子不語

Some seven hundred short accounts of things the Confucian tradition preferred not to talk about. The title comes from the Analects — the Master did not speak of prodigies, feats of strength, disorder or spirits — and Yuan Mei took it as a licence. Here are ghosts who want their bodies back, fox-spirits, corpses that walk, thunder gods settling accounts, tricked exorcists, dishonest monks, hells run on exactly the same bureaucratic principles as the empire, and a great many stories that stop without a moral because Yuan Mei did not believe a story needed one.

Yuan Mei (1716–1797) resigned from the civil service at thirty-three to live on the earnings of his writing at his garden near Nanjing, and was notorious in his lifetime for taking women as poetry students and for saying in print what other scholars only thought. He compiled these tales from what he was told, and published them in 1788 in deliberate defiance of the classical rule the title quotes.

This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete collection.