Tales & Legends

A scholar takes in a beautiful stranger, and learns too late what wears her face after dark.

A penniless traveler shelters in a crumbling temple where the other lodgers keep turning up dead by morning, a small hole bored in the sole of one foot. Then the loveliest girl he has ever seen comes to his door after dark, offering herself, and a bar of gold.

A solitary scholar swears he fears neither fox nor ghost. Then two women begin visiting his lamplit room — one warm, one cold — and each insists the other is quietly killing him. To live, he must learn which of the women who love him is not entirely alive.

A lovesick scholar tracks a girl into the mountains for the way she laughed at him on the road. He finds her, her strange old mother, and a household where no one will say what she is — or why she never, ever stops laughing.

A pampered young man from an old family climbs Lao Mountain to study with an immortal, then balks at the chores. When he finally bullies the master into teaching him one trick, he learns the cost of wanting magic without the work behind it. Pure Pu Songling.

When the Ming throne grows fond of cricket fights, a whole county is taxed in insects. A struggling village clerk is conscripted to supply one, on pain of a flogging — and as the deadline closes in, the hunt for a single champion cricket comes to cost him his savings, his peace, and nearly his only son.

A scholar stares too long at a temple mural — at one loose-haired maiden in particular — and finds himself on the other side of the plaster. What happens there is real enough. Whether any of it matters is the monk's problem to explain.

A Daoist monk in rags asks a market merchant for a single pear. The merchant refuses — rudely, repeatedly. So the monk borrows a pip from a stranger's charity, plants it in the road, and grows a pear tree on the spot. The crowd gets the fruit. The merchant gets the lesson.

A stranded scholar befriends a fox family hiding in a borrowed mansion. The youngest daughter heals him with a kiss's worth of medicine. He loves her; she is promised to another. What comes after — loyalty, thunder, death, and a resurrection — is harder to name than love.

A poor scholar and a merchant's daughter fall in love through exchanged poems — never properly meeting, never allowed to marry. When she dies and he follows her into the underworld, love turns out to be stronger than the afterlife's bureaucracy.

Xi Fangping's father dies cursing the rich neighbor who bribed hell's guards to beat him. Xi decides to go down there himself and plead the case — only to find that hell's courts are bought just as cheaply as the living ones.

A butcher heading home with nothing but bones finds two wolves on his trail. He throws, they follow, and when the bones run out he has to think fast. A tight little fable about what happens when cunning meets a man who is just as cunning — and has a cleaver.

A stone on a mountaintop splits open and a monkey climbs out. He dares the waterfall no one else will, wins a crown for it — then, at the height of his joy, the one thought he cannot fight comes for him: that even a king must die.

The monkey who could not bear to die crosses two oceans to find a teacher, and finds one who hides the whole secret of immortality inside a riddle and three taps on the skull. What he learns will make him a god — and get him thrown out for showing off.

Home from his lessons, the Monkey King wants one thing the world hasn't got — a weapon that can match him. So he walks into the dragons' palace under the sea and asks to try everything. What he carries out, and the second errand he runs that same night, will put two complaints on heaven's desk before morning.

Heaven cannot beat the monkey, so it tries to hire him — and learns the hard way that an immortal you cannot kill makes a very poor employee. He eats the peaches, drinks the wine, swallows the elixir, and dares the whole court of the sky to stop him. One being can.

An emperor wants the souls of his war dead set free, so he sends one gentle, fearful monk west to fetch the scriptures that can do it — a road no man survives alone. Five hundred years after heaven buried him, the strongest creature alive is still pinned under a mountain, waiting for someone to come by.

A rich farmer has a son-in-law problem. The strapping young man who married his daughter three years back has turned out to be a long-snouted, big-eared monster who eats like a famine and has locked the bride away. The farmer wants him gone. The monk and the monkey are happy to oblige.

A river so heavy a feather sinks, and a monster wearing nine skulls who has eaten every pilgrim before this one. Two of the travelers can fight in water and one cannot, which turns out to be the whole problem — and the river will not be crossed by winning.

A corpse-fiend who wants the holy monk's flesh comes at the pilgrims three times wearing three borrowed faces — a girl, an old woman, an old man. Only one of the travelers can see what is under each disguise, and seeing it is exactly what gets him thrown off the road.

A child hangs tied in a pine by the road, sobbing for rescue, and the kind monk cannot walk past him. The monkey smells a demon and is overruled. What follows is a fire ordinary water cannot quench, a monkey nearly killed by his own cleverness, and a child too dangerous for anyone but mercy to subdue.

A whole country without a single man, a river that conceives children straight from a cup of water, and two thirsty monks who drink before they ask. The only cure is guarded by an old enemy with a grudge — and that is the easy half of the trouble waiting in the capital.

Banished again for killing what his master would not, the Monkey King goes off to nurse the insult — and a second Monkey King walks in, identical down to the last hair, and takes everything. Two Wukongs, same face, same rod, same powers, and no one in heaven, hell, or earth can tell which is real.

The road west dead-ends at eight hundred li of unbroken fire, and the only thing that can put it out is one banana-leaf fan — held by the wife of the Bull Demon King, who happens to be the mother of a boy Wukong got hauled off to serve the Bodhisattva Guanyin. She is not in a lending mood.

For once the monk begs his own meal instead of sending a disciple — and walks straight into a house of seven smiling women who are not women at all. By the time the monkey finds the trail, the only thing between his master and the cookpot is a pig with no shame and a monkey with too much pride.

Fourteen years and ten thousand miles, and the pilgrims finally stand at the foot of the mountain where the scriptures wait. The last stretch is the strangest — a bottomless boat, a corpse in the river that no one will name, and a heaven whose clerks have their hand out. The road is almost done teaching.

On the goddess Nüwa's sacred birthday, King Zhou of Shang enters her temple, sees her lifelike image, and scrawls a lustful poem on the wall. The insulted goddess cannot strike a king whose dynasty still holds heaven's mandate — so she summons a thousand-year fox spirit and two others. This is how the Investiture of the Gods begins.

When King Zhou of Shang demands a provincial marquis's beautiful daughter for his harem, the proud father Su Hu writes his defiance on the palace wall and goes to war. The girl's name is Daji — and her journey to the capital at Zhaoge will decide the fate of a dynasty.

As Daji tightens her hold on King Zhou, the loyal ministers of the Shang die one by one — burned on a bronze pillar, broken against the palace steps, and at last the king's own uncle Bi Gan, ordered to cut the heart from his living body.

A general's wife carries her child for three and a half years, and what she delivers is a ball of fire. The boy inside grows up reckless and divine, kills a dragon prince for sport, and when the price comes due, pays it with his own body — flesh to his mother, bone to his father.

At seventy-two, Jiang Ziya is sent down from Mount Kunlun with a mandate to remake heaven and no gift for making a living. He fails at every trade his sworn brother sets him — until a fortune-telling stall makes him famous, and a demon in mourning white walks up to test the one man in Zhaoge who can see her.

An eighty-year-old man sits by a stream with a fishing line that ends in a straight needle, held above the water, baited with nothing. He is not fishing for fish. A king has dreamed of a winged tiger, and the diviners say it means a sage waits somewhere in the wild.

Huang Feihu is the Shang dynasty's greatest general, loyal through seven generations — until a New Year's visit to the palace ends with his wife dead on the ground and his sister thrown from a tower. This is the story of what it takes to break a loyal man, and the long road west it sends him down.

He was the one general the dying Shang dynasty did not deserve — upright where the court was rotten, brilliant where it was blind. So heaven sent three hundred thousand men west with him, and a road that ended at a ridge named for the dying of dragons.

Ten immortals of Jin'ao Island raise the Ten Absolute Formations before the Zhou camp — ten lethal magic arrays. The immortals of Kunlun break them one by one, but each array is opened at the cost of a life: a disciple sent in first to die, his name carried off to the roster in the Investiture of the Gods.

Zhao Gongming, an immortal of the Jie school, rides a black tiger into the war for the Shang and cannot be beaten — until the Zhou side stops fighting him and starts a curse: a straw effigy, his name, and arrows through its eyes. How the God of Wealth, Caishen, came to die.

Tongtian Jiaozhu raises the Immortal-Slaying Formation, four swords at four gates built to kill gods. Laozi rides in on a green ox, laughs, and pushes back his crown — and from one breath rise three immortals, the Three Pure Ones. One old man becomes four, and the founder of a school can only parry.

Tongtian has hung four heaven-forged swords at the four gates of a killing array no single immortal can survive. The only counter is three sages of equal rank entering together — so the old Daoist masters send west, to the doorstep of the Buddha, and ask him to step into the dust of the world.

After the Zhuxian Formation falls, the master of the losing school of immortals makes his last stand — the Ten Thousand Immortals Formation, the Wanxian Zhen, into which he pours his entire host. Laozi, Yuanshi Tianzun, and the Western saint Zhunti come to break it, a war of the immortals that will all but empty a lineage of heaven.

The Shang has fallen. The fox who wore a woman's face for thirty years is dragged to the executioner's block — and the soldiers cannot lift their swords, because even now, bound and condemned, she is the most beautiful thing any of them has ever seen. And on a high tower, the king she ruined waits for the fire.

The war is won, and Jiang Ziya climbs the Feng Shen Tower to unroll the Investiture of the Gods — the Fengshen Bang. One by one he reads out the war's 365 dead and hands each a title and a post in heaven's bureaucracy. Enemies become colleagues; the reward for dying is a government job in the sky.

The 1,200-year-old ancestor of every 'lived a whole other life' story. At a roadside inn a discontented young man borrows a Daoist's porcelain pillow, sleeps, and lives an entire ambitious lifetime — high office, disgrace, wealth, sons, old age, death — then wakes before the innkeeper's millet has finished cooking. The transmigration tale that started them all.

The first female sword-hero in Chinese fiction, and the story behind the film The Assassin. A general's daughter is stolen at ten by a wandering nun, trained for years in invisibility and the killing arts, then sent to murder a man — and chooses, instead, her own master and her own code.

One of the founding wuxia tales: the Three Heroes of the Wind and Dust. The slave-girl Red Whisk picks her own fate and elopes with the strategist Li Jing; on the road they meet a fierce curly-bearded swordsman who means to seize the empire — until he meets the true dragon and gives it all up.

The ancestor of every cultivation trial. A ruined spendthrift is bankrolled twice by a mysterious alchemist, then asked to repay him by guarding an elixir furnace through a night of hell's illusions — forbidden, on pain of failure, to make a single sound. He endures every horror but the last: a mother's love.

A beloved Tang fantasy romance. The failed scholar Liu Yi meets a dragon princess herding sheep in the wilds, cast out and abused by her husband's family, and carries her letter down to the lake-palace of her father the Dragon King — where her uncle, the Qiantang dragon, erupts in a storm of war to bring her home.

The Tang original behind The Romance of the Western Chamber — and far more unsparing. The scholar Zhang wins the reluctant Cui Yingying through her maid Hongniang, loves her, then abandons her and calls it wisdom. The star-crossed romance that Chinese theater spent centuries trying to give a kinder ending.

A rooftop rescue-heist that reads like a film. Mo Le, the superhuman Kunlun slave, scales walls, kills the guard dogs, and carries his lovesick young master and a captive singing-girl over the roofs of the city to freedom — then pays for it when the secret gets out. Pei Xing at his most cinematic.

A second Tang sword-heroine. Hongxian, a warlord's quiet maidservant, is secretly a martial adept; to stop a war she slips by night into a rival general's guarded bedchamber and steals the gold box from beside his pillow — drawing no blood — then reveals what she is and departs to repay an old karmic debt.

The companion to the pillow-dream, and a wry ancestor of isekai. Drunk under an old pagoda tree, Chunyu Fen is carried into the Kingdom of Huai'an, marries a princess, and governs a province for twenty years — then wakes to find the whole kingdom was an ant colony among the roots of the tree.

The great tragic romance of the Tang. The courtesan Huo Xiaoyu gives everything to the scholar Li Yi, who swears devotion and then abandons her for a respectable marriage; she dies of grief — and returns as a vengeful ghost to poison every union he tries to make. Love, betrayal, and revenge from beyond the grave.

A redemption romance that inverts the tragedy. The courtesan Li Wa ruins a smitten young nobleman, who falls to singing funeral dirges for coppers and freezing in the streets — then she takes him back, nurses him whole, and drives him to pass the imperial exams. Bai Xingjian's tale of a woman who undoes her own damage.

The artifact-power tale at the root of the tradition. A magic bronze mirror passes from hand to hand, unmasking and destroying fox-spirits, serpents, and plague-demons across a linked cycle of hauntings. Wang Du's early chuanqi — the ancestor of every enchanted object that sees what wears a human face.