I.—Personal.
—The public has, perhaps, a right to be made acquainted with the title under which I, an unknown writer, come forward as the translator of a difficult Chinese work. In the spring of 1867 I began the study of Chinese at H.B.M.’s Legation, Peking, under an implied promise, in a despatch from the then Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, that successful efforts would be rewarded by proportionately rapid advancement in the service of which I was a member. Then followed a long novitiate of utterly uninteresting and, indeed, most repellent labour,—inseparable, however, from the acquisition of this language, which throughout its early stages demands more from sheer memory than from the exercise of any other intellectual faculty. At length, in the spring of 1877, while acting as Vice-Consul at Canton, I commenced the translation of the work here offered to the English reader. For such a task I had flattered myself into the belief that I possessed two of the requisite qualifications: an accurate knowledge of the grammatical structure of the language, and an extensive insight into the manners, customs, superstitions, and general social life of the Chinese. I had been variously stationed at Peking, Tientsin, Takow, and Taiwan Fu (in Formosa), Ningpo, Hankow, Swatow, and Canton, from the latter of which I was transferred—when my task was still only half finished—to Amoy. I had travelled beyond the Great Wall into Mongolia; and I had made the journey overland from Swatow to Canton, a distance of five hundred miles; besides which, in addition to my study of the language, my daily object in life had always been to familiarise myself as much as possible with Chinese sympathies and habits of thought. With these advantages, and by the interesting nature of the subject-matter, I hoped to be able on the one hand to arouse a somewhat deeper interest than is usually taken in the affairs of China; and, on the other, to correct at any rate some of the erroneous views, too frequently palmed off by inefficient and disingenuous workers, and too readily accepted as fact. And I would here draw attention to one most important point; namely, that although a great number of books have been published about China and the Chinese, there are extremely few in which the information is conveyed at first hand; in other words, in which the Chinese are allowed to speak for themselves.[1] Hence, perhaps, it may be that in an accurately-compiled work such as Tylor’s Primitive Culture, allusions to the religious rites and ceremonies of nearly one-third of the human race are condensed within the limits of barely a dozen short passages. Hence, too, it undoubtedly is that many Chinese customs are ridiculed and condemned by turns, simply because the medium through which they have been conveyed has produced a distorted image. Much of what the Chinese do actually believe and practise in their religious and social life will be found in this volume, in the ipsissima verba of a highly-educated scholar writing about his fellow-countrymen and his native land; while for the notes with which I have essayed to make the picture more suggestive and more acceptable to the European eye, I claim only so much authority as is due to the opinion of one qualified observer who can have no possible motive in deviating ever so slightly from what his own personal experience has taught him to regard as the truth.
II.—Biographical.
—The barest skeleton of a biography is all that can be formed from the very scanty materials which remain to mark the career of a writer whose work has been for the best part of two centuries as familiar throughout the length and breadth of China as are the tales of the “Arabian Nights” in all English-speaking communities. The author of “Strange Stories” was a native of Tzu-chou, in the province of Shan-tung. His family name was P‘u; his particular name was Sung-ling; and the designation or literary epithet by which, in accordance with Chinese usage, he was commonly known among his friends, was Liu-hsien, or “Last of the Immortals.” A further fancy name, given to him probably by some enthusiastic admirer, was Liu Ch‘üan, or “Willow Spring;” but he is now familiarly spoken of simply as P‘u Sung-ling. We are unacquainted with the years of his birth or death; however, by the aid of a meagre entry in the History of Tzü-chou it is possible to make a pretty good guess at the date of the former event. For we are there told that P‘u Sung-ling successfully competed for the lowest or bachelor’s degree before he had reached the age of twenty; and that in 1651 he was in the position of a graduate of ten years’ standing, having failed in the interim to take the second, or master’s, degree. To this failure, due, as we are informed in the history above quoted, to his neglect of the beaten track of academic study, we owe the existence of his great work; not, indeed, his only production, though the one par excellence by which, as Confucius said of his own “Spring and Autumn,” men will know him. All else that we have on record of P‘u Sung-ling, besides the fact that he lived in close companionship with several eminent scholars of the day, is gathered from his own words, written when, in 1679, he laid down his pen upon the completion of a task which was to raise him within a short period to a foremost rank in the Chinese world of letters. Of that record I here append a close translation, accompanied by such notes as are absolutely necessary to make it intelligible to non-students of Chinese.
AUTHOR’S OWN RECORD.
“‘Clad in wistaria, girdled with ivy;’[2] thus sang San-lü[3] in his Dissipation of Grief.[4] Of ox-headed devils and serpent Gods,[5] he of the long-nails[6] never wearied to tell. Each interprets in his own way the music of heaven;[7] and whether it be discord or not, depends upon antecedent causes.[8] As for me, I cannot, with my poor autumn fire-fly’s light, match myself against the hobgoblins of the age.[9] I am but the dust in the sunbeam, a fit laughing-stock for devils.[10] For my talents are not those of Yü Pao,[11] elegant explorer of the records of the Gods; I am rather animated by the Spirit of Su Tung-p‘o,[12] who loved to hear men speak of the supernatural. I get people to commit what they tell me to writing, and subsequently I dress it up in the form of a story; and thus in the lapse of time my friends from all quarters have supplied me with quantities of material, which, from my habit of collecting, has grown into a vast pile.[13]
“Human beings, I would point out, are not beyond the pale of fixed laws, and yet there are more remarkable phenomena in their midst than in the country of those who crop their hair;[14] antiquity is unrolled before us, and many tales are to be found therein stranger than that of the nation of Flying Heads.[15] ‘Irrepressible bursts, and luxurious ease,’[16]—such was always his enthusiastic strain. ‘For ever indulging in liberal thought,’[17]—thus he spoke openly without restraint. Were men like these to open my book, I should be a laughing-stock to them indeed. At the cross-roads[18] men will not listen to me, and yet I have some knowledge of the three states of existence[19] spoken of beneath the cliff;[20] neither should the words I utter be set aside because of him that utters them.[21] When the bow[22] was hung at my father’s door, he dreamed that a sickly-looking Buddhist priest, but half-covered by his stole, entered the chamber. On one of his breasts was a round piece of plaster like a cash;[23] and my father, waking from sleep, found that I, just born, had a similar black patch on my body. As a child, I was thin and constantly ailing, and unable to hold my own in the battle of life. Our home was chill and desolate as a monastery; and working there for my livelihood with my pen,[24] I was as poor as a priest with his alms-bowl.[25] Often and often I put my hand to my head[26] and exclaimed, ‘Surely he who sat with his face to the wall[27] was myself in a previous state of existence;’ and thus I referred my non-success in this life to the influence of a destiny surviving from the last. I have been tossed hither and thither in the direction of the ruling wind, like a flower falling in filthy places; but the six paths[28] of transmigration are inscrutable indeed, and I have no right to complain. As it is, midnight finds me with an expiring lamp, while the wind whistles mournfully without; and over my cheerless table I piece together my tales,[29] vainly hoping to produce a sequel to the Infernal Regions.[30] With a bumper I stimulate my pen, yet I only succeed thereby in ‘venting my excited feelings,’[31] and as I thus commit my thoughts to writing, truly I am an object worthy of commiseration. Alas! I am but the bird that, dreading the winter frost, finds no shelter in the tree: the autumn insect that chirps to the moon, and hugs the door for warmth. For where are they who know me?[32] They are ‘in the bosky grove, and at the frontier pass’[33]—wrapped in an impenetrable gloom!”
From the above curious document the reader will gain some insight into the abstruse, but at the same time marvellously beautiful, style of this gifted writer. The whole essay—for such it is, and among the most perfect of its kind—is intended chiefly as a satire upon the scholarship of the age; scholarship which had turned the author back to the disappointment of a private life, himself conscious all the time of the inward fire that had been lent him by heaven. It is the key-note to his own subsequent career, spent in the retirement of home, in the society of books and friends; as also to the numerous uncomplimentary allusions which occur in all his stories relating to official life. Whether or not the world at large has been a gainer by this instance of the fallibility of competitive examinations has been already decided in the affirmative by the millions of P‘u Sung-ling’s own countrymen, who for the past two hundred years have more than made up to him by a posthumous and enduring reverence for the loss of those earthly and ephemeral honours which he seems to have coveted so much.
III.—Bibliographical.
—Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio, known to the Chinese as the Liao-Chai-Chih-I, or more familiarly, the Liao-Chai, has hardly been mentioned by a single foreigner without some inaccuracy on the part of the writer concerned. For instance, the late Mr. Mayers states in his Chinese Reader’s Manual, p. 176, that this work was composed “circa A.D. 1710,” the fact being that the collection was actually completed in 1679, as we know by the date attached to the “Author’s Own Record” given above. It is consequently two centuries, almost to the day, since the first appearance of a book destined to a popularity which the lapse of time seems wholly unable to diminish; and the present may fairly be considered a fitting epoch for its first presentation to the English reader in an English dress. I should mention, however, that the Liao-Chai was originally, and for many years, circulated in manuscript only. P‘u Sung-ling, as we are told in a colophon by his grandson to the first edition, was too poor to meet the heavy expense of block-cutting; and it was not until as late as 1740, when the author must have been already for some time a denizen of the dark land he so much loved to describe, that his aforesaid grandson printed and published the collection now so universally famous. Since then many editions have been laid before the Chinese public, the best of which is that by Tan Ming-lun, a Salt Commissioner, who flourished during the reign of Tao Kuang, and who in 1842 produced, at his own expense, an excellent edition in sixteen small octavo volumes of about 160 pages each. And as various editions will occasionally be found to contain various readings, I would here warn students of Chinese who wish to compare my rendering with the text, that it is from the edition of Tan Ming-lun, collated with that of Yü Chi, published in 1766, that this translation has been made. Many have been the commentaries and disquisitions upon the meaning of obscure passages and the general scope of this work; to say nothing of the prefaces with which the several editions have been ushered into the world. Of the latter, I have selected one specimen, from which the reader will be able to form a tolerably accurate opinion as to the true nature of these always singular and usually difficult compositions. Here it is:—