Nie Xiaoqian
聂小倩
A scholar spends the night in a deserted temple and is visited by a ghostly beauty — and by the swordsman who alone knows how to defeat the old demon that owns her.
GhostLoveSword
Ancient China Wonder · 志怪宇宙
A universe of gods, ghosts, fox spirits and wonders from ancient China
For two thousand years, Chinese writers recorded the strange: fox-spirits who become faithful wives, ghosts with unfinished business, swordsmen who fly over rooftops, and an underworld that runs like a civil service. This site translates those stories and builds them into one coherent world.
328Stories
28Worldview Entries
3+Features
2,000Years of Wonder
The Library
Essential Tales
The Taoist of Mount Lao
崂山道士
A rich young man climbs Mount Lao to learn magic from a Taoist master, endures a month of woodcutting, and comes home certain he has mastered the art of walking through walls.
ImmortalTrickster
Xi Fangping Sues the Underworld
席方平
A son follows his murdered father into the Courts of the Dead and files a lawsuit — through every clerk, every magistrate, every torture the underworld can devise, up to the highest god there is.
UnderworldJusticeGhost
The Curly-Bearded Stranger
虬髯客传
A penniless strategist, an eloping palace girl with a whisk, and a red-bearded giant who wants the empire — until he sees one young man in a plain coat and quietly withdraws his claim.
SwordJusticeDeity
Liu Yi and the Dragon Princess
柳毅传
A failed examination candidate meets a ragged shepherdess on the road and discovers she is the daughter of the Dragon King of Lake Dongting, exiled by her cruel husband. He agrees to carry one letter — and sets the dragons to war.
DeityLoveJustice
Nie Yinniang
聂隐娘
A nun takes ten-year-old Nie Yinniang from her home and returns her five years later — trained to fly over rooftops, kill at a word, and carry a dagger two inches long. The greatest swordswoman in Chinese fiction comes home.
SwordTransformation
The Universe
One Coherent World
Cosmos & Geography
宇宙与地理
How the world is built: the three realms, Mount Kunlun, the isles of Penglai, the Nine Provinces, and the Courts of the Dead beneath the earth.
Races & Beings
种族与生灵
Gods, immortals, humans, ghosts, fox spirits, nature sprites, monstrous beasts and dragons — and the rules that separate them.
Figures
人物图鉴
The recurring cast of the universe: the Queen Mother of the West, Nie Yinniang, Nie Xiaoqian, Lü Dongbin and others.
Cultivation & Rules
修炼体系
How a human becomes an immortal, how an animal becomes a spirit, what a tribulation is, and how cause and effect bind everything together.
New Translations
Latest Stories
The Crow That Knew a Man Before His Rise
祥鸦
Everyone says magpies report good news and crows bad, so the author feeds the crows in his courtyard instead. Through three decades of examination failure and one family success, the crows prove to be the only honest omen-bearers in the story — and the magpies arrive last.
The Ghost Tutor of Broom Village
扫帚村钝秀才
A rich man cannot choose a teacher for his son, until a voice in a dream tells him to go to Broom Village in Wu commandery and ask for a certain licentiate. The old man who comes is strict, brilliant, and — as he explains at the farewell banquet — has been dead for three years.
The Ghost Who Shrank Before a Soldier
正士驱邪
A martial scholar takes shelter in a ruined temple, and a ghost walks in and begins to grow. But as it grows, so does he — to three zhang above it. The ghost drops to its knees and explains the arithmetic: every man's spirit is ten zhang tall, and each bad deed shortens it by a foot.
The Girl With the Lotus Root
有根女
A girl of eleven loses her mother and goes to study in her uncle's library. One night a maid leads in a spirit in purple, who holds out half a sheet of stationery with half a couplet on it — and the girl finishes it without stopping to think.
Long Reads
Features
The Evolution of the Fox Spirit in Chinese Literature
The fox-spirit has been, by turns, a blessing from heaven, a national catastrophe, a predatory seducer and the moral centre of Chinese fiction. Tracing its transformations is tracing the whole history of the genre.
How the Chinese Underworld Changed Over Two Thousand Years
The Chinese land of the dead began as a vague wet darkness and ended as the most elaborate bureaucracy ever imagined for the afterlife. Its history is the history of how China thinks about justice.
10 Strange Creatures from the Classic of Mountains and Seas
Nine-headed birds, flying fish, an oracle-beast that knows every spirit's weakness, and a glutton with no body. Ten entries from the catalogue that invented the Chinese monster.