Romance

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.