Pu Songling finishes Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio after 40 years

Story: 1714 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 1714

For four decades, a Qing dynasty scholar named Pu Songling collected rumors, ghost sightings, fox spirit encounters, and human folly — and shaped them into something the world had never quite seen. The result, a collection of nearly 500 tales blending the supernatural with sharp social observation, would eventually be recognized as the pinnacle of classical Chinese short fiction.

What the evidence shows

• Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio: Pu Songling assembled his collection of nearly 500 tales — known in Chinese as Liaozhai zhiyi — over roughly 40 years, beginning in the early 1670s and completing the final volumes between 1707 and 1714 C.E.
• Manuscript circulation: The work circulated in hand-copied manuscripts among friends and scholars for decades before its first print publication in 1766 C.E., more than 50 years after Pu’s death in 1715 C.E.
• Zhiguai tradition: The stories draw on two classical Chinese literary forms — zhiguai (records of the strange) and chuanqi (tales of marvels) — weaving together fox spirits, ghosts, and scholars to explore human emotion, corruption, and desire.

Forty years of collecting the strange

Pu Songling was born in 1640 C.E. in Shandong Province and spent most of his adult life failing the imperial civil service examinations — a recurring humiliation that scholars believe shaped the sardonic, often melancholy tone of his fiction. He worked as a private tutor for decades, a position that gave him time, proximity to storytelling networks, and a great deal to be frustrated about.

He titled his studio Liaozhai, meaning “Studio of Conversation” or “Studio of Leisure.” According to tradition, he kept a pot of tea outside his door and invited travelers to stop and share their strange tales. Whether or not the story is literally true, it captures the spirit of the project: this was a work built from the ground up, from fragments of oral culture, classical allusions, and Pu’s own imagination.

The earliest completed section dates to around 1681 C.E. Scholar Zhang Peiheng places the final volumes as completed sometime between 1707 and 1714 C.E. In 1693 C.E., a wealthy official reportedly offered Pu a thousand taels of silver for the manuscript. Pu declined.

What makes the stories remarkable

Unlike much horror fiction, East or West, the ghost stories in Liaozhai are not designed to terrify. They are designed to blur. Fox spirits fall in love with scholars. Ghosts return to settle unfinished emotional business. The border between the living and the dead, the human and the supernatural, is porous and navigable — and usually more interesting that way.

The philosophical core of the work is the concept of qing — passionate emotional entanglement — applied equally to humans and spirits. This is not folk horror. It is literary fiction that uses the supernatural as a lens for examining what it means to feel, desire, grieve, and be treated unjustly.

Critics across centuries have read political allegory into the tales. Guo Moruo, the 20th-century poet and cultural figure, wrote that “the writing of ghosts and demons is superior to all others; the satire on corruption and tyranny is penetrating to the marrow.” Pu’s grandson described the work as “an act of serious self-expression.”

A manuscript that traveled by hand

Because Liaozhai zhiyi circulated only as hand-copied manuscripts during Pu’s lifetime, its early readership was limited to scholars and officials within his social network — the educated elite of Qing dynasty China. This was not unusual for the time, but it meant the work existed in multiple, diverging versions before it ever reached print.

The first printed edition appeared in 1766 C.E. in Hangzhou, published by Zhao Qigao — and it was already incomplete. Zhao admitted he had removed 48 stories he found “dull and commonplace,” and he censored passages touching on politically sensitive topics. The original manuscript, reportedly 20 volumes, was eventually rebound and partially preserved by Pu’s descendants. By 1950 C.E., only four volumes containing around 237 stories survived; the Pu family donated them to the Liaoning Provincial Library.

The transmission of the work is itself a story about how literary culture functioned in imperial China: not through publishing houses, but through trust, copying, and the slow movement of paper through social networks.

Lasting impact

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio did not just become a classic — it generated a wave. Following its print publication and growing reputation, other collections of “wonder tales” and supernatural fiction proliferated across China well into the 19th century C.E., including Yuan Mei’s Zibuyu (1788 C.E.), Ji Yun’s Yuewei caotang biji (1789–1800 C.E.), and Wang Tao’s Songyin manlu (1875 C.E.).

The work has been translated into Russian, German, English, and dozens of other languages. Jorge Luis Borges listed it among his favorite books. Yuken Fujita of Keio University called it “the most outstanding short story collection” in the entire Chinese literary tradition. Hiromasa Imai called it “the pinnacle of ghost literature.”

Dozens of films and television series have drawn on Pu’s stories, particularly in Chinese-language cinema. The fox spirit as a figure of romantic longing and moral ambiguity — a recurring presence in East Asian popular culture — owes much of its modern form to how Pu Songling wrote her.

The first major English translation, by Herbert Giles in 1880 C.E., was later criticized as “prudish” — Giles removed or softened all sexual content and much physical description in keeping with Victorian norms. Martin Buber produced a German translation that restored some of the expurgated material. John Minford’s more complete modern English translation has brought the full range of Pu’s work to new audiences.

Blindspots and limits

The record of Liaozhai zhiyi‘s creation is incomplete in ways that may never be fully resolved. A significant portion of the original manuscript — possibly more than half — has been lost, and the earliest surviving print edition was already censored before it reached readers. What we call the canonical text is, to a degree, a reconstruction shaped by the choices of 18th-century publishers and the accidents of preservation.

Pu Songling himself remained outside the elite literary establishment his entire life, never passing the highest imperial exams. The social critique embedded in his stories is real — but it was also the frustration of a man who wanted in. That ambivalence is worth holding alongside the admiration.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio

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