Preface [1628 Edition]

As the saying goes, “To one who has seen too little of the world, everything is strange.” People of our time marvel at stories about monsters and demons, little realizing that there is much in our experience of everyday life that is quite magical and out of the ordinary. In days of yore, Chinese travelers abroad were appalled that cow manure was cherished as a valuable asset in a land they were visiting, but the local people countered with this remark, “In your country, you raise writhing worms and use their excretions to make colorful fabric with which to clothe yourselves.” What they clicked their tongues at in disbelief is something the Chinese take for granted. Therefore it simply does not make sense to marvel only at occult and uncanny things beyond the easy reach of our eyes and ears.

During the Song and Yuan dynasties, there was a school of writers who collected stories from local communities and presented them to the imperial palace for entertainment. The language was colloquial, and each story had a moral. Although lacking in elegance, those writings nonetheless constituted a genre, albeit a minor one, that provided amusement in its own way.

Peace has reigned in the empire for so long that the easy life has compromised public morals. A few flippant and wicked young men learning the rudiments of writing have taken it into their heads to malign the world. They invent a profusion of tall tales that are the height of absurdity and depravity. They are second to none in their transgressions against Confucian moral values and their incitement to karmic sins. What is worse, such volumes are so popular that they fly off the bookshelves, driving up the price of paper. Men of insight, concerned by the morals of the times, rightly call for strict laws banning such filth.

Feng Menglong’s collections of short stories (Illustrious Words to Instruct the World, etc.) are an exception. Eminently refined and tasteful and in conformity with moral principles, they mark a break from the corrupt practices of today.1 But, alas, all the available old texts written in the Song and Yuan dynasties have been included in those collections. Impressed by the rapid circulation of those volumes, book dealers assume that I have secret copies of more of such stories and encourage their publication so as to start a competition. The fact is, the few stories left over are not any more presentable than debris in the ditches. Therefore I have fleshed out miscellaneous fragments of old and new stories and gathered them into several volumes in the hope that readers may find the stories refreshing enough to add delight to their bantering conversations. Only about half the stories and the names that appear in them are true. The stories may not be credible as historical fact, but they are meaningful nonetheless. As for stories that astonish, the reader would do well to bear in mind that strange things do abound in this world. Therefore, blame not the storyteller but be warned by his words, and that is all there is to it. Challenging the novelty of these stories would be suggestive of questioning the value of cow manure while taking the raising of silkworms for granted. The stories in this collection were certainly not fabricated out of thin air.

Master of the Studio of the Void

Written next to the wine vessel