of the Listner and Its Song Dynasty Context
Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006.

Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion London and New York:
Routledge, 1986.

Ji Yun 紀昀. Yuewei caotang biji 閱微草堂筆記. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe,
1980.

Jinbu shuju 進步書局 ed. Biji siaoshuo daguan 筆記小說大觀. Yangzhou: Jiangsu
guangling guji keyin she, 1983. Reprint.

Kang, Xiaofei. The Cult of the Fox: Power, Gender and Popular Religion in Late
Imperial and Modern China. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.

---. “The Fox [Hu 狐] and the Barbarian [Hu 胡]: Unraveling Representations of the
Other in Late Tang Tales.” Journal of Chinese Religion 29 (1999): 35-67.

Keenan, David L. Shadows in a Chinese Landscape: The Notes of a Confucian Scholar.
Armonk, New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1999.

Lai, Walen. "From Protean Ape to Handsome Saint: The Monkey King." Asian Folklore
Studies 53.1 (1994): 29-65.

Lau, D. C. trans. The Analects. Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 1983.

Lau, Y. W. and Joseph S. M. Ma eds. Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and
Variations. Boston: Cheng & Tsui, 1986.

166

Leavey, Barbara Fass. In Pursuit of the Swan Maiden. New York: New York University
Press, 1994.

Li Fang 李昉, ed. Taiping guangji 太平廣記 Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1961.

---. ed. Taiping yulan 太平禦覽. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.

Li Jianmin 李建民. “Suibing yu changsuo: chuantong yixue dui suibing de yizhong jieshi
祟病與場所：傳統醫學對祟病的一種解釋.” Hanxue Yanjiu 漢學研究 12.1
(1994): 101-48.

Li, Jianguo 李劍國. Tangqian zhiguai xiaoshuijizhi 唐前志怪小說集釋. Shanghai:
Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986.

---. Zhongguo hu wenhua 中國狐文化. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2001.

Li Shouju 李瘦菊. Huxian xinyang yu hulijing gushi 狐仙信仰與狐貍精故事. Taibei:
Xuesheng shushe, 1995.

Li, Wai-yee. Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Li Yanshou 李延夀. Nan Shi 南史. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1975.

Lin Song 林嵩. “Cong yaoshu dao lingguai:lun ‘pingyao zhuan’ xingzhi zhi yanbian 從
妖術到靈怪：論《平妖傳》性質之演變.” Mingqing xiaoshuo yanjiu 明清小說
研究 85 (2007): 185-241.

Liu Fu 劉斧. Qingsuo Gaoyi 青瑣高議. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1983.

Loewe, Michael. Divination, Mythology and Monarchy in Han China. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Lu Xun 魯迅. Zhongguo xiaoshuo shilue 中國小說史略. Shanghai: Shanghai guji
chubanshe, 1998. Print.

---. A Brief History of Chinese Fiction. Trans. Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang. Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press, 1982.

Mann, Susan. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford,
California: Stanford University Press, 1997.

167

Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilization in China. Vol. 3. 7 vols. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1954.

Peng Dingqiu 彭定求, ed. Quan tangshi 全唐詩. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979.

Pu Songling 蒲松齡. Liaozhai zhiyi, huijiao huizhu huiping ben 聊齋誌異會注會校會評
本. Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986.

Qiao Guanghui 喬光輝. Mingdai jiandeng xilie xiaoshuo yanjiu 明代剪燈繫列小說研究.
Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2006.

Qingchengzi 青城子. Zhiyi Xubian 志异續編. Biji Xiaoshuo Daguan Vol. 27.

Qu You 瞿佑. Jiandeng xinhua (wai erzhong) 剪燈新話 ( 外二種). Shanghai: Gudian
wenxue chubanshe, 1957.

Roberts, Moss. Chinese Fairy Tales and Fantasies New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.

Schafer, Edward H. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985.

Sima Qian 司馬遷. Shiji 史記. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.

Sommer, Matthew H. Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2000.

Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre Ithaca,
New York: Cornell University Press, 1973.

Uchiyama Chinari 內山知也. “ ‘Bu Jiang Zong baiyuan zhuan’ kaolun 《補江總白猿傳》
考論.” Trans. Yixi Lamu益西拉姆. Suitang Xiaoshuo Yanjiu 隋唐小說研究 Ed.
Zha Pingqiu 查屏球. Shanghai: Shanghai fudan daxue chubanshe, 2010. 82-95.

Unschuld, Paul. Chinese Medicine: A History of Ideas. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985.

Wang Chong 王充. Lunheng Jiaoshi 論衡校釋. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1995.

---. Lun-Heng: Philosophical Essays of Wang Ch’ung. Trans. Alfred Forke. New York:
Paragon Book Gallery, 1962.

168

Wang Guoliang 王國良. Soushen houji yanjiu 搜神後記研究. Taibei: Wenshizhe
chubanshe, 1978.

Wang Li 王麗. “Gu xiaoshuo ren hua yilei moshi yu bentu bianxing guannian ge
xngcheng 古小說人化異類模式與本土變形觀念的形成.” Xinan shifan daxue
xuebao 西南師範大學學報 28.1 (2002): 141-47.

Wang Pijiang 汪辟疆, ed. Tangren Xiaoshuo 唐人小說. Shanghai: Shanghai guji
chubanshe, 1978. Print.

Wang Qing 王青. “Zaoqi huguai gushi: wenhua pianjia xiade guren xingxiang 早期狐怪
故事：文化偏見下的胡人形象.” Xiyu yanjiu 西域研究 4 (2003): 91-98.

Watson, Burton. The Tso Chuan: Selections from China’s Oldest Narrative History New
York: Columbia University Press, 1980.

Wei Zheng 魏徴. Sui shu 隋書. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1973.

Wu Guangzheng 吳光正. Zhongguo gudai xiaoshuo de yuanxing yu muti 中國古代小說
的原型與母題. Beijing: shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2002.

Wu, Hung. “The Earliest Representations of Ape Tales: An Interdisciplinary Study of
Early Chinese Narrative Art and Literature.” T'oung Pao, Second Series 73.1
(1978): 86-112.

Xu Hualong 徐華龍. Zhongguo gui wenhua 中國鬼文化. Shanghai: Shaihai wenyi
chubanshe, 1991.

Yang Bojun 楊伯駿, ed. Chunqiu zuozhuan zhu 春秋左傳注. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,
1981.

Yen, Ping-Chiu. Chinese Demon Tales: Meanings and Parallels in Oral Tradition New
York: Garland Publishing, 1990.

Yu, Anthony C. "Rest, Rest, Perturbed Spirit!’ Ghosts in Traditional Chinese Prose
Fiction." Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47.2 (1987): 397-434.

Yuan Huazhong袁華忠, and Fang Jiachang 方家常 eds. Lun Heng Quanyi 論衡全譯.
Guiyang: Guizhou renmin chubanshe, 1993.

169

Zeitlin, Judith. Historian of the Strange: Pu Songling and the Chinese Classical Tale
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993.

---. The Phantom Heroine: Ghosts and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Chinese
Literature. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 2006.

Zeng Yandong 曾衍東. Xiao doupeng 小豆棚. Ji’nan: Qilu shushe, 2004.

Zhang Chao 張潮, ed. Yuchu xinzhi 虞初新志. Shijiazhuang: Heibei renmin chubanshe,
1985.

Zhang Hua 張華. Bowuzhi 博物志. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980. “wei 《補江總白猿
傳》創作主旨探微.” Wenyi Pinglun 文藝評論 (Jun. 2011): 70-78.

Zhou Lengjia 周楞伽. “Jiandeng xinhua yu tangsong xiaoshuo de shicheng guanxi ji
yishu tese 《剪燈新話》與唐宋小說的師承關繫及藝術特色.” Mingqing
xiaoshuo yanjiu 明清小說研究 73 (2004): 121-24.

Zhu Yiqing 朱翊清 Maiyou Ji 埋憂集. Biji Xiaoshuo Daguan 筆記小說大觀 Vol. 21.

Abstract (if available)

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Conceptually similar

PDF

A grain of sand: Yingzao fashi and the miniaturization of Chinese architecture

PDF

Conditions of literary modernities: a conceptual history of Chinese literature, 1860-1925

PDF

The many voices of the Lanting poems: society and seclusion in the Eastern Jin

PDF

Translating Chinese poetry: Bei Dao as a case study

PDF

Reconfiguring Chinese modernism: the poetics of temporality in 1940s fiction and poetry

PDF

The Chinese film industry's soft power implications

PDF

Examining the representation of modern women in 20th century modern Chinese fiction: the search for self in comparison of works by women authors Ding Ling and Eileen Chang

PDF

Carnival in the birdcage: a study of the film and media industries' reforms in China after 1978 and its soft power

PDF

The social life of nations: a comparative study of turn-of-the-century American and Chinese utopian fiction, 1888-1906

PDF

Embracing the demon: the monstrous child in Japanese literature and cinema, 1946-2008

PDF

Explaining the variation in the extent of China's hegemony, 1279-1840 — multiple sources of ideational power beyond Confucianism

PDF

The organic metaphor demystified: rhetoric of environmental change and environmental preservation in contemporary American nature writing

PDF

The theory of empty noun in Chinese: with special reference to the right node raising construction

PDF

Jin Yong's chivalry: gender and ethnicity in wuxia fiction, film, and television

PDF

An exploration of the debate on “nancy boys” in modern China

PDF

Romance rapscallions on the cusp of modern: male courtship in Eileen Chang stories

PDF

Confrontation and compromise: The worlds of the supernatural and humans in Pu Song-Ling's "Liaozhai Zhiyi"

PDF

Language, soundscape, and identity formation in Shanghai fangyan literature and culture

PDF

In/visible constituents: the representation of undocumented immigrants

PDF

Mandate and manipulate: constructing political legitimacy during the Yuan-Ming transition, 1351-1370

Asset Metadata

Creator Xue, Jingyu (author)

Core Title The magic mirror: representations of monsters in Chinese classical tales

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program East Asian Languages and Cultures

Publication Date 07/27/2012

Defense Date 05/03/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Chinese literature,classical tales,Monsters,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Cheung, Dominic (committee chair), Birge, Bettine (committee member), Rosen, Stanley (committee member)

Creator Email jingyuxu@usc.edu,xue.jingyu@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-72822

Unique identifier UC11290277

Identifier usctheses-c3-72822 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-XueJingyu-1009.pdf

Dmrecord 72822

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Xue, Jingyu

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA